8 October, 2008
Amazing but true: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ruled that meat and milk from cloned animals is safe to eat, despite the fact that clones, as defective copies of the originals, live about half as long as normal animals. If they reach adulthood, cloned animals also have a tendency to die unexpectedly, and there are theories that cloned animals undergo accelerated aging. These problems with cloned animals were present since the beginning of the technology when in Scotland scientists cloned a sheep who died prematurely, Dolly (1996 - 2003).
Copies of original - and copies of copies - are probably inherently flawed. But if live in the United States, cloned meat - untested and unlabelled - is coming to a supermarket near you.
Headline from the New York Times: “F.D.A. Says Food From Cloned Animals Is Safe.”
“After years of delay, the Food and Drug Administration tentatively concluded yesterday that milk and meat from some cloned farm animals are safe to eat. That finding could make the United States the first country to allow products from cloned livestock to be sold in grocery stores...
A poll this month (December 2007) from the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that while most consumers knew little about animal cloning, 64 percent said they were uncomfortable with it, with 46 percent saying they were “strongly uncomfortable.” [i]
The FDA and their clients in the bio-engineering companies are fully aware that most Americans feel that cloned food is unethical, unhealthy or yucky. Thus, the FDA will not require mandatory labeling of cloned meat. In fact under the protection of WTO and NAFTA the converse is true: companies selling cloned meat cannot be forced to suffer potential economic harm by being required to label it and neither can retailers. And it gets worse. Under these policies, we might anticipate that companies shall issue “Clone Free” labels. But will they be allowed to do so? After all, the label “Hormone Free” is “unapprovable” because FDA sided with the major milk providers and slaughterhouses. And international trade agreements and conventions are prohibitive as well.
So, why clone animals for food in the first place? Donald Coover, owner of SEK Genetics, Inc. (a beef cattle semen distribution company), is favorably quoted in an FDA report:
“The consumer is looking for a nutritious and wholesome product provided to them in a repeatable and reliable manner... If a consumer spends $30 on a steak dinner at a restaurant, they expect a great steak, but don’t always get it.” [ii]
This is a familiar story. Henry Ford achieved the mass production of a homogenous product, the Model-T car. As Ford said famously, “People can have the Model T in any color, as long as it’s black.” So the process of Fordism has simply moved from the factory to the laboratory.
The Model-T analogy is a good one because repeatable and reliable food coincided with the rise of the automobile. Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, describes how chains like McDonald’s developed assembly-line kitchens just as most Americans were getting their post-war wheels. Drive-up restaurants soon followed, but mass produced and highly processed food served in ever-larger portions, led to a decline in food safety and to a rise in obesity and disease. [iii]
Thus the impetus for cloned meat grows from an ideological commitment to uniformity, so coveted by the fast-food industry. And though the reality is that cloned animals are not identical in ever way to the original, the concept of cloning and its archetype provides a discipline and predictability within the food supply - particularly upon burgers, whose production is, at present, unnecessarily complicated and overly heterogeneous.
“In just 4 ounces, a typical burger patty is packed with the meat and fat of 50 to 100 cattle from multiple states and two to four countries. Eat two hamburgers a week -- as the average American does -- and in a year’s time the consumer samples a stampede: 5,200 to 10,400 cattle.” [iv] The full realization of cloning leads to the opposite situation. It will possible for people the world over to bite into a hamburger made from the same supposedly perfect cow - forever.
And the Meek Shall Consume the Clones
Is cloned meat risky? The FDA insists that cloned livestock is “virtually indistinguishable” from conventional livestock (notice the word virtually). The FDA even insists that “cloning doesn’t put any new substances into an animal, so there’s no ‘new’ substance to test.” The FDA’s party line is that cloning is no big deal: “Clones are similar to identical twins, just born at a different time.” [v] (Except that the cloned twin tends to have diseases, organ failure, and kick the bucket prematurely.)
Not one scientific study exists regarding the impact of cloned food on human health; the technology itself has only been around since 1997 for mammals. Actually, there is one study, about to be launched now as a live experiment, with American consumers serving as guinea pigs. The Center for Food Safety describes the situation accurately:
“Animal cloning is a new technology with potentially severe risks for food safety. Defects in clones are common, and cloning scientists warn that even small imbalances in clones could lead to hidden food safety problems in clones’ milk or meat. There are few studies on the risks of food from clones, and no long-term food safety studies have been done... Given that researchers do not understand many of the health problems that arise throughout the life-cycles of cloned animals, the FDA acted irresponsibly in assuming that the foods produced from these animals are safe for humans to eat.” [vi]
Another alarming aspect of cloning animals is that it advances the technology for cloning humans. The word “clone” was coined in 1963, when a biologist and “transhumanist (aka “posthumanist”), J.B.S. Haldane, presented a paper titled: “Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten-Thousand Years.” [vii]
Grandiose hopes (and biological ones no less) for thousands of years reminds one of the racialist and nationalist ambitions of the Nazis. More specifically, animal cloning reminds one of Dr. Josef Mengele’s experiments on twins. Indeed, there is a fine line between high-tech animal husbandry and human eugenics.
Do officials at the FDA think that animal cloning will lead to human cloning? Here is what they say: “The FDA does not believe so…” The FDA does not believe so? Well, actually they qualify the statement. On their website, the FDA concludes: “… there are unresolved issues regarding the broader social and ethical implications of the use of cloning for humans.” [viii] Well, nothing than can’t be sorted out eventually in a Brave New World coming near you.
Andrew Bosworth(Top)
[i] Pollack, Andrew and Andrew Martin. F.D.A. Says Food From Cloned Animals Is Safe. New York Times. 29 December 2006.
[ii] Bren, Linda. Cloning: Revolution or Evolution in Animal Production? FDA Consumer Magazine. May-June 2003.
[iii] Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002.
[iv] Pulaski, Alex and Andy Dworkin. Cattledrive: What’s in that burger you’re eating? Newshouse News Service, Jackson Citizen Patriot, 22 February 2004.
[v] ANIMAL CLONING: FAQs ABOUT CLONING FOR CONSUMERS. Food and Drug Administration. 26 October 2007.
[vi] Cloned Animals. Center for Food Safety. WWW. http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/cloned_animals.cfm
[vii] Timeline. Bloodlines. Public Broadcasting System. WWW. http://www.pbs.org/bloodlines/timeline/text_timeline.html
[viii] ANIMAL CLONING: FAQs ABOUT CLONING FOR CONSUMERS. Food and Drug Administration. 26 October 2007.
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