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US FDA Deems Cloned Animals Edible
Coldeagle sends us the news that the US Food and Drug Administration has declared that meat from cloned animals is safe to eat. The agency decided that no labeling is necessary for meat or milk from cloned cows, pigs, or goats or their offspring. (Ironically the FDA didn't include cloned sheep in the announcement, claiming a lack of data, though the very first cloned animal was a sheep named Dolly.) The article notes that a couple of major food suppliers have already decided not to use any products of cloning, and that the groups opposed to cloning in the food chain will now concentrate their efforts on convincing more suppliers to boycott the business of cloning. The FDA noted that their focus groups and other public input indicated that about 1/3 of US citizens do not want food from cloned animals under any circumstances; another 1/3 have no objections; and another 1/3 fall somewhere in between.
It actually is cost prohibitive right now...
I doubt it will take long for it to become priced right for these companies.
The real question is, how long is it before the average consumer becomes apathetic about buying and eatting cloned meat.
That's very nice of the FDA to decide that the American public doesn't need to be told they are eating cloned meat. I feel free, don't you?
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
...when artificial insemination was first used for cattle, there was the same "moral panic" because, y'know, it was new and different and therefore SPOOOKY, and the same Usual Suspects were all up in arms over it, and, of course, it is now so accepted and commonplace no one even remembers there was an outrage.
Hell, when the first smallpox vaccine was invented, there were very similair panics to what we see today over genetic engineering.
People are stupid, but they are also easily distracted and forget last year's MAJOR CRISIS in favor of this year's equally all-consuming disaster.
Yeah, I don't get it either. I mean, people being annoyed/apprehensive about GMO foods, that I get (the discomfort level, I mean, not the irrational fear that follows it). But clones? They're just twins, for goshsakes, a pretty common natural occurrence.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Without diversity, entire food supplies can be wiped out by single diseases.
If you ate a double yolk egg, it was certainly not a cloned animal. Assuming you didn't eat a Balut egg, the egg was unfertilized and thus not an animal at all.
I think you meant to imply that eating a twin is the same as eating a clone. It is not. A clone implies that the animal has identical chromosomes to an already existing (adult or otherwise) animal. Twins (identical) share the same chromosomes because they came from the same zygote and split off in early development.
You are right that some animals and plants are capable of cloning themselves, but no higher order animals and certainly no mammals. In light of the fact that people probably eat cloned fruit (cloned by humans), I can understand their uneasiness with eating cloned mammals.
I would probably eat a cloned steak, but if given the choice, I would probably buy the un-cloned steak every time.
Customers are expecting non-cloned meat; they're not expecting meat from an animal who resides in a barn with a north-facing door. Accordingly, it would be reasonable for them to know the former, but not the latter.
I do hope that the FDA allow producers to label their meat non-cloned only if it isn't in fact cloned. Yes, scientific studies are important, but in the end, as with organic produce, the customer should at the very least not be lied to. For some, after all, they have an almost religious zeal in their choice. Would be accept non-kosher meat being sold as kosher? The health argument here misses the point.
Wikileaks, no DNS
groups opposed to cloning in the food chain will now concentrate their efforts on convincing more suppliers to boycott the business of cloning
If GMO grain and hormone-loaded-milk are any example, the industry is concentrating on keeping the FDA from requiring industry mark which meat is from cloned animals. *And* aggressively going after businesses that market food as NOT being cloned/GMO/hormone-loaded.
It's absolutely hilarious to listen to the logic: "If we labeled it, people wouldn't buy it." Ho, really? No kidding, sherlock! That's how capitalism works. And guess what? 1/3rd of America doesn't want anything to do with you.
I'm so tired of farmers and businessmen that are the first to yack about "freedom" but keep begging for the government to save them / prop them up. As more and more people start demanding organic foods, the non-organic foods will drop in price because demand drops. I'll bet anything that the non-organic agribusinesses will go running to Congress begging for larger handouts...
Please help metamoderate.
"have cloned meat than meat pumped full of growth hormones."
The two are not mutually exclusive.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
But it is different from ordinary meat. The difference is you basically always eat the same animal. Where's the problem? Same as pesticides: in nature we were used to eat different fruit each developing its own chemicals (self made pesticides). Now we always eat the same chemicals. Next we'll eat the same few animals. I consider it a potential long term risk. Our body becomes accustomed to deal with a reduced variety of stuff.
And this in the best case scenario where the makers of the animal don't try to squeeze every penny from its genome by feeding us the meat of the beast that grows faster with the less food no matter how healthy it is.
Anyway, in a free state people would be free to choose, even if choice comes from silly reasons. Most of consumer choices are dictated by stimuli which are engineered by advertising and PR. Prohibiting to label the food as cloned or not is fascist.
What if Microsoft got the state to prevent laptop makers to say what OS is in their laptops, XP, Vista, Mac or Linux, so that people are forced to get more of Vista?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I'm afraid you aren't understanding the distinction -- or, you're in fact trying to pretend there isn't one with that analogy. Either way, it's specious.
A plant clipping will naturally re-grow, you don't really need to do much with it, because plants have evolved to propagate this way. Put the damned thing in water, and it grows. Hell, it's not even a clone, it's the same original plant essentially. We're cool with that.
However, my limited understanding is that we introduce degradation and errors when we replilcate DNA of mammals. We simply haven't cloned enough animals, over enough generations to have any factual data that the original genes aren't getting slightly borked by the technology which is doing this. We think we know, but we don't.
Hell, new data suggests that by the time a man is in his 70's the DNA in his sperm has degraded substantially. Make a clone of a cow, clone that, and then clone it again. Short of doing a hell of a lot of research, there is no evidence to support the claim this is safe. There is definitely evidence to suggest there is degradation in the genes of clones and the animals aren't as healthy.
IMO, the FDA has said something is safe which they can't possibly know. And, they're doing it to support an industry which doesn't want to be compelled to label the origins of such things.
There simply isn't enough long-term evidence to say it is safe, merely that we've not yet found any evidence that it isn't safe. For a lot of people, that doesn't meet the threshold of proof that we should be eating these things.
Is it fear of the unknown? Possibly. But, how many things used to be considered absolutely safe until it had been around a while? I seem to recall they used to use pesticides on people and entire towns under the belief that it was safe. You need real, long-term data to make the positive assertion it is safe. I don't believe we have that. By the time you fuck with your food supply and find out that it wasn't safe, you're screwed.
By all means, eat your cloned steak. But, I think they should be labelling it, and people should have the choice to buy it or not.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Genetic issues are not confined to the animal. Cloning introduces many mutations, so many that most cloning efforts end up in non-viable organisms. Messed up genes produce messed up proteins. We already have diseases such as CJD/Mad Cow that stem from animal proteins - not a virus or bacteria - just an abnormal protein. Mad cow became such a problem because bad animal proteins were distributed to populations through feed. Just like the mad cow scandal, we won't find out until it's too late. One day, cloned beef experiment #1123, put in a million big macs, will be found to have a protein that causes another incurable brain disease.
I don't think people object to eating cloned meat if that were the only factor. At least, not the people who understand some basic science. I think the larger objection is that this will limit diversity in the gene pool even faster than current breeding already is. And we've seen how well that worked out for the banana in the 50s, when it was effectively cloned by horticultural methods.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
your own example of fruit shoots you down, all fruit is transplanted on root stocks and cloned from the same tree's over and over.it's been done this way for hundreds of years with no ill effects, so there's your long term evidence.
not only that but through selective breeding and tigthly run farming you've pretty much been eating the same cow for decades anyway.
also i might add that while each cow has the same DNA, they will be different in many subtle ways influcened by their environment.
And they aren't prohibiting it, just not requiring it which IS free, unlike your own fascist solution of government mandated labels.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Okay, you've illustrated how cloning might be bad for the organism that is cloned, but where you--and everyone wringing their hands about this--falter is by then suggesting that this has some sort of health impact on someone who eats it.
Your stomach and small intestine have absolutely no interest whatsoever in the quality of food's DNA. It's just matter to be converted into glucose for cells to burn. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that your body somehow incorporates DNA, good or otherwise, into your body. If that were the case, I'd be a fish right about now, being that I eat some every single day (living in Japan). But last I checked, I was still a crap swimmer, and afraid of water to boot.
To sum up, of course cloned animals are safe to eat. So are GM products. Pesticides, herbicides, growth hormones, antibiotics... Not so much. But animals and plants that do not produce toxins or aren't full of rocks or whatever? Absolutely fine.
I simply cannot understand how so many people can problematize such a simple thing as digestion of organic matter. There are plenty of things to consider when talking about mass cloning and/or mass GM, but health most certainly is not one of them.
I hate to break it to you, but most fish don't screw. They do feel pain, though. And chickens definitely "give a fuck" how they live - they are widely considered to be as intelligent as mammals, with a complex social structure and capacity for learning.
Once scientists have perfected vat-grown meat, you'll be able to eat meat without concern for the ethical implications. Until then, human consumption of meat will continue to cause unnecessary harm to living, feeling animals, among whom are included chickens and fish.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
I don't care about cloned food. I care about genetically modified food.
How many programmers do you know who have never put a bug in their code.
We know how those languages work and can mathematically analyze their operation.
There are so many interactions going on within an organism that we have little idea
how the 'code' we decide to inject is going to behave. The significance of this is
not in the animal or plant being modified, but in their offspring.
The lack of restraint on GM food is ridiculous. Is anyone surprised the FDA allows
cloned food if they allow GM food?
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
If people can be alergic to peanuts....
What's to say some variant of a protein created in a GM crop won't trigger massive alergic reactions in a very small proportion of the population.
How would you suggest that they test GM food against that ? Other than stick it on the shelves and see who dies?
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
Those who object to genetically modified foods based on your argument are fooling themselves into thinking that this is a unique problem of GMOs. It is not. Firstly, we have been modifying the genes of foods for hundreds of years, through selective breeding, hybridization, mutation, and other techniques. Secondly, there are plentiful natural sources of genetic modification, from natural mutation to viral infection and natural hybridization to all kinds of other sources. Remember that nature created influenza, potato blight, anthrax, mad cow disease, AIDS, cancer, etc. It's only an irrational fear of industry and science which makes out the potential down sides of GMOs to be unique and uniquely damaging.
Many people complain that we don't know with 100% certainty what will happen with genetically modified foods. But it's a mistake to think that we have ever had that sort of certainty concerning our foods, modified or not. And today with GMOs we have at least as much if not much more knowledge about our foods and the changes we're making to them as we ever have had.
Also, I think many people discount the benefits of engineered foods too quickly. Without modern, engineered, high yield crops much of the world would be starving today.
Certainly there's room for caution and rational skepticism, but it's silly for educated people in the 21st century to be imagining that Frankenstein is going to grow out of a corn field.
"if cow A is good to eat, then a clone of cow A should be just as good to eat."
readers please observe the following disclaimer:
"clone" does not mean "exact copy"
"should": refers to ideal scenario only, and is not necessarily applicable to the real world
"just as good": does not necessarily refer to consumer satisfaction
IMO, the parent comment is just the sort of response you'd expect from a computer science crowd trying to comment on biological systems. Cloning a cow is not the same as cloning a partition on a hard disk.
From what I recall, the whole thing of GM crops was never to provide the well fed western world with extra food. We've already got more than we need.
The original idea was robust crops that would work in the third world, where death from lack of food is an everyday occurrence.
Alas for them the corporations discovered that it made cheap food that they could make good profits on, and the biotech companies realised this was an idea way to control farmers worldwide by forcing them to purchase a constant supply of (patented) seeds, not replanting with saved seeds as has been the practice since farming was first developed.
Basically it went from a wonderful idea to just another way for money to be made.
Someone else will have to find the cites for this if you want them.
Yea I get superbly annoyed at the people that don't like the idea of genetically enhanced food. I think it's a good idea. They can make crops immune to diseased insects, they can make them grow faster, and taste better. With continuing research in this area, maybe we can solve the fuel crisis, or solve hunger.
The idea of genetically enhancing food isn't new. It's been done for centuries - we just know a bit more on how it works. Selective breeding is STILL the number one way that scientists use to genetically enhance our food.
I don't have a problem with cloned food, or genetically modified food. If it's better for us, and it still gives us nutrients, I'm all for it.
What I'm really looking forward to is the ability to manufacture beef without growing an entire cow. Wouldn't it be great if they could create a delicious, juicy steak without having to murder animals to get it?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -