Green Eggs and Strange Ham
Green Eggs and Strange Ham
“I do not want to eat cloned animals!”
That’s the title of a petition I received in my e-mail in-box last week. The first thing I thought was: I do not want to eat cloned animals here, I do not want to eat cloned animals there, I do not want to eat cloned animals ANYwhere!
In fact, you and I and most everyone else will probably never eat meat or drink milk that comes directly from a cloned animal. But that doesn’t mean there’s no cause for concern.
Getting satisfaction
When it comes to farming, I’m not quite the Eva Gabor character in Green Acres, but I’m close to that end of the farming spectrum. What I don’t know about animal husbandry is a lot.
So when it was recently announced that FDA experts decided it’s safe to eat food produced by cloned animals, I couldn’t help but wonder why a farmer would go to the trouble and expense of cloning when animals have done a pretty good job of the reproductive thing for eons.
Turns out I was right about the expense – a single cloning procedure can cost as much as $170,000. And I was also right about the reproductive abilities of animals – cloning isn’t meant to take the place of doing what comes naturally. Because cloning is for rock stars.
The whole point of cloning a farm animal is to produce what the Associated Press (AP) calls a “rock star” breeder. Once you’ve determined that an animal is a naturally prodigious breeder that tends to produce offspring that are healthy, tender, and delicious, if you clone that animal a few times you’ll have a stable of breeders that will live the life of Mick Jagger, but without the number one hits and the grueling tour schedule. And at a cost of $170,000 per carbon copy, you can be sure that none of these animals will end up on the dining room table. But most of their offspring will.
So the key question is: Are future generations spawned by rock star breeders safe to eat? The FDA says yes. But once again we’re relying on the best guess of experts. Only after years of public consumption will we be able to say with certainty that there’s no subtle wrinkle hidden in the DNA that will do us harm.
Experts once told us that cigarettes soothed the throat. How’d that work out?
Choices made difficult
When this news about the FDA seal of approval for cloning hit the media, one television commentator dismissed fears by pointing out that if you don’t want to eat cloned animals, just choose meat from non-clone sources. Simple!
Just one problem: The FDA will not require special labeling for milk or meat products that come from cloned livestock, according to a National Geographic report. After all, FDA experts have already determined it will be safe to eat. So why bother with a label?
This isn’t really a surprise, of course. The FDA allows meat products to be treated with carbon monoxide (to improve color) without any special labeling. And there’s no point in looking for a label note that lets you know your chops have come from animals that were given growth hormones and antibiotics. You can assume that’s the norm, unless you’re fortunate enough to get your meat products fresh from a local farmer.
And speaking of hormones, one of the complaints about meat from cloned animals is that the cloning process requires higher levels of hormones. That’s according to representatives for the Center for Food Safety, who also told National Geographic that the FDA has not addressed the fact that cloning tends to prompt higher rates of birth defects and disease among cloned animals.
We’re still several years away from the day when products from cloned animals reach grocery shelves. So there’s plenty of time to ask hard questions and share awareness of potential problems.
If you’d like to sign the “I do not want to eat cloned animals!” petition, you can find it at thepetitionsite.com.
