WHY????
Is 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….
January 9th, 2007 at 3:05 am
I don’t know. We’ve done all sorts of weird things throughout history. Depending on how you look at it, all sorts of food practices are unnatural. Consuming milk as adults? Very, very weird. Lactase persistence (the ability to digest milk sugar after infancy) is a response to this strange behavior. Inbreeding animals and plants to fix desired traits? Not natural, though in agricultural species it isn’t as bad as it is among different dog breeds. We’ve been cloning plants for quite a while - the bananas we eat don’t have seeds, and so we clone the plants by transplanting parts of their root systems. The apples you eat are almost certainly from trees that were made artificially by grafting limbs from one cultivar onto the trunk of another. Heck, you can even make a plant that will grow tomatoes above ground and potatoes below.
That said, it is troubling that the comment period is so much shorter for this issue than others.
January 9th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
I have two thought processes running on this right now. One is like yours a little freaked out. The second is from someone who enjoys meat, but also loves animals, so I will often go into spells where I very little meat, until we get busy and I start to eat out again, and lets face it the restaurant industry doesn’t cater to vegetarians. So this side of me says well “It’s not really a cow so I don’t have to feel guilty about eating this steak”.
Which side of me will win out?
I don’t know. But the part that really gets me is that they know we don’t want it because they are saying they are refusing to distinguish between the two as they think that consumers will ban anything with the cloned meat. THAT’S how you know the Lobbyists have too much power.
January 9th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
I applaud the FDA’s progressive decision. I am not sure what there is to be freaked out about. I mean we have been genetically manipulating livestock and plants for….well since we figured out we could.
Right now cloning livestock for food is not feasible. But the idea behind is brilliant. It is a short cut to getting desirable traits in meat. Instead of breeding traits with rather unexpected results you get the qualities of the animal you want up front. If say a pig has the right meat to fat ratio and grows to the correct size, is disease resistant and has the right meat flavor it is easy to just go ahead and produce more of the same animal rather than try to breed the exact same traits again.
Cloned meat is also a good way to bring back marginalized or nearly non-existent species. There has been a lot of discussion recently about heirloom animal species in an ongoing attempt to recapture the food taste of our forefathers. This is especially apparent in pork where people are now seeking pig varieties that are not as lean as the commercially available products. Some of the heirloom animals are reduced to essentially pet status an bringing them back is a difficult, daunting proposition. It would be easier if you could select a small group of excellent genetic specimens of the breed from all over the world and clone them. You could then breed or clone accordingly. It might also help bio diversity, as you cannot breed long distance (frozen, fed-exed sperm not withstanding) but you can certainly clone across the world.
I don’t even see why it’s an issues. The resulting animal is still just meat. What difference does it make if it started out as a natural egg or a manipulated one. Heck I don’t even care of the egg is a chimera (a cross between two species). Cross my bunny with jelly fish, bring it on. Cross my goat with spider genes (actual plan not making it up), go for it. So long as the meat is not toxic, I am AOK with it. Just means I get to try something exotic.
We revel in eating weird and difficult to get foods. So why would an ordinary side of beef be so daunting?
January 9th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
I thought the NPR story I heard on this was pretty fair - Robert Siegel talking with DT Max on Dec 28th.
I think the conversation followed Kitara’s arguments, that the line between cloning and breeding isn’t that clear - both produce generations of “identical” animals - and the resulting product isn’t more or less harmful to humans than a bred product. On the other hand, the conversation argued, bred populations tend to have weaknesses (to disease, injury, etc) and that problem would be present and perhaps amplified in the situation of clones. These weaknesses are bad for the animals, no doubt, and possibly dangerous for the humans that eat them too, as sicknesses result in over-use of antibiotics, etc . . .
audio was here: http://news.yahoo.com/video/2142
ps. I’m a Pittsburgher and pretty excited about this blog. My blog links to my other Pittsburgh food favorites . . .