January 2, 2007
FDA is Okay with Cloned Meat
The report was long (678 pages) but, in the end, the Food and Drug Administration’s findings were easily summed up in a single sentence: Meat and milk from cloned animals is
safe for human consumption.
The FDA’s report doesn’t yet approve the sale of food from cloned animals but is the first step towards what at this point seems a done deal. The government will take comments
from the public until April 2 before rendering its final decision.
The analysis by the FDA is seen as a victory for biotechnology companies that argue breeders will now be able to keep herds made up only of the finest livestock.
Mark Walton, president of ViaGen, told The Washington Post, “The higher-end breeders are going to start signing up and taking advantage of this. They’ve been interested,
but they’ve been skeptical that we’d ever get the regulatory process dealt with.”
Others outside of biotechnology circles do not share Mr. Walton’s enthusiasm. The Center for Food Safety has asked the FDA to take a more cautious approach to approving meat
and milk from cloned animals to be used for feeding humans. The group argues the FDA should do rigorous testing and approve one species at a time, much in the manner it handles
prescription medicines. As it stands now, all clones would get the thumbs up, assuming the decision isn’t kyboshed during the public comment stage.
The agency is very comfortable with its approach on the matter.
“We have looked very, very closely,” Stephen F. Sundlof, the FDA’s chief of veterinary medicine, said in a telephone news conference. “There’s just not anything there that is
conceivably hazardous to the public health.”
Should the FDA give its approval, it will be quite a while before the meat or milk from cloned animals reaches the average American’s home. Today, there are fewer than 1,000
clones living on farms in the U.S.
Another obstacle is the high price of clones. Some animals can cost up to $15,000, making them too valuable to send to the slaughterhouse.
“Everything is basically two to three years away, even if it all opens up tomorrow,” said Steve Mower, director of marketing at Cyagra, a company in the cloning business.
There are some who question cloning on a purely economic basis.
Carol Tucker Foreman of the Consumer Federation of America said U.S. farmers already produce more milk than Americans can drink and the government has spent billions
since 1999 in buying up the surplus.
Discussion Question: Where do you see the cloned livestock issue going?
Discussion Questions
Poll
BrainTrust
Recent Discussions
More Discussions
How Can Retailers Crack the Gen Z ‘Riddle’?
Gen Z is becoming an increasingly important consumer demographic, but an elusive one to map. How…Does Bath & Body Works’ Scented Holiday Campaign Pass the Sniff Test?
Bath & Body Works is kicking off a new campaign with scent being at the fore…Which Tech Will Solve In-Store Inventory Woes?
Three major tech lineups are looking to solve retail inventory problems. Which is most suited?
I still believe that the main issues are those of information and transparency. If cloned products are generally available but without being labelled (because they are so safe and indistinguishable from non-cloned products), this denies people the right to choose. Sooner or later they will realise it and start objecting on principle, not because they know or understand the causes and effects of cloning at all. They will more likely react with suspicion to not being told or given the opportunity to take responsibility for what they eat. A combination of education and information will be necessary to prevent problems further down the line.
Among people who care most about their personal food quality, the FDA has no credibility. When cloned food supplies become price competitive with all other foods, they’ll be consumed by people who don’t want to spend extra for natural foods.
It all depends on the economics. If cloned animals become more cost effective than the more traditionally sired, we’ll see more products from cloned animals on the market. If not, we won’t. But, rest assured, if and when clone products do arrive at market, there will be a horrendous hue and cry from both the pro-science and the forces of organic innocence.
While the FDA is presumably right on the safety of cloned meat, the key word is “presumably.” As others have pointed out, the FDA has enough credibility problems lately that there should be a lot more clinical evidence. At this point the sample data is probably so small that consumers won’t feel reassured by the announcement. Who knows: This may someday turn out to be a marketing angle in reverse for food marketers: Packaging and selling meat and poultry products as “clone-free.”
A hundred years ago modern nutritional science was in its infancy, and vitamins were just being discovered. The analytical taking apart of what we eat led to a huge interest in intervention in the food supply. After all, if vitamins are good, and we can have a virtually unlimited supply of bottled vitamin B1, why not put more of it into our diet? For that matter, what’s with all these useless components in our food? Why don’t we just eat the pure stuff?
This type of thinking contributed to the manufacture of pure sugar (white-white-white) and pure flour (white-white-white.) But as soon as you purified all the components of your food, you found that some nutrients were now missing. So we needed to enrich our flour. Or maybe just go back to eating food in its “natural” state?
But when we found that we had missed some of the necessary components, and new vitamins and nutrients were discovered, we also found that some of the microcomponents of regular, ordinary food, were highly toxic. Oh dear! What to do?
So you could just eat what our great grandparents ate, and suffer with the aflatoxin, carototoxin, solanine, ergot, E. coli, etc., dying (is that entirely natural?) from food borne diseases. Or you could endorse the work of people like Norman Borlaug who has saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the developing world through the application of science to agriculture – food.
The apocalyptic fear mongers remind me of the old Anthony Newly musical, Stop the World, I Want to Get Off! But as someone said, “It is less important, what you eat; than what eats you!”
First, the FDA’s announcement, while giving comfort to some, comes on top of some significant misses by the FDA. So, I don’t see widespread consumer acceptance simply because the FDA says there is no substantial risk today. Second, even if consumers were willing to accept the FDA’s position, technology in this case is not where it would need to be to support a consumer market. There are still many problems with cloning. While they eventually will be worked out, it will take time and money so the consumer market isn’t around the corner (and 2 – 3 years seems optimistic).
It does seem possible, and more likely, that breeders will want to use the clone technology in combination with traditional breeding methods to focus the herds in directions that produce traditional but more consistently high quality animals and animal products. A first generation clone then combined with traditional breeding could yield higher populations of animals with “desirable” characteristics. Don’t look for clones to overtake the market just yet.
Hopefully, we’ll have the sense to understand this subject in a reasonable way some day. Yeah, right. Along with genetically-engineered foodstuffs, cloned products suffer from knee-jerk ignorance.
Ever since monk Gregor Mendel conducted and documented his seminal hybridizing experiments with pea plants in the 19th century (including a 35-year delay for scientific recognition), we’ve been consuming un-original foodstuffs. Some say that native Americans hybridized maize (corn varieties) well before Mendel’s published experiments. In other words, get over it. We’ve been eating this stuff for centuries.
We are not what we eat. Unless we are in the habit of consuming radioactive plutonium, the stuff we eat cannot affect our DNA or the DNA of our naturally-conceived children. This is not the stuff of giant grasshoppers suddenly appearing out of the Nevada desert. Human digestion begins with mastication (chewing) and saliva, and is finished by powerful stomach acids and our intestinal systems. In other words, we break down food into its essential chemical elements and send them along to those parts of our bodies that need them for nutrition. If we consume genetically-engineered or cloned food, our bodies break them down in the same, efficient, digestive way.
Remember how we overreacted to irradiation of food? Now, with e-coli concerns, it’s on its way back. Irradiation was never a threat, except to bacteria. Again, no giant grasshoppers. Generally, we are unreasonable folk who react and make decisions based on emotion rather than intellect.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on animal biology. But I do know that I am much more concerned about the ongoing health factors of antibiotic residue in our milk, meat, and poultry and herbicides and bacteria on our veggies and grains than I am about whether an animal is “conceived” the old fashioned way, by artificial insemination, or by cloning.
As seems so often to be the case, the news media reports on the results of polls such as “Will you eat cloned meat?” without determining whether the poll respondents have any knowledge or information about what they are being asked. Further, I have seen precious little space in the media devoted to a general explanation of the cloning process in layman’s terms. I do think that cloned meat will make its presence known in the area of specialty and rare high-end animals, not your basic hamburger steers.
Ultimately, the future of cloned food will depend primarily on two economic factors: 1. Whether the process of cloning itself can be made cost-effective when weighed against other options, and; 2. Whose voices and dollars (i.e., those whose own economic interests lie in either the success or the failure of cloned food) come through the loudest.
I think several previous commentators have hit on major issues: monocultures lead to susceptibility to a heretofore unknown epidemics; economics make this a pipe dream currently; consumers “yuck” about a process they are not familiar with.
By the same token, the “high praise” for the “virtues” seem a bit over done. We’ve all seen fruits and vegetables hybridized over several decades to the point where “heirloom” varieties along with organic farming are taking back a bigger share of market. Personally, I like a watermelon to taste like a watermelon instead of like a gourd – even if you can dribble a watermelon today without breaking it open. And the nutritional value of many of these foods have gone down as a result, by the way.
Diversity is good. We are “scientifically” breeding cattle in many cases today anyway. I see no real benenfit in crowning “Bessie” as the only genetic pattern we will ever need to produce milk, and “Bevo” as the only steer that is needed for us to cut a steak.
I’ll just keep eating beef (and the occasional tough steak) the old fashioned way. Guess I am just stubborn and “set in my ways.”
The FDA report announced that the cloned products tested were safe. If “safe” becomes the last word or the primary word consumers hear, the “issue” will become a non-issue. However, if there is a health problem somewhere down the road or if a group decides to take this on as an issue and creates a media event questioning the safety of the products, then it could become a hotly contested issue. The fact that the industry is trying to be proactive and have testing done before just putting the products on the market and asserting their safety is a good move. Having another independent body check and certify the safety would put them in a stronger position. Then the industry will have to stay on top of what is being done, being discussed, and track unanticipated events. This is a reasonable beginning. It is not the end of the story however.
Is cloned food good for us or not? It appears we don’t yet have the answer to this, despite the FDA’s “official” pronouncement (we don’t yet have the minority view that circulated in the FDA). Will cloned animals be economically useful? We don’t know. There are data on all sides of these questions, but in the end, I doubt we can predict where this issue will go. Prediction is difficult, to put it nicely, even for experts! I think it could be useful instead to discuss the questions: “What are the pros and cons of cloning and of food from cloned sources?” or, “What are the economic drivers and inhibitors of cloning?” or “What are the forces for and against using cloned food?”
Absent an economic advantage, the production of cloned animals for food will remain an academic exercise, subject to academic and emotional controversy. Some consumers will object on aesthetic or moral grounds, but most will look at their personal safety and the price – not necessarily in that order.
Meanwhile, the FDA assures us that milk from cloned cows is safe for human consumption, but it cannot assure us that raising cloned cows is safe for the herd. As with any form of monoculture, reducing diversity of the crop may raise yields under perfectly controlled conditions, but at the expense of vulnerability to epidemic disease.
This is a clear signal from the scientific community on the safety of cloning. There is no difference in this and some of the “selective breeding” which we have been doing with plants and farm animals for years. This is just the next step. Now, instead of waiting for chance mutations to continue through the evolutionary process, we can selectively breed them in (or breed them out) of the evolutionary process. We are now able to let the biggest and the healthiest continue while we move forward at a faster, broader pace, instead of having to pay an evolutionary price of waiting for evolution and chance to give us a per chance morsel. Cloning gives man the ability to selectively choose, rather than just leaving this up to chance. Our farming and medical communities will benefit tremendously as we move forward with the cloning process.