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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.
I've been smoking cloned dope for years.
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
...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.
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.
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."
...it's just that like most people, you don't understand how "cloned" meat is produced. A cow clone can cost upwards of $5,000, but no one eats that cow. A highly productive cow is cloned, then used as breed stock, just like any other animal with good attributes. It's the offspring that are used to produce meat and milk. Really, the entire argument looks puerile and pointless when people flap their mouths without knowing even the basic information.
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
WTF? Every topic on the main page has "25 comments"
Ahh... the cloning technology has arrived to Slashdot!
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.
These clones are not genetically identical to uncloned animals. The newborn clone has the same depleted count of telomeres that the fully-grown animal had when the clone's original tissue was taken from the original animal. But not the amount that a natural animal has when it's born. The adult clone will also have fewer telomeres in every cell than a natural adult.
We don't know that those lowered telomere counts affect the tissue in any way that affects the eater. But we also don't know that it doesn't affect us. We do know that the animals die much younger, because telomere countdowns are directly reflected in the aging process. So a "middle aged" cloned sheep is really like an old natural sheep. And there could very well be many other effects, some of which are much more subtle, some of which could be unhealthy. The FDA should not even allow sale of these animals for food until their hazards are disproven.
But we won't even be able to tell the basic difference by looking at the label. Because the food industry doesn't want us to know, because they have their reasons for cloning that have nothing to do with our health or safety.
That's shows what's unnatural about our government that's protecting these industries, rather than letting us decide how to protect ourselves, when the FDA won't.
--
make install -not war
>now there's a teeny tiny part of you that's worried about zombie sheep.
Zombie herbivores? I can see it now... Graaaainnsss....Graaaaiiinnnnssss....
IGMC.
Only if I want seconds.
rewriting history since 2109
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.
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.