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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.
have cloned meat than meat pumped full of growth hormones.
if cow A is good to eat, then a clone of cow A should be just as good to eat.
This is the same FDA that allows beef growers to feed the parts of other cows (minus the brains and spinal cords) to other cows while they are packed in tightly and standing in their own piles of urine and feces because they can't move anywhere.
:(
This is the same FDA that has permitted plenty of E. coli outbreaks because they refuse to put an end to unhealthy meat practices.
This is the same FDA that bends to political pressure instead of caring about the health of the American public it is supposed to protect.
What about hormones which possibly cause early puberty in girls? I could go on but I won't bother, we all know what we're putting into our bodies...
Cloned beef may be safe but it's the practices that they allow outside of this that really suck and I wouldn't trust a fucking thing they approve and neither should you. If only that beef didn't taste SO good
Cloned or not, as long as the animal in question lived a happy, healthy life prior to being slaughtered, I'll eat it. If I can't source it to a responsible supplier, I won't. /opinion
Sort of. It depends at what point the cloning process occurs. The thing about Dolly was that she was cloned from a mature adult and had inherited the genetic damage that the adult had accumulated in its lifetime (including shortened telomeres). So if they clone them early before a lot of genetic damage has happened to the template organism, OK. If they clone them later, it's not certain what that genetic damage might have lead to. Over multiple generations, that damage could add up and affect quality.
In the long run, though, cloning your food animals is a bit of a cop out. It means you're trying to maximize your growth/production without establishing sufficient genetic diversity in your strain. As with cloned forests, you've got a highly homogeneous population that is much more susceptible to disease epidemics.
But I admit it would be tempting if they could guarantee a perfect filet mignon every time.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Unfortunately, vegetarians aren't necessarily exempt from this.
If you are an ovo-lacto vegetarian (no meat at all, but haven't given up eggs and dairy) like me, then you need to be concerned. Potentially any dairy will now be able to use cloned cows to produce their milk and butter, which they can then sell to us without revealing that fact. I am already very concerned regarding what dairies I purchase from, simply due to my views on animal rights, but this will add yet another variable to the situation. I recommend that you not blow this off as something that will not affect you.
For the record, I currently buy what milk I do use from Organic Valley, an American organic coop owned and operated by the small family farms that make it up. They are quite open regarding their methods and the treatment of their animals, so I feel at least relatively satisfied in that respect.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
Genetically modified food, particularly meat from cloned animals, should be labeled if the FDA must approve it for sale.
This is a consumer rights issue.
All up and down this post, geneticists and biology teachers have been going on and on about telomeres and banana clones and blah blah blah...the fact is, meat from a cloned animal is NOT the same as meat from an animal born as a twin. The long term consequences of narrowing genetic diversity in biological food product (what cows have become) could have very nasty consequences.
The FDA did their studies and approved cloned meat. Fine by me, but we have the right to know WHAT we are eating...especially in regards to this issue.
Thank you Dave Raggett
You are extremely naive. Sorry.
:) So, organisms will just take the traits from that make cells of the anti-biotic taking organism resistant to the anti-biotic. Problem solved.
:P If plants didn't have an immune system, I don't think they would have survived these hundreds of millions of years.
"Perfectly-immune organism" cannot exist. That's an oxymoron. All life is just an arms race. The attacking organisms need to feed to survive and will adapt to your defenses. Then defenses have to adapt to the new attack vector. For examples, see the super-resistant MRSA? Or other superbugs? The same thing will happen to any "supercow". That's why you can't have a perfect anti-biotic - eventually something will be resistant to that anti-biotic. After all, the cells of the organism that is using anti-biotic are not all killed by it
Oh, and bananas have an immune system too.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7117/abs/nature05286.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system
eeeeeeeh! wrong answer. taking cuttings and striking them is no different to cloning, and it's been done by humans for 100's of years.
"my very inexpert understanding of what cloning means"
I think this makes a point all on it's own.
"Good thing the fascist government is stepping in and regulating lead in children's toys."
nice going you even played the "Think of the children card". pity your confusing something known to be toxic with something that's known not to be....
oh and cloning is has nothing to do with genetically modified crops, if anything it's EXACTLY the oppersite since it's purpose is to get the exact same gene's over and over. as usual you people are confused about what your opposed to.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Nice understatement.
The real heart of the matter isn't "frankenfood" (though it's a marketing issue, for sure) or the inevitable genetic damage carried forward by the clones; it's the way that the food industry is becoming more capital intensive through ideological progress, vertical integration and conglomeration, and through designing a complex chain of pharmacological dependencies. All these things undermine your food security by replacing family farms (and local processors) with giant corporate systems that DO NOT have you or your community's best interests at heart.
Cloned, monogenetic livestock herds will require Big Pharma to support them, they'll be susceptible to epidemics and genetic flaws. They will go hand in hand with methods of production that are over-scale and thus risky. They will be controlled by a very few corporate giants, and will further push farmers out of business, to be replaced by more of the same faceless institutions.
I'm all for mass international corporate production--of electronics. Food, however, is different. Our food security requires
well, that's as a start. Food security isn't about stockpiling or having enough or locking your roommates out of the pocket pizzas. It's about integrating the food system into the regional economy and seeking better quality and diversity, it's about reliability and nutrition, and minimizing risks.
Cloned livestock herds will work against food security, because of how they will be developed, produced, and owned. The so-called health issues are second to these concerns.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Yes, I can, and I think it's an important consideration.
Lets say, for example, that a plant species, over millions of years, is slowly affected by small changes that gradually turn it into a plant we know and love today like corn. This plant has evolved a certain level of genetic stability against mutations, such that during the normal process of crossbreeding and mutation, the possible results that can be achieved will mostly be stable. This is important.
Now, take a piece of genetic code and inject it in there sporadically. The plant now consists of several distinct chunks of information that are forced to be related to each other through horizontal gene transferral. Now, after months of testing (note the first process took millions of years), we deem it is safe to eat and put it into the wild. The plant works better than before because it was designed as intended. This is great, but there's a problem. There's no control over the plants in the wild.
Once the gene is in the wild, and the plants cross pollinate with non-GMOs, the genes are out of our control. The genes will remain in our food chain for as long as that kind of plant remains in the food chain. Now, maybe you trust the groups who produce these GMOs to have done due diligence on their testing of the stuff, but with as complex of a chemical system as an organism, and something as complex as genetic code, I think we're just kicking ourselves.
The number of plants needed to create individual problem genes that are beneficial to the plants but hurt us are there. How many kernels of GMO corn does it take to feed Rhode Island. How about NY? The rest of the US? Genetics is a search and optimization problem. Take genes, randomize as needed, preserve helpful ones, repeat. And the problems will arise much faster than normally because its no longer a search between combinations of stable genes that have undergone the same search pattern. There is new data in the mix and it doesn't have the support of natural redundancy that the old plant or donor animal had.
I have no problem with GMOs if they CANNOT reproduce on their own. Hiding the genes is a non-solution because the genes are still in the code. The issues arise from the presence of the genes in the code, and over several decades.
We know that with months of testing, nothing bad can happen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_orange
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.