US FDA Deems Cloned Animals Edible

Coldeagle sends us the news that the US Food and Drug Administration has declared that meat from cloned animals is safe to eat. The agency decided that no labeling is necessary for meat or milk from cloned cows, pigs, or goats or their offspring. (Ironically the FDA didn't include cloned sheep in the announcement, claiming a lack of data, though the very first cloned animal was a sheep named Dolly.) The article notes that a couple of major food suppliers have already decided not to use any products of cloning, and that the groups opposed to cloning in the food chain will now concentrate their efforts on convincing more suppliers to boycott the business of cloning. The FDA noted that their focus groups and other public input indicated that about 1/3 of US citizens do not want food from cloned animals under any circumstances; another 1/3 have no objections; and another 1/3 fall somewhere in between.

What consumers really want to know...

[Dan East (318230)]

Will it cost half as much?

Dan East

Re:What consumers really want to know...

[mcpkaaos (449561)]

The real question is, how long is it before the average consumer becomes apathetic about buying and eatting cloned meat.

I believe that would be a cloned-chicken-or-the-egg argument. Sorry, couldn't resist.

It's Not Cost Prohibitive...

[by Anonymous Coward]

...it's just that like most people, you don't understand how "cloned" meat is produced. A cow clone can cost upwards of $5,000, but no one eats that cow. A highly productive cow is cloned, then used as breed stock, just like any other animal with good attributes. It's the offspring that are used to produce meat and milk. Really, the entire argument looks puerile and pointless when people flap their mouths without knowing even the basic information.

Re:It's Not Cost Prohibitive...

[Skreems (598317)]

I don't think people object to eating cloned meat if that were the only factor. At least, not the people who understand some basic science. I think the larger objection is that this will limit diversity in the gene pool even faster than current breeding already is. And we've seen how well that worked out for the banana in the 50s, when it was effectively cloned by horticultural methods.

Re:OT: 25 replies?

[Spy der Mann (805235)]

WTF? Every topic on the main page has "25 comments"

Ahh... the cloning technology has arrived to Slashdot!

Edible

[Tribbin (565963)]

Edible like in snails, ants and blowfish edible?

I'd much rather...

[Dance_Dance_Karnov (793804)]

have cloned meat than meat pumped full of growth hormones.

if cow A is good to eat, then a clone of cow A should be just as good to eat.

Re:I'd much rather...

[couchslug (175151)]

"have cloned meat than meat pumped full of growth hormones."

The two are not mutually exclusive.

That's ok

[Anonymous Crowhead (577505)]

I've been smoking cloned dope for years.

The FDA Approves Shit Anyway

[garcia (6573)]

This is the same FDA that allows beef growers to feed the parts of other cows (minus the brains and spinal cords) to other cows while they are packed in tightly and standing in their own piles of urine and feces because they can't move anywhere.

This is the same FDA that has permitted plenty of E. coli outbreaks [google.com] because they refuse to put an end to unhealthy meat practices.

This is the same FDA that bends to political pressure instead of caring about the health of the American public it is supposed to protect.

What about hormones which possibly cause early puberty in girls? I could go on but I won't bother, we all know what we're putting into our bodies...

Cloned beef may be safe but it's the practices that they allow outside of this that really suck and I wouldn't trust a fucking thing they approve and neither should you. If only that beef didn't taste SO good :(

Re:The FDA Approves Shit Anyway

[swillden (191260)]

You're thinking the Department of Agriculture, not the FDA.

No he isn't [fda.gov].

Yes, he is. Read your link. It may be on the FDA's web site, but it lists the responsibilities and powers granted to the Secretary of Agriculture, who is the head of the Department of Agriculture, not the Food and Drug Administration (which is an agency in the Department of Health and Human Services, led by the Secretary of Health and Human Services).

No, I have no idea why the FDA has law that doesn't concern them on their web site.

No label?

[mcpkaaos (449561)]

That's very nice of the FDA to decide that the American public doesn't need to be told they are eating cloned meat. I feel free, don't you?

This has all happened before...

[MrLizard (95131)]

...when artificial insemination was first used for cattle, there was the same "moral panic" because, y'know, it was new and different and therefore SPOOOKY, and the same Usual Suspects were all up in arms over it, and, of course, it is now so accepted and commonplace no one even remembers there was an outrage.

Hell, when the first smallpox vaccine was invented, there were very similair panics to what we see today over genetic engineering.

People are stupid, but they are also easily distracted and forget last year's MAJOR CRISIS in favor of this year's equally all-consuming disaster.

Freerange/Organic more important imo

[Dragonshed (206590)]

Cloned or not, as long as the animal in question lived a happy, healthy life prior to being slaughtered, I'll eat it. If I can't source it to a responsible supplier, I won't. /opinion

No more doggy bags

[Dan East (318230)]

Great. Now restaurants will stop letting people take their left-over steak home, for fear of having their custom cow breed cloned.

Dan East

No diversity = higher risk

[heroine (1220)]

Without diversity, entire food supplies can be wiped out by single diseases.

meanwhile, on the industry side...

[SuperBanana (662181)]

groups opposed to cloning in the food chain will now concentrate their efforts on convincing more suppliers to boycott the business of cloning

If GMO grain and hormone-loaded-milk are any example, the industry is concentrating on keeping the FDA from requiring industry mark which meat is from cloned animals. *And* aggressively going after businesses that market food as NOT being cloned/GMO/hormone-loaded.

It's absolutely hilarious to listen to the logic: "If we labeled it, people wouldn't buy it." Ho, really? No kidding, sherlock! That's how capitalism works. And guess what? 1/3rd of America doesn't want anything to do with you.

I'm so tired of farmers and businessmen that are the first to yack about "freedom" but keep begging for the government to save them / prop them up. As more and more people start demanding organic foods, the non-organic foods will drop in price because demand drops. I'll bet anything that the non-organic agribusinesses will go running to Congress begging for larger handouts...

Not Geneticallly Identical

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

These clones are not genetically identical to uncloned animals. The newborn clone has the same depleted count of telomeres [wikipedia.org] that the fully-grown animal had when the clone's original tissue was taken from the original animal. But not the amount that a natural animal has when it's born. The adult clone will also have fewer telomeres in every cell than a natural adult.

We don't know that those lowered telomere counts affect the tissue in any way that affects the eater. But we also don't know that it doesn't affect us. We do know that the animals die much younger, because telomere countdowns are directly reflected in the aging process. So a "middle aged" cloned sheep is really like an old natural sheep. And there could very well be many other effects, some of which are much more subtle, some of which could be unhealthy. The FDA should not even allow sale of these animals for food until their hazards are disproven.

But we won't even be able to tell the basic difference by looking at the label. Because the food industry doesn't want us to know, because they have their reasons for cloning that have nothing to do with our health or safety.

That's shows what's unnatural about our government that's protecting these industries, rather than letting us decide how to protect ourselves, when the FDA won't.

Label it at least!

[globaljustin (574257)]

Genetically modified food, particularly meat from cloned animals, should be labeled if the FDA must approve it for sale.

This is a consumer rights issue.

All up and down this post, geneticists and biology teachers have been going on and on about telomeres and banana clones and blah blah blah...the fact is, meat from a cloned animal is NOT the same as meat from an animal born as a twin. The long term consequences of narrowing genetic diversity in biological food product (what cows have become) could have very nasty consequences.

The FDA did their studies and approved cloned meat. Fine by me, but we have the right to know WHAT we are eating...especially in regards to this issue.

Re:Cloning in nature

[JollyRogerX (749524)]

If you ate a double yolk egg, it was certainly not a cloned animal. Assuming you didn't eat a Balut [wikipedia.org] egg, the egg was unfertilized and thus not an animal at all.

I think you meant to imply that eating a twin is the same as eating a clone. It is not. A clone implies that the animal has identical chromosomes to an already existing (adult or otherwise) animal. Twins (identical) share the same chromosomes because they came from the same zygote and split off in early development.

You are right that some animals and plants are capable of cloning themselves, but no higher order animals and certainly no mammals. In light of the fact that people probably eat cloned fruit (cloned by humans), I can understand their uneasiness with eating cloned mammals.

I would probably eat a cloned steak, but if given the choice, I would probably buy the un-cloned steak every time.

Re:Cloning in nature

[Morosoph (693565)]

What you say is absolutely true, but is missing an important principle: the customer's right to reject a product on any brain-dead reason that they choose.

Customers are expecting non-cloned meat; they're not expecting meat from an animal who resides in a barn with a north-facing door. Accordingly, it would be reasonable for them to know the former, but not the latter.

I do hope that the FDA allow producers to label their meat non-cloned only if it isn't in fact cloned. Yes, scientific studies are important, but in the end, as with organic produce, the customer should at the very least not be lied to. For some, after all, they have an almost religious zeal in their choice. Would be accept non-kosher meat being sold as kosher? The health argument here misses the point.

Re:Cloning in nature

[gstoddart (321705)]

And don't think you veggiesaurs are exempt. Have you ever eaten anything grown from a clipping of a plant? That's a clone.

I'm afraid you aren't understanding the distinction -- or, you're in fact trying to pretend there isn't one with that analogy. Either way, it's specious.

A plant clipping will naturally re-grow, you don't really need to do much with it, because plants have evolved to propagate this way. Put the damned thing in water, and it grows. Hell, it's not even a clone, it's the same original plant essentially. We're cool with that.

However, my limited understanding is that we introduce degradation and errors when we replilcate DNA of mammals. We simply haven't cloned enough animals, over enough generations to have any factual data that the original genes aren't getting slightly borked by the technology which is doing this. We think we know, but we don't.

Hell, new data suggests that by the time a man is in his 70's the DNA in his sperm has degraded substantially. Make a clone of a cow, clone that, and then clone it again. Short of doing a hell of a lot of research, there is no evidence to support the claim this is safe. There is definitely evidence to suggest there is degradation in the genes of clones and the animals aren't as healthy.

IMO, the FDA has said something is safe which they can't possibly know. And, they're doing it to support an industry which doesn't want to be compelled to label the origins of such things.

There simply isn't enough long-term evidence to say it is safe, merely that we've not yet found any evidence that it isn't safe. For a lot of people, that doesn't meet the threshold of proof that we should be eating these things.

Is it fear of the unknown? Possibly. But, how many things used to be considered absolutely safe until it had been around a while? I seem to recall they used to use pesticides on people and entire towns under the belief that it was safe. You need real, long-term data to make the positive assertion it is safe. I don't believe we have that. By the time you fuck with your food supply and find out that it wasn't safe, you're screwed.

By all means, eat your cloned steak. But, I think they should be labelling it, and people should have the choice to buy it or not.

Cheers

Re:Cloning in nature

[ppanon (16583)]

Sort of. It depends at what point the cloning process occurs. The thing about Dolly was that she was cloned from a mature adult and had inherited the genetic damage that the adult had accumulated in its lifetime (including shortened telomeres). So if they clone them early before a lot of genetic damage has happened to the template organism, OK. If they clone them later, it's not certain what that genetic damage might have lead to. Over multiple generations, that damage could add up and affect quality.

In the long run, though, cloning your food animals is a bit of a cop out. It means you're trying to maximize your growth/production without establishing sufficient genetic diversity in your strain. As with cloned forests, you've got a highly homogeneous population that is much more susceptible to disease epidemics.

But I admit it would be tempting if they could guarantee a perfect filet mignon every time.

Re:Problems with telomeres in clones

[by Anonymous Coward]

>now there's a teeny tiny part of you that's worried about zombie sheep.

Zombie herbivores? I can see it now... Graaaainnsss....Graaaaiiinnnnssss....

IGMC.

Re:Until they get cloning right....

[mandelbr0t (1015855)]

The genetic issues are confined to the animal. You can't screw up your own DNA by eating meat that has faulty DNA. I can think of a few possibilities that could happen down the line: genetic mutations in the cloned animals makes them more prone to disease. But, meat is already screened for human-communicable diseases, so nothing to worry about there, except that cloning may not prove to be a viable solution to making more livestock. Genetic mutations in the cloned animals cause them to grow differently, changing the quality of the meat. OK, that's something to be a bit concerned about, but grade A sirloin is grade A sirloin. I suppose if the taste was so different that it doesn't taste like cow, chicken, etc. any more they may need to start labeling stuff better (and show us pictures of the animals that are so freaky they don't taste like their ancestors any more). Cloned animals may not be able to reproduce. Of course, they don't really care about that since they're cloning instead of procreating.

All in all, there's nothing to worry about, and labeling meat as 'CLONED' will just make it easier for consumers to boycott perfectly safe products. There's just too much mis-information about a lot of biotechnology and I don't think that enabling advocacy groups to spread a bunch of FUD is the best plan. If you feel that badly about it, buy a ranch and grow your own. I assume that you'll also go back to eating maize instead of corn -- octoploid genetic freak vegetables.