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My Large Beef with Cloned Cattle

Go Ahead, Drink Bacon Grease for Breakfast

The meat and milk from cloned animals are safe to eat and should be allowed for auction, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

And you'll never know, anyway, because the labeling volition be a clone of the labeling used for not-cloned beef.  No special labeling is needed, the FDA says in an article published in the Jan. one issue of Theriogenology and in the total 678-page study posted on the FDA web site terminal week.

The less we know the better, manifestly.  Why else would the results of a four-twelvemonth investigation in cloning safety be appear quietly between Christmas and New Yr's?

Cloning dates back hundreds of days

On 1 level, we've immune cloned beef to penetrate America for years.  It's called McDonald'south.  While non technically cloned, all billion or so of the hamburger patties sold are indistinguishable from each other.  This is our future.

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On another level, yous might have already eaten real cloned beef.  Cloning livestock has been going on for five years now, and the FDA but initiated a voluntary moratorium in 2003 on the commercial sale of the offspring of cloned animals.  In this era of censorship and compromised priorities at the CDC, EPA and NASA, the FDA didn't have the teeth to make the auction of cloned animal products illegal.

Cloning advocates are already painting us concerned consumers equally Luddites, with minds too feeble to comprehend that cloning is just an extension of animal husbandry practices that have taken place for centuries.  This is a natural progression, they say, like feeding herbivorous cattle the basis-up remains of other animals, which somehow brought well-nigh mad cow disease.

As safe as cloned mother's milk

Are cloned beast products safety?  Probably, but that's not the whole issue.  Cloned cattle would be a flake off the sometime chipped beef, genetically identical to the progenitors.  Scientists take the Dna of a prized bull or dairy cow and insert this into a hollowed-out nearly microscopic cattle egg.  An electrical daze, eerily familiar to Frankenstein, induces the egg to grow.

Issue one is long-term homo safety.  While the practice is probable safe, only a few years take passed since the dawn of cloning to truly empathise the touch this would have on millions of livestock consumed by hundreds of millions of people.

Result two is the long-term viability of the food supply.  Nature likes diversity; this is why most animals reproduce sexually.  A disease can more easily wipe out an entire herd if each animal is genetically identical.

Issue three is the appalling secrecy.  Consumers take the right to know whether their food product was raised in a affair that is acceptable to them.  Of form the biggest producers don't want the FDA to crave special labeling.  The bulk of consumers are queasy with the thought of cloning animals, equally revealed in a contempo poll by the Pew Initiative on Nutrient and Biotechnology.

Upshot four is the necessity.  Why do we demand to clone livestock?  It's because big business organization, the confront of American farming practices, demands identical products for mass production.  And these identical slabs of meat line the meat sections of identical supermarkets from Albuquerque to Yonkers.

Uncertain hereafter

Butchers take virtually entirely disappeared from America.  Gone is the day of specialty cuts and regional flavors.  Instead, 4 meatpacking companies slaughter and package near 85 percentage of all beef in the United States, according to the USDA.  Supermarkets only rent a few meat-cutters to trim the nearly finished production.

The biggest meat producers volition likely require their suppliers to provide a genetically perfected production, which only the largest suppliers could afford to practise.  One time once again, the little guy is marginalized.  Already I am unable to purchase many of the meat products I grew upward with in my Italian neighborhood, similar sweetbreads.  Minor farmers are barred by constabulary from slaughtering their own animals; and the overtaxed slaughterhouses will but render certain cuts.

Such is the diversity of the American food supply system.  Cloning will bring more of the same.  We have until April 2 to complain to the FDA about this.  Then the FDA will make its final decision.

Christopher Wanjek is the author of the books "Bad Medicine" and "Nutrient At Work." Got a question about Bad Medicine? Email Wanjek. If information technology's really bad, he simply might reply information technology in a hereafter cavalcade. Bad Medicine appears each Tuesday on LIveScience.

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Christopher Wanjek is a Live Science contributor and a wellness and science writer. He is the author of three science books: Spacefarers (2020), Food at Work (2005) and Bad Medicine (2003). His "Food at Work" book and project, apropos workers' health, safety and productivity, was deputed by the U.Due north.'s International Labor Organization. For Alive Science, Christopher covers public wellness, nutrition and biology, and he has written extensively for The Washington Post and Sky & Telescope amongst others, as well as for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where he was a senior author. Christopher holds a Master of Wellness degree from Harvard School of Public Health and a caste in journalism from Temple University.

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Source: https://www.livescience.com/9484-big-beef-cloned-cattle.html

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