Where Are Us Beef Cattle Exported to
My Big Beefiness with Cloned Cattle
The meat and milk from cloned animals are safe to eat and should exist allowed for sale, according to the U.Due south. Food and Drug Administration.
And yous'll never know, anyhow, because the labeling will be a clone of the labeling used for non-cloned beef. No special labeling is needed, the FDA says in an article published in the Jan. 1 issue of Theriogenology and in the full 678-page study posted on the FDA web site terminal week.
The less nosotros know the better, patently. Why else would the results of a iv-twelvemonth investigation in cloning safety exist announced quietly between Christmas and New year'due south?
Cloning dates dorsum hundreds of days
On one level, nosotros've allowed cloned beef to penetrate America for years. It'south called McDonald's. While not technically cloned, all billion or so of the hamburger patties sold are indistinguishable from each other. This is our future.
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On another level, you might take already eaten real cloned beef. Cloning livestock has been going on for v years now, and the FDA just initiated a voluntary moratorium in 2003 on the commercial sale of the offspring of cloned animals. In this era of censorship and compromised priorities at the CDC, EPA and NASA, the FDA didn't have the teeth to make the sale of cloned animal products illegal.
Cloning advocates are already painting u.s.a. concerned consumers as Luddites, with minds too feeble to comprehend that cloning is just an extension of brute husbandry practices that accept taken identify for centuries. This is a natural progression, they say, like feeding herbivorous cattle the footing-up remains of other animals, which somehow brought about mad cow affliction.
As rubber as cloned female parent's milk
Are cloned animal products safe? Probably, but that's not the whole effect. Cloned cattle would be a chip off the old chipped beef, genetically identical to the progenitors. Scientists take the DNA of a prized bull or dairy moo-cow and insert this into a hollowed-out nearly microscopic cattle egg. An electric shock, eerily familiar to Frankenstein, induces the egg to grow.
Issue i is long-term human safety. While the do is likely safe, simply a few years have passed since the dawn of cloning to truly understand the impact this would have on millions of livestock consumed by hundreds of millions of people.
Issue two is the long-term viability of the food supply. Nature likes diverseness; this is why most animals reproduce sexually. A disease can more hands wipe out an entire herd if each fauna is genetically identical.
Upshot three is the appalling secrecy. Consumers have the right to know whether their food product was raised in a matter that is acceptable to them. Of class the biggest producers don't want the FDA to require special labeling. The majority of consumers are queasy with the thought of cloning animals, every bit revealed in a recent poll by the Pew Initiative on Nutrient and Biotechnology.
Issue four is the necessity. Why do we need to clone livestock? It's considering big business, the face of American farming practices, demands identical products for mass production. And these identical slabs of meat line the meat sections of identical supermarkets from Albuquerque to Yonkers.
Uncertain future
Butchers have virtually entirely disappeared from America. Gone is the day of specialty cuts and regional flavors. Instead, four meatpacking companies slaughter and package nigh 85 percentage of all beef in the Usa, according to the USDA. Supermarkets merely hire a few meat-cutters to trim the nigh finished production.
The biggest meat producers will likely require their suppliers to provide a genetically perfected product, which simply the largest suppliers could afford to do. Over again, the petty guy is marginalized. Already I am unable to purchase many of the meat products I grew up with in my Italian neighborhood, like sweetbreads. Small-scale farmers are barred by law from slaughtering their own animals; and the overtaxed slaughterhouses will only return sure cuts.
Such is the multifariousness of the American food supply system. Cloning will bring more of the same. We have until April two to complain to the FDA about this. Then the FDA will make its terminal decision.
Christopher Wanjek is the author of the books "Bad Medicine" and "Food At Piece of work." Got a question about Bad Medicine? Email Wanjek. If it's actually bad, he only might reply it in a future column. Bad Medicine appears each Tuesday on LIveScience.
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Source: https://www.livescience.com/9484-big-beef-cloned-cattle.html
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