WHY????
Monday, January 8th, 2007Is anyone else as freaked out by the FDA’s preliminary approval of clones in the food chain as I am?
This is one of those situations where I’m convinced that industry lobbyists have more power than is good for us. Yes, I know that the FDA’s preliminary approval comes after five years of study, and I also know that their exhaustive study has found that milk and dairy from cloned bovine, goats, and swine (but notably not sheep) is indistinguishable from that of naturally-bred animals. I also understand, as the FDA’s press release describes it, that “Because of their cost and rarity, clones will be used as are any other elite breeding stock — to pass on naturally-occurring, desirable traits such as disease resistance and higher quality meat to production herds. Because clones will be used primarily for breeding, almost all of the food that comes from the cloning process is expected to be from sexually-reproduced offspring and descendents of clones, and not the clones themselves.”
What I don’t understand is, if the clones are indistinguishable, why bother using them in the first place? I mean, why not just let a bull hump a cow like nature intended? (I know, mass-market meat is already beyond that process; instead they inject sperm from a bull into a cow when thermometer readings have shown that the cow is most fertile and therefore most ready to make use of the commodity…)
Key word from the FDA’s quote describing where cloned animals will wind up: almost all of the food…. But basically, yeah, once that breeder’s put in her time and she’s not spittin’ ‘em out as reliably as she was a year ago, it’s straight to the processing plant with her so she can be made into hamburger meat. But that’s also assuming that as a food-purchasing public, we’re going to be comfortable with the breeders and the bulls being the same breeders and bulls, generation after generation because somebody decided that this matched pair makes beautiful angus steaks together. Am I being unreasonable here when the only response I can come up with to this situation is, Because it’s just not natural, that’s why!?
I suspect that I am, which is why I’m going to wait a couple of days and try to come up with a more eloquent objection to make before I submit my comment to the FDA. However, I encourage everyone to take advantage of the limited window that the bureaucracy gives us to voice our opinions and submit a comment before April 10, 2007.
Really, though, it’s remarkable that the FDA is only allowing a three-month window for public comments to be submitted. They’ve got five pages worth of topics on which they’re currently accepting comments, many of which have comment periods of a year or more. If they spent five years doing the preliminary research on this subject, why not wait another year and have a longer period of public commentary about what is almost certain to be the most contentious issue on their docket? I just don’t understand….