Should Humans Use Cloned Animals for Food?

January 11, 2008

You vegans out there probably don’t give a hill of beans about the Washington Post’s recent revelation that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is about to say that it’s OK for humans to eat meat and use dairy products from cloned animals. But the omnivorous masses, the ones who pick one fast-food joint over another because the patties are supposedly fresh rather than frozen, may get a little uneasy at the prospect of chomping into a double burger with cheese produced by somatic cell transfer, rather than the old fashioned way.

Scientists started cloning animals back in 1996, when Dolly the sheep was produced in Scotland. But for years, U.S. regulators were cautious about allowing clones to become part of the U.S. food supply. However, based a 2002 National Academy of Sciences report and additional findings from researchers in the U.S. and Japan in 2005, the FDA issued a draft risk assessment in 2006 that meat and milk from clones of adult cattle, pigs and goats, and their offspring are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals. But consumer and health activists remain unconvinced. In December 2007, the U.S. Senate passed an amendment to the 2007 farm bill by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., that would require more government study of clones’ safety, but it’s unclear whether that restriction will make it into the final bill. If it doesn’t, the FDA’s approval would mean that meat and milk from the offspring of clones — and eventually, as the cost of the technology drops, from clones themselves — could start appearing in supermarkets and on restaurant menus sometime in the near future.

Proponents of animal cloning see the brouhaha as an unnecessary one. "Thousands of data points, hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles and two reviews by the National Academies have all said the same thing," Mark Walton, president of ViaGen, an Austin, Texas-based animal cloning company, told the Post. "There is nothing left to review." David Faber, president of TransOva, an Iowa-based cloning outfit, insisted to the Des Moines Register that “there is no food safety issue with clones.” The Los Angeles Times actually went so far as to sponsor a taste test at an upscale L.A. eatery, in which six diners were asked to tell the difference between cloned and conventional beef. (They couldn’t.)

The rationale behind cloning cattle is that animals with the best genetic makeup to produce tasty meat or milk could be duplicated again and again. In theory, that ultimately would make the finest quality sirloin burgers or porterhouse steaks available cheaply to everyone.

Scientific American points out that the cattle industry has long employed a process called budding, in which the undifferentiated cells in a fertilized cow egg are separated, so that they grow into hundreds of artificially induced siblings (“natural clones,” as the magazine calls them).

None of this seems to have persuaded the public; a recent Pew poll found that six out of 10 Americans regarded the notion of eating cloned beef as, well, kind of icky. Consumers Union points out that many clones suffer from severe deformities, and those that survive often have weak immune systems and require large doses of antibiotics to survive. “At the very least, raising clones will necessitate greater use of antibiotics on food animals, worsening the existing problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can infect and sicken humans,” CU testified on behalf of proposed California legislation that would require special labeling identifying food that came from clones.

The Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in its public comments on the FDA’s draft risk assessment:

Animal cloning remains a technology in its early stages that still produces primarily debilitated and physiologically impaired animals. Regarding the relatively few animals that survive to adulthood and appear to be normal, there are sufficient differences between clones and non-clones to conclude that they are not normal, or at least not normal enough to conclude that subtle changes do not pose health risks. Although the possibility of such effects is not great, because milk and meat are so widely consumed in the United States, these deserve to be addressed experimentally in well-defined consumption and safety studies done in all species and breeds headed for the market on animals at the ages they are likely to be consumed.

So are you ready for a T-bone clone, or does the idea of “Frankenfood” gross you out? Express your opinion below.

Comments

[Vegan Vengeance]

This is possibly the most depraved idea that the animal exploitation industry has come up with so far.

Read the Animal Rights FAQ at http://www.veganism.com/

[Rondo]

Im not a vegetarian by any means, but I definitely dont want to eat anything that comes from a clone (or a descendent of one.)That goes for milk too. Who knows what effect this genetic manipulation will have on humans in generations to come.

[Astroboy]

This is a big controversy about nothing. Someday we're going to be eating synthetic meat grown in a laboratory, food that was never part of an actual animal at all. It's already possible to do this on an industrial scale, using existing technology. I saw something on TV about how NASA is thinking of doing this in spacecraft, to create a food source for long flights.

[Vegan Vengeance]

Well, at least that would eliminate the need to slaughter animals. I've got to wonder how healthy it would be to eat something grown in a lab, though.

[Mothra]

What about cloning animals and keeping them as pets?

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7785

[Rondo]

I think the Humane Society came out against cloning pets, on the grounds that there already are too many stray cats and dogs that need homes. On the other hand, if you've got a prizewinning purebred dog, why not clone him? That way, you don't have to mess with mixing up two related bloodlines and getting some recessive traits in the offspring.

[Patrick Kiger]

Here's an intriguing development, reported by my Takoma Park neighbor, Washington Post science writer Rick Weiss (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/15/AR2008011501555.html):

The U.S. Department of Agriculture yesterday asked U.S. farmers to keep their cloned animals off the market indefinitely even as Food and Drug Administration officials announced that food from cloned livestock is safe to eat.

Bruce I. Knight, the USDA's undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, requested an ongoing "voluntary moratorium" to buy time for "an acceptance process" that Knight said consumers in the United States and abroad will need, "given the emotional nature of this issue."

Yet even as the two agencies sought a unified message -- that food from clones is safe for people but perhaps dangerous to U.S. markets and trade relations -- evidence surfaced suggesting that Americans and others are probably already eating meat from the offspring of clones.

Executives from the nation's major cattle cloning companies conceded yesterday that they have not been able to keep track of how many offspring of clones have entered the food supply, despite a years-old request by the FDA to keep them off the market pending completion of the agency's safety report.

[Patrick Kiger]

The LA Times (http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-fi-clonedmeat16jan16,0,6893041.story?coll=la-home-middleright) has an interesting story on the issue today. An excerpt:

Despite the Food and Drug Administration's declaration that such meat and milk are safe to eat, it is going to take years for ranchers to produce and raise the animals.

Even then, many of the nation's biggest grocers say they are dead set against selling it.

"Our intention is not to accept cloned products from our suppliers," said Meghan Glynn, a spokeswoman for Kroger Co., the Cincinnati-based owner of Ralphs, Food4Less and several other chains.

Pleasanton, Calif.-based Safeway Inc., the owner of Safeway and Vons, said it favored continuing a voluntary ban on the use of cloned animals for food.

And California Pizza Kitchen, the 229-restaurant chain based in Los Angeles, said it had "no plans to provide our guests with cloned products."

The only problem is that they probably won't know if they've received such products. In its decision, the FDA did not require products derived from clones to be labeled because agency scientists found no difference between them and meat and milk produced the conventional way.

The industry has devised a method to track cloned animals. But it will make little difference in the marketplace because most animals meant for consumption will not be the clones, but their offspring, which will not tracked. The clones themselves are too precious to slaughter.

[FredforPrez]

I dont want to eat anything that came from a clone. The whole idea of it is SICK! We should eat natural foods, just like our ancesters did.

[Jamal]

Get real. Most everything that we eat in the modern world is either artificial, altered in some way, or flown in from some remote place. Today's beef cattle already have been significantly altered genetically from their ancient ancestors, due to selective breeding. Plus they're pumped full of synthetic hormones and antibiotics and stuff like that. As for the "natural" diet of our ancestors, give me a break. I read someplace that back in Jesus' time, most people in Galilee suffered from malnutrition because their "natural" diet was low on protein and other nutrients. You could live on a diet of artificial strawberry milkshakes, Chicken McNuggets and fries and be healthier than they were! (Okay, you might have to throw in a McDonalds salad and some orange juice once in a while too.) I'm looking forward at eating clone quarter-pounders with cheese that are half the price of the regular ones today.

[The Mad Yank]

IF a clone is grown from healthy stock, then the clone will be healthy stock; this is a basic tenet of cloning. A true CLONE is like a Xerox copy of a document - no, excuse me, it's actually like running two prints of the same MS Word document, one right after the other, from the same printer, on neighboring pages.
DUH.
Of course, if you DON'T have healthy stock, THEN you have a problem. So, you'd better be sure of genetically-healthy stock. We're not talking about a cow with a head cold; we're talking about a cow with a congenital heart defect, that kind of thing. Two-headed chickens need not apply.
IF we can read bovine gene charts that deeply, and that cleanly, then YES, I'LL eat cloned beef. Same goes for pork, chicken, lamb, fish, whatever. If NOT, then sorry, back to the lab, Dr. Frankenberry. Take another couple-dozen stitches in that neckline before you send the monster back out with his arms up.
But the basic IDEA is a DARNED GOOD ONE - drop the price of meat so EVERYONE who wants it can afford it. Humans NEED PROTEIN to survive and grow strong, and we NEED strong humans. And TOFU doesn't get it.

[su]

but always hybrid varietyof animals are prodused when clonnig..so that there is no wrong in cloning until we use it in de best way..

[Timberland Outlet Store]

Nice, and thanks for sharing this info with us.Good Luck!