FDA Set To Approve Products from Cloned Cows

phantomlord writes "The FDA is currently set to allow beef and milk from cloned animals onto the market. Further, the products will likely not be branded as such and there is no way to know if we're currently consuming products from cloned animals." From the article: "Farmers and companies that have been growing cloned barnyard animals from single cells in anticipation of a lucrative market say cloning will bring consumers a level of consistency and quality impossible to attain with conventional breeding, making perfectly marbled beef and reliably lean and tasty pork the norm on grocery shelves. But groups opposed to the new technology, including a coalition of powerful food companies concerned that the public will reject Dolly-the-Lamb chops and clonal cream in their coffee, have not given up."

Comments

I'm excited.

[dada21]

More producing products (cows, in this case) mean more supply of the products I use (cream, cheese and other high fat-low carb dairy products). More supply means lower prices. Lower prices means more business opportunities, which means a stronger economic outlook for those who can't afford the high barrier to entry created by the high cost to breed cattle.

I'm sure there are some health concerns (my wife prefers organic, I prefer mass produced for my daily consumption), but I'm not sure that the concerns are valid. I travel the globe and specifically like to visit previously poor countries (Ethiopia, Uganda, India, etc) and what I see is people who have better lives because of the ability to purchase their needs cheaper. If the health concern is a higher rate of disease that might knock 5 years off your life expectancy, but being able to eat or clothe yourself or keep your body mass consistant will add 20 years, this sounds like a net benefit. Beyond the health concerns, though, we also can see that cheaper dairy might mean more business opportunities in the previously poor areas -- and this also increases the standard of living and life expectancy of the person willing to get involved in the new marketplace.

I absolutely, positively do NOT want government requirements for labeling. If I am concerned with labeling, I will call the manufacturer of the product and ASK. I already do it because I don't consume trans fats (except for naturally occuring ones in beef). The government was "supposed" to regulate trans fat labels, but they haven't. Many items say 0 trans fats but contain a significant amount below 1 gram, and your government allows it to be labeled 0 grams. Nice. That's government at its finest. When I see 0 grams of trans fats, I will call the manufacturer and ask them to confirm the fact that there are zero, and most of the time they'll say "there's a negligible amount" which is the equivalent of saying "yeah, they're in there." No thanks.

Forcing companies to label properly does NOT work. "Organic" means nothing, "0 trans fats" means nothing, "low sugar" means nothing, "whole grains" means nothing. If you're worried, contact the company directly and figure it out on your own.

Cloned animals seems good to me -- if I can get marbled beef at a discount, I'll be happy. If beef jerky comes down even 20% in price, I'll be happy. If creams and cheeses can be made at the same quality for a lower price, I'll be happy. All of these items keep me healthy, slim and energized, and the cost savings means I can eat more -- making myself even healthier.

Re:I'm excited.

[jimicus]

Rubbish. It may impact price, but it will have almost no impact on quality which is already uniformly low in the average supermarket.

You know how in IT, we say "good, fast, cheap: choose any two"? Much the same applies to meat. In this case, it's a trade off between lean meat, tasty, tender, length of time needed to prepare and cost.

There are a number of things which affect what comes out when the cow is shot, skinned, cut up and put onto little shrink-wrapped polystyrene trays. Sure, one of them is the breed, but two very big factors are how the animal lived and how long the meat was hung after slaughter. Neither of which is affected in the slightest by whether your cow was made by a boy and a girl cow who loved each other very much, by a man with a syringe full of bull sperm or by a farmer wearing a flat cap and an old tweed jacket working in a lab.

Re:I'm excited.

[nessus42]

If I am concerned with labeling, I will call the manufacturer of the product and ASK.

You're going to call up every company for every product that you buy? And then expect to reach someone who will know the answer? And even if they do know the answer, you expect them to give you a truthful one?

Without regulation, your hair dye would contain toxic amounts of lead. Oh, wait a minute -- it currently does! Sure, you have a point, the regulations are highly flawed. But without them, it is clear that corporations would try and succeed in getting away with murder.

To fix the regulations so that they actually work, vote your bum of a corporate lackey representative out of office and tell him or her why.

|>oug

Re:I'm excited.

[dada21]

I'll throw rubbish back at you. I disagree with the "good, cheap, fast" because it absolutely does NOT prove itself in reality. I've been running businesses since I was 13, and I tell you think: I always sold 2 of the 3, but I also tried to make the third better. This is how competition works.

If I was good and cheap, my competitor would try to mimic me and try to do it faster. Eventually, they would. Over time, good gets better, cheap gets cheaper, and fast gets faster. It is ridiculous to think of competition as a closed system. Actually, a State-licensed market IS a closed system only because no one has to worry about good, cheap OR fast. State-licensing makes things worse, more expensive and slower. See DMV for proof.

Re:I'm excited.

[dada21]

Voting does nothing. I vote, but not for anyone you'd vote for. The best way to vote is with your dollars -- and don't tell ANYONE why you stopped buying their product, but tell your friends and family why you did. Competition rises to meet demand, so when you remove demand, other competitors have to figure out WHY. That is what makes items better. If you set a bar at a certain level, the market will try to rise to ONLY that level (this is why the State fails, because they set the bar too low). If you set a bar at a level undetermined, but higher than now, the market will try to raise the bar until you're happy. Usually in raising their bar, they find new ways to provide a better product at a higher quality in a faster period of time and at a lower price.

Voting with your dollars matters, voting at the ballot is a joke.

Re:I'm excited.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know how in IT, we say "good, fast, cheap: choose any two"?

No, but I know that little soundbite was used in reference to car mechanics long before any of us was likely born.

There are a number of things which affect what comes out when the cow is shot, skinned, cut up and put onto little shrink-wrapped polystyrene trays. Sure, one of them is the breed, but two very big factors are how the animal lived and how long the meat was hung after slaughter. Neither of which is affected in the slightest by whether your cow was made by a boy and a girl cow who loved each other very much, by a man with a syringe full of bull sperm or by a farmer wearing a flat cap and an old tweed jacket working in a lab.

While I don't doubt that this is all true, it's really not to the point. If you're buying trash at the meat counter to begin with, you're going to get trash going forward. Genetically strained crap is still crap.

If, however, you inentionally seek out quality meat, being able to consistently supply that meat from a handful of proven genetic lines will enable consistently high quality. No worries that one family's line was killed off by some sort of accident or disease and has to be replaced with an unproven genetic line, just whip up a new batch of that line to replace what was lost.

Re:I'm excited.

[Foobar of Borg]

There is only one reasonable response to your rambling idiocy.

MMMMMMOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Re:I'm excited.

[bhima]

Interesting... I mostly disagree with you but I'm not surprised. My other random comments:

They should come up with a new word for these professionals who work for corporate farms to distinguish them from farmers

I prefer to purchase the majority of my food from a farmer who I can look in the eye... i.e. who lives nearby. I got on this kick a while back and I'm surprised how easy it is to get a majority of my family's food from within a 85 kilometer radius. (including most of my alcohol)

I here you on the labeling thing but I really do have content concerns and they absolutely don't get addressed with the US labeling system. But at least I can ask the farmer when I am at his farm what the deal is.

Clones mean monoculture doesn't that suggest one nasty bug means significant loss of product. Clones also mean patents and other artificially induced scarcity (I'l bet they won't be able to reproduce either)

Beef sucks, chicken raised in those corporate farm sucks. Venison, Kudu, _Impala_, and other wild-game meat is the most tasty thing you can buy. Warthog is good but tough...

If you like jerky you may _love_ biltong... but it may be impossible to dry in your climate

Re:I'm excited.

[Ixne]

It's generally in a company's best interests to keep it's customers alive. Something about repeat business, they tell me.

I'd like to introduce you to this little thing we have called the Tobacco Industry...

Re:I'm excited.

[radtea]

Forcing companies to label properly does NOT work.

Shady processors adulterated fertilizers, deodorized rotten eggs, revived rancid butter, substituted glucose for honey. Farmers began to learn about such deceptions from a new breed of agriculture chemists, often trained in Germany, located in State officialdom and helped by Federal funds. These chemists could apply their scientific skills to expose the work of chemists employed by industry to depreciate food products, as the Senate Report put it, in "a greed for gain."

Anyone who is interested in the mundane world of fact, rather than fanciful flights of political ideology, knows that prior to regulation and inspection, the quality of food was much lower than it is today. The quote above describes the situation in the mid-1800's, prior the the first national pure food act in the U.S. in 1906.

The law is a powerful instrument, and it has proven to be more effective than anything else in forcing people who are selling things to not lie about what they are selling.

The issue with food labelling has nothing to do with any rational concerns about food quality, however. The only issue is that consumers have a right to know what they are buying. In practice, the only way of ensuring that right is honoured is to have legal sanctions against lieing about what is being sold, and uniform labelling standards are by far the most efficient way of doing this.

Personally, I'm not at all keen on supporting an even more uniform agricultural monoculture than we have now, so if meat from cloned animals was labelled I would tend to avoid it.

Re:I'm excited.

[perrin]

I am usually impressed by feats of intelligence. But for once, I must say that I am duly impressed by idiocy. I thought the post was satire at first. But then, of course, requiring people to phone the factory for every product they want to buy to ask what it contains and hope for someone clueful to tell you something truthful, just makes sense if you will just, I don't know, stand on your head and sing 'lalalalalala' at the same time.

I do not really know how labelling works in the US, but it works fine over here in Old Europe.

Re:I'm excited.

[nessus42]

It's generally in a company's best interests to keep it's customers alive. Something about repeat business, they tell me.

It's generally in a company's best interests to maximize its profits. If some fraction of a company's customers happen to die due to a badly designed gas tank, get sick from lead poisoning in their hair dye, or what have you, then that's just a cost of doing business. Your life means absolutely nothing to the typical corporation, other than how it affects its bottom line. I.e., kill off too many of your customers, yes, that would probably be bad for the bottom line. Kill of only enough of them so that the cost of losing those customers is less than the cost of increasing the safety of your product, then that number of deaths is the obviously correct business decision to the typical corporation.

|>oug

Re:I'm excited.

[Darko8472]

Does that mean we'll finally have *PROPER* buffalo wings?!

Re:I'm excited.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> I live in the Midwest and we purchase unpasteurized cream locally. It tastes great, it's healthier,

Healthier? Cream is not healthy whatsoever, and unpasteurized cream is therefore more likely to be contaminated with bacteria.

I recall a European guy who's country had banned US vegetables "because of pesticides", which, of course, was really to protect local markets, claim the non-pesticide vegetables tasted better because they had no pesticides. No, they probably taste better because they're picked closer to being ripe, while the US picks theirs when they are hard little rocks so they can be handled with bulldozers without much damage, and thus be shipped, but are too small to ripen properly.

Re:I'm excited.

[Bodrius]

If I am selling an item and you want it, you can NOT know what my costs are, how I make it, or how much it costs me to sit on it until it sells. I can NOT know how much you have in your wallet.

That seems a different issue than the labelings in question.
In a capitalistic society, I may not know what your real costs are, but I definitely want to know what the product IS.

I see the labeling regulations, at best, as a way for government to protect itself against widespread fraud and the costs of dealing with it through other legal processes. There are basic tenets for when a contract is valid, and this makes it easier to read the contract.
People are not buying organic or mass-produced because they want to know the best bargain: they consider "organic" or kosher a completely different product, and if it is mislabeled it is like any other product misrepresentation. If I sell you pork claiming it is a vegetarian dish, for many people "caveat emptor" is not a sensible counter-argument.

As to calling the manufacturers, I generally only have to do it once. 1/2 an hour for a lifetime of consumption is a good investment.

That implies a level of trust in the manufacturer that may take more than 1/2 hour to establish. If you do not trust the labels they use in their product at government's request, trusting the first person on the phone willing to answer is knowledgeable, correct and honest seems a bit naive to me.

In essence, I agree with you that the current labels are useless and counterproductive, and I agree that governments are unlikely to implement them right. That does not mean preventing product misrepresentation was not their responsability in the first place.

The market self-correction I expect to work best is at the consumer-group and retailer level. Assuming this kind of information (product contents and source) is readily and publicly available, the accountability of identifying these products falls on the immediate providers (grocery stores, markets, etc) serving a particular community.
Consumer groups can hold them accountable by reaching and verifying the same type of information, and detecting inconsistencies. Over time, it is in the self-interest of a store to clearly label their products to meet their customer's expectations.

Current labels gives them an excuse not to make that effort, since it is now the government's and manufacturers role.
But ensuring this kind of information is readily provided by manufacturers is the kind of free information flow that is still the role of the government.
The implicit risk of business should be on the bargaining process, not in the contents of the product you buy.

Re:I'm excited.

[nessus42]

I barely read the labels anymore -- I do read the ingredients but I even take that with a grain of salt (no pun intended). For me, I have to see how my body is affected by a new product, and if I don't feel right, I'll not consume that product.

I'm having a really hard time not rolling my eyes here. Your idea of the epitomy of consumer safety is to try something and see how it makes you feel??? Do you actually know anything about science? There are plenty of things that will make you feel great today and kill you in a week or in twenty years.

|>oug

Re:I'm excited.

[Surt]

A lot of people shop at whole foods & earth fare in spite of the higher costs because of the more stringent labelling requirements. It's just that the labels they care about aren't relevant to nutrition for the most part. People care more about the means of production (apparently) than they do about being healthy.

Re:I'm excited.

[bracktra]

Good thing you're rich enough to vote with your dollars... not all people have that luxury.

Re:I'm excited.

[dada21]

Doesn't matter if you're rich or poor -- the overall numbers is what matters. One rich person spending $600 on a pound of kobe beef doesn't create a market demand in any huge way. 600 poor people spending $1 on low quality beef DOES create demand, and the beef supplier who sells $2/pound beef will try hard to reduce the price to attract those 600 new customers.

Voting with your dollars works every day -- look at items that have fallen in price even though your voted government destroys the value of the dollar every day with inflationary policies (designed to make the poor more poor and the rich wealthier). Your voted government is the largest cause of poverty in the world -- did you see that 50% of Mexico's stock market is controlled by one family? Sweden's too? http://blog.mises.org/archives/005755.asp That's socialism for you -- as if the poor are helped by it.

Re:I'm excited.

[ElleyKitten]

Right now, I _HAVE_ to call because the labeling laws make it difficult to know what I'm eating. In Spring I called 15 "Zero Trans Fats" producers who verified that their products contain trans fats, just levels lower than the law requires (0.5 grams per serving). You might buy those products thinking their safe -- BECAUSE OF THE LAW! I had to take a step because of the law. Ridiculous.

You didn't have to do that because of the law. If there was no law, they still wouldn't put the correct amount of trans fats, and you'd still have to call. If anything, you should be arguing that the law should be stricter and require them to put the exact amount, or at least " less than 1 gram" or something. That would at least save you some phone calls.

I don't think removing the laws would give us more or better labels. 90% of people don't read labels, so the companies would stop to save costs. But where would that leave people which obscure allegies, like whey? Not everyone with obscure allergies lives near a health food store that would continue labeling.

Re:I'm excited.

[pNutz]

The USDA allows food producers to round down if their products have .5 grams or less of a food component. They can claim that there is 0 grams trans fat if their products contain .2 grams per serving.

So you see, a producer could easily claim that their products claim "ONLY 0.2 GRAMS OF TRANS FAT PER SERVING!!!", gov't regulations do not prevent this. The producers used free market wisdom to keep their consumers uneducated as to the contents of their food. Removing government regulation means no reporting on the trans fat content at all (and no FDA study).

Of course, as an anachno-capitalist, you believe that the corporations of the world, in their unquenchable thirst for wealth, will inadvertently benefit all mankind with the magic of making money for themselves. This is because using their monetary influence to negatively affect consumer education about the ill-effects of their products would just be wrong. This is something they only do because government regulations tell them that they can't. They're like teenagers in this way.

And as to your original point, this is not good news. If this means cheaper beef by increased cattle agriculture, it means a less efficient use of the land. This does not benefit the poor of the world who are already grossly overusing their farmlands and still coming up short of even supplying their people with grain. A greatly decreased consumption of beef would benefit all humanity much better. I don't think the regulation of beef consumption is the answer, but the misinformation that food producers are only too eager to push will not go away or just sort it self out through the market. The incentive that concerned citizens provide them with, with their phone calls and concerned letters, will not outweigh the incentive that the general public provides when it is too lazy, ignorant, or misinformed to stop eating so much beef.

Also, in your link to Nature, the op-ed makes a good point for not repealing all GMO notification laws, but improving testing methods to make them effective.

If you and I wanted MORE labeling, we'd go to a store that worked with their producers to verify manufacturing and content, and we'd pay more.

Grocers like Whole Foods already tout their GM-free wares far above and beyond what regulations require, because their consumers give them the incentive to do so. There's only enough incentive to do this on niche markets (the wealthy), for those educated on the topic enough to have an opinion about GM foods. Do realize that this is not because most consumers don't want labelling, it's because they haven't been informed or they've been misinformed (usually by producers or retailers). The market doesn't care if they are adversely affected in a decade or two.

Re:I'm excited.

[QMO]

Did you know that referencing mises.org decreases the credibility of your post. (On second thought, maybe that was your intention.)

Re:I'm excited.

[rhombic]

You should pay more attention, this one has consequences. Cholesterol is not a trans fat, BTW (it's actually not a fat at all; it's a lipid but not a fat.) Personal opinion plays no role, there's a perfectly good chemical definition on whether something is a trans fat or not.

Any unsaturated fatty acid produced naturally in a foodstuff has all cis double bonds. We have enzymes that deal perfectly well with these unsaturated fats. When polyunsaturated fats are partially hydrogenated through chemical means, some of the bonds isomerize to trans rather than cis. We have no enzymes to deal with a trans bond in a fatty acid, so they get treated in some funky ways. One of the impacts is that they appear to cause higher cholesterol, and appear to be much worse for you than even fully saturated fats like lard. Of course, any foodstuff that has less than 1g of trans fat per serving, even if they have 0.99g per serving, can label themselves as "0g trans fat". This stuff is bad for you on the mg scale, and should be labeled like cholsterol on mg's rather than grams, but that's what money will buy ya from the FDA. For a good review, see Zaloga et al, "Trans fatty acids and coronary heart disease", Nutr Clin Pract. 2006 Oct;21(5):505-12.

What do these have to do w/ GM food? Nothing at all ;). I think the analogy is that for years, margarine (which is positively loaded with trans fatty acids) was presented as the healthful alternative to butter. Now it appears that it's much worse for you than butter. Without enough study to understand the real biology of what's going on, jumping to the conclusion that something newly made is good for you is unjustified. FWIW, I have nothing at all against GM foods, or for that matter cloned animals, which aren't necessarily GM'd anyway. Jumping to the conclusion that something new is bad is unjustified, but failing to study new foodstuffs for potential risks and then being willing to drop bad ideas is important too.

Re:I'm excited.

[jdavidb]

A great example for this is the practicing Jewish market for Kosher foods. Labelling laws are inadequate for Kosher standards. It is impossible to discover if a product is Kosher from the required labelling alone. So there's a private, competitive market for Kosher certification and labelling, one which to my knowledge is regulated only the anarcho-capitalist way: by a free market. There have been instances where a product changed and a certification became incorrect, and in these cases the market took care of disseminating the information (and this was pre-Internet, btw). Moreover, the market provided for getting many, many products changed to meet the standard, including Coca-Cola. It's worth reading about some time.

Re:I'm excited.

[Eravnrekaree]

The means of production does affect the foods nutritional value. If the food is grown in dead, nutrient starved soil, its not going to have as many nutrients. As well, we arent only concerned about whats in the food but whats not in it, we dont want pesticides and other nasty things in the food. I believe in both the precautionary principle, that when introducing exotic new technology, we should be safe rather than sorry and keep it off shelves until it is proven safe, by an independant party (not a corporate controlled one like the FDA which cares more about corporate profits than peoples health), and as well that humans have evolved for thousands of years to handle certian types of food. When we start adding in things that we have not eaten before, strange new chemicals, the body is not as well prepared to process these, and it may even be harmful. Technology is great in computers, but not on my plate.

Re:I'm excited.

[ElleyKitten]

Jews tend to be much more of a community than say, those with shellfish allergies. I'm allergic to shellfish, and I can't name one other person I know with that allergy or web forum or anything else to meet and talk with other people with that allergy. I imagine few kosher keeping Jews would say they've never met another kosher keeping Jew and had no idea how to find one.

And MacDonald's announces

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

a buy one get one free special

I'll admit it

[smooth wombat]

When I first read the headline I thought it said, "FDA Set To Approve Products from Cloned Clowns"

Clowns

[Kadin2048]

Nah, they're way too tough and stringy.

Re:Clowns

[Rob T Firefly]

But they do somehow fit an awful lot of patties into a single bun. Mmmm, clownburgers...

Re:Clowns

[JonTurner]

So these two cannibals are eating a clown when one turns to the other and asks "does this taste funny to you?"

(Sorry... I just told this joke on /. a week ago, but it was just too good an opportunity to pass up!)

Re:Eh.

[El Torico]

What's the fun in eating the exact same meal day-in, day-out?

It's the culinary equivalent of marriage.

Yea there out there.

[jellomizer]

There will always be a group (Bate for Fox news) giving enviromentalist a bad name. Unfortunatly there will always be groups claiming to be Enviromentalest groups complaining about anything new and potentionaly good, bringing up erational fears and missing the point. There is so much we can do to improve the environment using a lot of these "Envromental Enemies" technologies. Genetically Engineered Corn can be used to create a biodegradable plastic, but Some Crazy Enviromental Groups will not give a green thumb becuase genetically engineered crops are evil. eradatated meat which kills of a lot of the bacteria, Some enviromental groups are giving that the thumbs down because it uses radation and radation is evil too, Even though after the meat has ben radated the raditation drops to well below what would happen if you defrosted it in the microwave. Meat Cloning will only improve the quiality and helthynes of the food, as well proving a cheaper cost, unlike hormones, and additional chemicals cloning is just extending the same meat. If you want to debate meat cloning get off the Envrionmental band wagon and explain how the inital costs will only allow the richest farmers to use this process and creating a market which puts more farmers out of buisness and make it difficult for 3rd world countries to get into the process. But envriomental. Darn it most of them don't eat meat anyways so cloning shouldn't effect them.

Consistency

[maxwell demon]

Farmers and companies [...] say cloning will bring consumers a level of consistency and quality impossible to attain with conventional breeding [...]

I guess it will also give pathogens a level of consistency and infectability impossible to attain with conventional monoculture.

Re:Consistency

[thebaron2]

The pathogens that you need to worry about when you're talking beef and pork will be no more likely to occur no matter where the beef comes from.

The biggest chance that you have for contamination occuring takes place when raw product, already chopped/sliced/ground is delivered to manufacturing plants. From that point on, most meat is treated as though it were already contaminated. What I mean by that is that no matter how "safe" you "know" your raw material is, you must still meet certain USDA and FSIS (Food Safety and Inspection Service) "kill standards" when meat is processed.

Whether you're talking regular, home grown cattle or cloned cattle, all meat must be cooked to AT LEAST 160 degrees Fahrenheit internal temperature in order to kill any possible pathogens. In addition to that, most meat is treated with anti-microbial agents or even "zapped" with irradiation technologies to achieve at least a 6-8 Log reduction in pathogen counts at some point in the processing cycle, depending on which technology you use.

Furthermore, meat products are required by law to achieve a certain Water Activity level before they can be sold on the market. The Water Activity is a measure of the potential water energy available in a product that would sustain microbial growth after processing and packaging. Beef Jerky, for example, MUST attain a Water Activity level of .85 or below, with most Inspectors and regulatory agents demanding Water Activity of .80 or below. At these levels, it is impossible to meat pathogens to grow, and it doesn't matter if the meat is "au natural" or clones.

Safety is not an issue here - what surprises me the most is that there won't be package labeling requirements if you use cloned animals. Labeling requirements are so strict as it is, that I can't believe that new requirements won't pop up and get forced on the industry - which, IMO, would be a good thing.

go organic

[amigabill]

The industry is pushing me more and more toward organic foods. It's more expensive, yes, but at least I know I'm not going to have a reaction to hormones and stuff that doesn't have to be in there. I don' think that cloned food is all that scary, as it's coming from DNA we'd have eaten before the cell samples were taken for the cloners. I am more concerned about genetic engineering than cloning, as with engineered DNA, we haven't been eating that for thousands of years and thus it has more potential for "side-effects" to happen than cloned stuff from a natural cow source.

If cloned and genetically engineered stuff is approved for public consumption, at least have the courtesy to require labelling so we can decide for ourselves. If the public is OK with such things, then they'll be successful in the market. If the public does not want such things, they should be allowed to choose, and that decision should not be hindered because they don't know what is or is not cloned or engineered or whatever. If the public doesn't want it, then the market for it should not florish due to devious obfuscation tactics, it should be the consumer's choice for a product to succeed, not the vendor's.

The most critical issue...

[RingDev]

is not health impact on humans consuming 'cloned' produce. Nor is it even genetically breading for improved feedstock.

The real danger here is a homogenized feed stock. If every cow in the world (or greater market region) is a clone of the same cow, they will all have the same strengths and weaknesses. A virus that may have previously only effected 5% of the feedstock population could suddenly effect 100% of the feedstock population.

I can see using cloning in two situations. 1) Immediate needs over ride the risk of losing the entire stock, and 2) as a small % of existing live breading facilities. As in a beef farmer may have a few hundred head of cattle, of those, 90% are 'normal' bread cows, the other 10% are clones. The clones would likely have a higher resale rate as you would be almost guaranteed the perfect cow. This way, even if something effects the clowned cow, you won't be out the entire food source, just a portion of "cash cow" income.

-Rick

Lean == Tasteless

[RogueWarrior65]

This lean meat crap makes me want to puke. For those of you who are old enough to remember, beef and pork used to have lots of fat which is what makes it taste good.

Everybody has health concerns

[TheRecklessWanderer]

All I hear today is, don't eat this, don't eat that, don't eat the other.

I recently found I have diabetes type 2. Thats the one where you have to watch your diet and take some metformin and other drugs (maybe), and exercise. (BLAH). Boo hoo for me, my Dad has it, my Grandfather on my mom's side, I'd be a little stupid if I wasn't expecting it. In any case, I went to these "Diabetes seminars" put on by the local hospital. There is a nurse, and she talks about how to take care of yourself. Lots of fliers, and basically, she says, don't eat this don't eat that, all the stuff I like. 3 days of seminars, and I have to go visit the nurse and do this and that and the other.

Eventually I figure out that this is just go generate easy money for the hospital. They are billing the province a huge amount for each seminar and visits, so I said screw it. Now I just do it myself and everything is fine.

Where am I going with this tho? Thanks for asking. Everybody is saying this is bad for you, that is bad for you. Oh, don't drink milk, it causes cancer. Don't eat peanut butter at school, people have allergy's. Freakin peanut butter, I grew up on that. Something is always bad for you. You have to eat something. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend my life eating rabbit food. Screw that.

So they are cloning my steaks now. Sometimes I find a really good tbone at the butcher, sometimes it's not so good. I would love to find one that I like, and clone that over and over again. Give me another a1j447L2K please. Perfect every time. Whew hew.

Let's not forget that every time somebody says something is bad for you, there is an agenda behind it. Pepsi says Coke is bad for you. Coke says Pepsi is bad for you. Milk marketers say juice is bad for you. The government wants you to know smoking is bad for you because it is a huge burdon on the health industry. (Well, it is bad for you, duh!).

It drives me crazy everybody telling me what to eat and what to drink. I'll do what I want.

Re:Everybody has health concerns

[Vellmont]

Everybody is saying this is bad for you, that is bad for you. Oh, don't drink milk, it causes cancer. Don't eat peanut butter at school, people have allergy's. Freakin peanut butter, I grew up on that. Something is always bad for you. You have to eat something. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend my life eating rabbit food. Screw that.

Stop listening to just anyone and everybody, and start getting information from actual scientists and not dumb journalists out to sell eyeballs. Educate yourself about your disease and how foods affect your blood sugar. Don't just simply rely on someone to tell you what to eat, find out the reasons for it.

There seems to be a belief out there that all science is just whooey because it's all influenced by politics and self interest. That's largely not true. The self interest comes from the people reporting the science. Some of them are just reporters looking to sell eyeballs. Some are people with an agenda against meat, GM food, corporations, etc. These kind of people will ignore evidence, miss-report and miss-interpret evidence, listen to pseudo-scientists as if they were real scientists, etc.

If you want to eat candy bars all day and advance yourself to insulin dependent diabetes, go blind at 50, or worse, go right ahead. But don't bundle all claims about food together in one category as if they're all equally bad (or good for that matter).

Re:Everybody has health concerns

[crabpeople]

"So they are cloning my steaks now. Sometimes I find a really good tbone at the butcher, sometimes it's not so good. I would love to find one that I like, and clone that over and over again. Give me another a1j447L2K please. Perfect every time. Whew hew"

Perhaps it is the occasional bad steak that makes the good ones taste better. Eliminate the occasional, or even regular, bad steak and the good ones will normalize out so that they wont be "really good" anymore and will end up being normal.

Re:Everybody has health concerns

[MWoody]

I can't believe this shit got modded up. I'm sorry, Reckless, that you've got diabetes. But them's the breaks. And yeah, it DOES mean that you have to watch what you eat and drink. Or you die. Very simple. As you've said, given your relatives, it's in the blood; there is NO ONE to blame but yourself for not having recognized this fact and made the necessary changes to prevent this eventuality, or at least make its impact lessened.

Your little tantrum will take you right to the grave, and it might take a few of your extremities with it on the way. Maybe a little blindness thrown in. But no, you're sticking it to the man, being your own boss, living life on the edge.

Yes, of course the marketing divisions behind certain foods often skew or misreport findings to support their own products and damage others. But don't, in your attempt at rebellion, think for a second that it invalidates what you're told by a medical professional. Telling yourself the "diabetes seminars" are just there to make money for the hospital is ridiculous; what's next, you're going to not let them amputate your dead foot because they "just want the insurance money?"

Some might think I'm being a little harsh, but I'd wager that +5 post is getting thousands of views as I write these words. And a fair percentage of them are probably diabetics. And hell, some of them might decide to buy in to this self-delusion. In short: the post above is stupid and dangerous and could be hurting people. MOD IT DOWN.

Re:Food

[Cadallin]

"I don't see how a naturally born animal will have health benefits over and above a clone."

This is the statement I take issue with. I'm not exactly sure how far we've come since then but dolly died young of progressive lung disease, and the articles I can find suggest that other cloned animals since are not particularly healthy, and that the process is far, far less efficient than simply breeding animals. By which I mean it often takes dozens of attempts to produce a single viable embryo.

Given this information I'd guess that clones would not be a good way of producing animals identical to high quality stock at all.

Big deal?

[a_nonamiss]

Honestly, I don't see what the big deal is. Cloning is exactly like forcing twins. Are cows that are born as twins any less healthy than non-twin cows? All you are doing is creating a genetic copy, something which happens all the time in nature. I think people scared of cloning have watched too many Star Wars prequels. Sure, there is an evil use for cloning, but there is an evil use for almost everything.

Re:Big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

And there is always an evil twin. Thus without proper labelling, you would have a 50% chance of eating an evil hamburger.

Re:Big deal?

[crosstalk]

I know this is not the total point of your comment, but usually the mother and the twins suffer. Most times the mothers goes into keotosis, and then suffers a distended abomasum(then requiring surgery to fix) many times the twins are underweight are have to be pulled(there was significant talk in the Vet community about aborting twins if found as soon as possible(like during the pregnancy checking time frame) The way this is done at 30 days is you sometimes can feel if there are twins because the econmic repercusions were worse than having to abort and recycle the cow(and recycle I mean giving shots of uterine/ovarian hormones to cause them to come back into estrous.

Now in relation to your question on what the big deal is, Not to me, clone it, whatever, I personally wait for the days of the food replicator. Now I think as someone else pointed out we need a stock that keeps breading regulalry to keep problems from cropping up from only having one genetic line available.

Putting the Frankenstein in Frankenfurter

[Ranger]

Soon we'll all be eating cloned beef from cattle raised in high density feedlots who stand around in their own feces and urine pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics. Then the meat will have to be irradiated to kill the resistant strains of E. coli created in the cattle's stomachs because were forced to eat corn that they didn't evolve to eat.

Since consumers will expect their irradatiated meat to glow in the dark, they'll create glowing cattle just like the glowing pigs.

Read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma if you want to or watch Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms talk about the real future of raising meat (long) and how to turn vegetarians back into meat eaters and why it's important to have promiscuous healthy earthworms.

Deja-moo

[Rhys]

The feeling that you've eaten this beef before.

Cloning

[Anon-Admin]

From my experience, cloning gives a better and more uniform product. I have cloned 1000's of plants and everyone of them is the same.

Next time you see some one protesting cloning, ask if they would like a good joint of Dro to puff on. Good Hydro weed is all clone. This gives a uniform response and eliminates the need to locate the males. Cloning beef is bad! Cloning Weed it good? hmmm.

Re:Really REALLY excited.

[mpapet]

More supply means lower prices. Lower prices means more business opportunities.

You mistakenly believe that the market for cattle operates efficiently. There is no reason to believe that the market for cattle would operate any differently than, say the market for desktop computer operating systems. It's exposed to the same amount of legislative influence, graft and corruption required to remain in a market that any other market for goods or services. Another example was the de-regulated power industry that California used for a while. Where was the greater supply of energy at lower prices promised? ...which means a stronger economic outlook for those who can't afford the high barrier to entry created by the high cost to breed cattle.

Like most barriers to entry, they are legislated to address two needs:
1. Public perception that "something must be done!"
This is why your food supply is one of the safest in the world. Do you want more e-coli in your food supply or less?
2. Protection from competition.
This is why quickie-mart capitalism exists. It fulfills the rhetorical need to justify absurd policies.

I doubt there is any opportunity to look at the issue objectively because like most quickie-mart economic believers, it's a belief that has it's own self-satisfying logic to it. No amount of objective analysis of how a market actually works versus your imagined and largely academic concept of how it -should- work will change your postion.

Can't "vote with your dollars," then, can you?

[dpbsmith]

"the products will likely not be branded as such and there is no way to know if we're currently consuming products from cloned animals."

Right. The "it's a free-market, vote-with-your-dollars" folks never explain how you can vote with your dollars if you can't tell what you're buying.

The current administration talks a good line about a "free market," but their application of the principle is very selective.

If you don't want to eat cloned food...

[Vellmont]

Never eat another apple. Yes, every single apple is a clone of the first tree of that type of apple. Apple trees in agriculture are propogated by cuttings. The seeds inside will likely produce a tree with apples that tastes nothing like its parent.

Re:If you don't want to eat cloned food...

[dodongo]

You also can't graft a cow into soil and make it grow. There's a difference between selective breeding and cellular-level manipulation of organisms.

Re:If you don't want to eat cloned food...

[radtea]

For an even more obvious example, check out most commercially available bananas

Yes, by all means do: "The common banana found at breakfast tables all over the developed world is in peril. Both pests and disease are threatening to make it extinct. The banana most familiar to us, and most in danger, is the Nanica variety of the Cavendish cultivar group. All Nanica banana plants are more or less genetically identical. Since the cultivar is sterile and seedless, it is spread by clippings, creating clones instead of offspring. It was adopted more than 50 years ago when the previous Gros Michel variety was killed off by a blight. The chief hazards to today's banana are pests, Black (and Yellow) Sigatoka fungi, and Panama disease." (emphasis added.)

Monocultures are susceptible to disease, and the case of bananas is empirical proof that monocultures do die off from disease. Widespread use of artificial insemination in cattle production already means that most beeves in North America are the offspring of a relatively small number of bulls. There is already a concern within the veterinary community regarding inbreeding and genetic homogeneity. Cloning has the potential to make this problem worse.

Re:If you don't want to eat cloned food...

[dodongo]

Your implicit suggestion that I misrepresented the article is right-on. Mea culpa.

I don't know why, but I do actually have a strong psychological distinction between grafting in flora and cloning in fauna. Maybe it's the hundreds of years of history the former technique has behind it. So you may scoff at my distinction, and well, that's fine. :)

Re:This is a terrible idea. Evolution stops here.

[Dunbal]

we loose mllions of years worth of genetic variation caused by natural mutation and selection.

      True. And false. We've lost MOST of the variety through breeding anyway. Also natural mutation doesn't provide ideal creatures, only different ones. And selection - well now WE are the ones doing the selecting, according to what WE need and not what random climactic or geological events dictate. Why should we put up with the inefficient cow nature provided -one that was well adapted to its role BEFORE modern agriculture but not ideally adapted to its modern "niche", when we can create a better cow that is more suited to its current role?

Also we lose the associated benefits of variation such as different animals haveing different levels of immunity to different diseases. Having all your eggs in one basket is a REALLY bad idea.

      Here finally is an argument that DOES make sense, as a potential danger. But first, we will adopt the cow that is naturally resistent to all the diseases we know of. This is part of what we are looking for in our ideal cow. This only leaves us open to the animal being vulnerable to a newly mutated pathogen, and I agree it's a risk in any monoculture. This is solved by keeping adequate vigilance, isolation, and hygene. And at worst, I'm sure the entire original stock is not going to be killed off, that would be foolish.

      An interesting point you make in the subject line - but evolution does NOT stop just because you manipulated genes. The new "supercows" can also continue to mutate. There's nothing stopping that. What we'll lose is the variety that sexual reproduction brings, but to be frank we've bred out most of the differences already anyway. But random mutations will STILL occur.

this is the opposite of GM

[r00t]

GM means weird changes. (good ones, if you trust the corporation...)

Cloning means NO changes.

But as you say, there are other issues: grass-fed (yummy) or corn-fed (gaaa... all my food tastes like corn, from salmon to soda!), free-range (lean) or feedlot (greasy), etc. BTW, you can buy nice beef and unusual meat over the net. It's shipped in dry ice.

We need to go beyond cloning. The solution is a matter replicator.

Re:this is the opposite of GM

[maxume]

The calcium carbonate(cement) is an antacid; the corn gives them mad indigestion.

RecklessWanderer: please read

[giafly]

I definitely have no interest in a slow painful death

Then I suggest you avoid doing things likely to cause diabetes, or make it worse, which unfortunately means being careful what you eat.

BTW I think my second link answers why they didn't say what you were examining your feet for.

Explain this to me.

[Grendel Drago]

Wait, wait. Let me see if I have this straight.

Labeling laws are skirted by industry and made worthless. The solution, by you, is to get rid of labeling laws, instead of strengthening them or closing the loopholes.

"What do you know? These antipsychotic meds only make me a little less crazy. I guess I'd better just stop taking them at all."

Re:Enough Already

[TheMeuge]

A good analogy to what you're proposing is this:

- A new way of purifying water was invented
- The resulting liquid was analyzed by mass-spectrometry, NMR, IR and all other tools in the disposal of modern science. The study determined that the liquid that comes out of the machine is absolutely pure H2O, completely identical to all other water, and containing no additives
- You propose that we have to conduct a long-term study comparing the effects of drinking water to drinking water.

Re:More food??

[An Onerous Coward]

Global starvation isn't a result of our growing our cows inefficiently. It's a result of growing our cows at all. It takes 5-10 calories of grain to produce one calorie of meat. If you care about starving people, rather than about scoring points against environmentalists, then you shouldn't eat meat and you shouldn't go back for seconds. But I don't get the feeling that you care much for the whole "live simply so that others may simply live" lifestyle. You strike me as more of an SUV kind of guy.