Cloned Food - Will you buy/eat it?

Now that the FDA says it's ok...will you be having some?

You are not going to have much of a choice since it will not be indicated on the label. Hell, we can't even get countries of origin labeled, let alone genetics.

Actually, you've probably already eaten cloned meat. It's been going on since 2002. And you've certainly eaten genetically modified produce for years.

-ramon

I guess with all the other junk in my body (as I sit here drinking my second Diet Coke of the day) I'm just not so worried about cloned food.

Really, how different is a cloned cow from a test-tube-baby cow, which is what we're getting now? Essentially, from what I gather, cloned animals are not different from identical twins of the original animal...

Another question: if we had the technology to create test-tube muscle tissue - meaning we could do away with killing, feeding, and otherwise farming, would you eat that? I have a feeling it's on the way...and if we did it, would that animal tissue be considered vegitarian?

Why are we cloning food at all? Just because we can?

Why would something cloned be bad? Isn't it genetically identical?

Liz in Norwood Park wrote:Why are we cloning food at all? Just because we can?

I think the idea is that livestock with particularly attractive/valuable characteristics can be "copied," guaranteeing results more effectively than selective breeding. From what I've read, however, cloned livestock will likely be too expensive to butcher and sell as meat. Rather, they'll be used as breeding stock.

From what I've read, animals are being cloned for breeding rather than eating, so you'll be eating the offspring of clones, rather than clones.

Interesting topic.

I would prefer they didn't start cloning animals for breeding or otherwise, as I can't help but think this messes with the gene pool unnecessarily. Of course, I'd rather not eat test tube baby cows either, but I do.

It seems to me that the choice is really between eating meat produced from local farmers who raise livestock in a very traditional way, or eating mass-produced meat from your grocery store.

I'd certainly prefer the former, but the latter is how I actually eat.

Well, cloned anim*u*ls (TM) are prohibitively expensive(for mass-marketing) for the time being.

As opined upthread; what we're really headed for is vat-meat...which one would imagine(read: hope) would appease PETA-esque fascists, but, I doubt it.




primer elision: I have no problem with hybridization/genetic experimentation/or cloning: I do have a big problem with the "chicken littles" of this world

Agreed. Setting aside larger peripheral issues, I'm not the least bit concerned about eating cloned animals or the offspring thereof from a safety standpoint. Fears of pesticides, hormones, GM, etc. in raising livestock makes logical sense (even if I don't share those fears), but as far as I can tell the only rational fear when it comes to eating cloned livestock is straight-up fear of change.

Liz,

Will you eat it?

Regards,

I haven't been following the news on this, because I can't focus on the page for all the eye-rolling.

Are they talking about cloning a supposedly-ideal adult, or merely splitting early-stage embryos? The latter is trivial, and I wouldn't worry about it at all.

The former is a little touchier: some cloned animals have shown shorter lifespans and other health issues. I'm not saying there's a problem with the food products from them, but it might fall under an animal cruelty thing if these beasties are going to be bred with a high likelihood of health issues.

There is always a concern about monoculture: If every steer in the US is a Ferdinand-X-4, there's greater risk of a disease wiping them all out, because they'll all have the same resistances and susceptibilities. They're not more likely to catch a disease, just if they do, the whole herd will be at greater risk. This may be balanced by the breed having resistances.

It's a perpetuation of the factory food system: You think it all tastes the same now? Wait until you eliminate breeding variations.

Last note: You think you've never had cloned food? Ever eaten a banana? The standard Cavendish variety and many other cultivars are sterile and only are grown by cuttings or cloning. And they're dying out due to a fungal infestation.

Cathy2 wrote:Liz,

Will you eat it?

Regards,

GIven a choice, I'd rather not. It's just too freakish for me. Too Franken-Burger.

What about you? Will you, Cathy?

Hi,

I have no problem doing so.

Regards,

Christopher Gordon wrote:I do have a big problem with the "chicken littles" of this world

So then I guess you'll only be happy when they genetically (or otherwise) engineer a race of giant chickens.

I don't believe there are any actual health issues in eating cloned anything, as long as what was originally cloned was healthy to eat to begin with. JoelF provides other reasons why the practice might be problematic (the mono-culture one scares me the most). If it is so safe, though, why don't we have a right to know what products are genetically modified or cloned and which are not ? Why don't we have choice in this land of the free? What are they scared of?

I definitely have a problem with corporations owning "life" and this is an inevitable result of this ruling. Companies today own certain strains of say corn, or soybeans. If they accidentally cross over into your farm field, you can be sued. If a McDonald's patented bull mounts my old Bessie on some casual encounter, will I forever be in McDonald's debt for the sad offspring?

I'm tired of the FDA being corporatist when it's mandate is consumerist. Corporations are not people. Leave old Bessie alone.

-ramon

Cathy2 wrote:Hi,

I have no problem doing so.

Regards,

I wonder what the farmer in your signature would say.

JimInLoganSquare wrote:

Christopher Gordon wrote:I do have a big problem with the "chicken littles" of this world

So then I guess you'll only be happy when they genetically (or otherwise) engineer a race of giant chickens.

I do lurv me some nature-gone-amok flicks (see: no crappy SciFi Channel crap); I'm talkin' oldskool as quoted above...

What I'm really innnerested in is this idear that AGRICULTURE is prima facie evidence that humankind's been involved in genetic manipulation(and will continue to do so) from our evolution in the use of tools, coordination of fire, and pattern recognition. Frankenfoods, my butt.

Echoing some sentiments here, I see cloning as one of modern technology's ways of greatly speeding up processes similar to making hybrids etc. by other 'traditional' methods.

Whether the origin of the meat is a cloned animal or not, I'd be more concerned about how the animal is raised, what it's fed and how it's processed.

To give a serious answer (even though I voted "other," because I was so amused that it was a choice and wanted to reward Liz for amusing me), if two choices were in the butcher case, one marked cloned and the other marked not-cloned, I would never buy the cloned. It would feel unsafe to me in a way I can't defend here (since I lack the facts), but which I don't need to. However, if packages were unmarked, I would probably resign myself to eating cloned meat, since the alternative might be eating no meat at all.

But then, it might continue to be possible to find uncloned, when places like Whole Foods and Paulina and Apple Market began to make a point of selling only uncloned (as they probably would). In which case I might just start buying all my meat at those places.

The one thing that could change my mind is if it began to appear that cloned meat was actually superior in flavor, tenderness, all the good stuff, to uncloned. I don't know if that could ever be a promise cloned meat can make, but I wouldn't doubt that it's down the road. If that happened, and there'd been some years of safe use established, I suppose I could drift that way.

riddlemay wrote:To give a serious answer (even though I voted "other," because I was so amused that it was a choice and wanted to reward Liz for amusing me), if two choices were in the butcher case, one marked cloned and the other marked not-cloned,

To quote GoodFellas: You mean, let me understand this cause, ya know maybe it's me, I'm a little fucked up maybe, but I'm funny how, I mean funny like I'm a clown, I amuse you? I make you laugh, I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?

Actually, this is what i meant by "other"...as in given a choice.

How about outside the world of food - I was thinking of all the different new technology offering burn victims new skin, almost all of it "artificial": Skin substitutes. Medical advances of this nature aren't particularly different than advances in food technology; they both have drawbacks and benefits, yet as a culture, we tend to embrace one and shy away from the other.

I also think that focus on things like cloning, food additives, etc. can remove focus from the very real threat of a just plain bad diet. All things being equal, I wonder how changes in foods and food processing affect the health of a person who eats a "balanced" diet and exercises regularly...

Liz in Norwood Park wrote:

riddlemay wrote:To give a serious answer (even though I voted "other," because I was so amused that it was a choice and wanted to reward Liz for amusing me), if two choices were in the butcher case, one marked cloned and the other marked not-cloned,

To quote GoodFellas: You mean, let me understand this cause, ya know maybe it's me, I'm a little fucked up maybe, but I'm funny how, I mean funny like I'm a clown, I amuse you? I make you laugh, I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?

Actually, this is what i meant by "other"...as in given a choice.

It seems to me the "yes or no" took care of the being-given-a-choice. So now I'm confused by what you meant by "other." (I was happier thinking it was a joke. In fact, since it makes me happier to think that, I'll continue to.)

The question of whether there should be labeling is an interesting one.

Generally, I'm fully in support of more information, more disclosure, etc. Don't ban or regulate things, just make the information available and let consumers make their own choices.

But the cloned animal products is a rare case where I'm not convinced there should be government regulation when it comes to labeling. When there are realistic health concerns, absolutely, but as far as I can tell that just isn't the case here at all. It isn't like GM where altering DNA could theoretically create unintended changes along with the intended ones. As my wife (who is by her own admission no expert in this field, but is still a Hopkins pathologist who is well-educated in genetics) put it, when you're dealing with a cloned animal, there's no reason to think they might have a different health impact because there's nothing different to begin with. If you had the original and the clone, there isn't even any way of telling which is which... and not because we don't have the technology, but because the difference doesn't exist.

So mandating disclosure of cloned products seems, by means of exaggeration, similar to disclosure of which cows were born on Tuesdays. In the sense that there could always be some unforeseen difference that we can't conceive of, that information could be significant, but there's no logical reason to believe it might be. If we labeled animal products with all of the variables that were as likely to have a health impact as cloned or not cloned, we're going to have to start packaging steaks in refrigerator boxes to allow room for all of the labels.

Again, neither I nor my wife are experts in this field. But from what I understand, that's how realistic fears of problems are. On a gut level, if you don't trust it you don't trust it, and there's nothing wrong with that. But there's no reason to believe you shouldn't. As such, I'm not yet convinced that this is something the government needs to step into (beyond regulating the safety of the process, of course). Let the industry regulate itself. There will be a demand for non-cloned products, and meat producers who wish can label their product as such and meet that demand.

riddlemay wrote:

Liz in Norwood Park wrote:

riddlemay wrote:To give a serious answer (even though I voted "other," because I was so amused that it was a choice and wanted to reward Liz for amusing me), if two choices were in the butcher case, one marked cloned and the other marked not-cloned,

To quote GoodFellas: You mean, let me understand this cause, ya know maybe it's me, I'm a little fucked up maybe, but I'm funny how, I mean funny like I'm a clown, I amuse you? I make you laugh, I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?

Actually, this is what i meant by "other"...as in given a choice.

It seems to me the "yes or no" took care of the being-given-a-choice. So now I'm confused by what you meant by "other." (I was happier thinking it was a joke. In fact, since it makes me happier to think that, I'll continue to.)

Okay!

Dmnkly wrote:If you had the original and the clone, there isn't even any way of telling which is which... and not because we don't have the technology, but because the difference doesn't exist.

Wouldn't the original be older?

i'll just say I'm an atheist who has moral reservations. besides I'm opposed to anything that makes livestock farmers obsolete.

Hi,

At the the Greater Midwest Foodways sausage program last year, Vienna Sausage indicated bulls are used in making hot dogs. Artificial insemination has caused a decline in the bull population. Livestock farmers used to always keep a bull. Apparently with reproductive technology they don't have to keep the bull and often do not.

With or without the bull, the livestock farmers are still in business.

Regards,

Number of Wisconsin Dairy Farmers:

1960:103,000
1997: 22,000

It's probably less than 15,000 now.

Bulls kill people, so that's an entirely different matter.