CLONED FOOD

Okay, so I’ve been buried at work and haven’t been keeping up with the important topic of CLONED FOOD. It seems like forever ago that we first heard about Dolly the sheep, and the idea that cloned animals would actually become a food source was only a remote possibility. Now, as reported by NPR, the US Food and Drug Administration is set to approve cloned meat and milk this spring. Even more disturbing than this is the fact that “manufacturers” and distributors of cloned food products will not be required to label their meats and milk with information pertaining to the cloned or non-cloned status. (Do we call it cloned vs. real or cloned vs. non-cloned?).

Apparently all of the taste tests are in, and the cloned meat and milk are indistinguishable from non-cloned. Call me old fashioned, but there’s just something unsettling about the whole idea of cloning living creatures and then eating them. You can bet that some people are counting on getting rich from this whole process, despite anything they may say about how cloning can benefit mankind by improving the quality or quantity of the food supply. In the end it’s all about the money.

I read up a bit on cloning because I didn't really understand how it all works. The Encyclopedia Britannica sums is up this way:

"Dolly the sheep was successfully cloned in 1996 by fusing the nucleus from a mammary-gland cell of a Finn Dorset ewe into an enucleated egg cell taken from a Scottish Blackface ewe. Carried to term in the womb of another Scottish Blackface ewe, Dolly was a genetic copy of the Finn Dorset ewe."

I love meat.....I mean I really do. And I love milk, but I can't help but believe that messing around this way with the creation of living creatures will have unintended consequences in the generations to come that are frightening to imagine. Maybe I'll think about becoming a vegetarian!

A recent Washington Post article about the coming FDA approval can be found at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/16/AR2006101601337_pf.html

Stories from the March 10, 1997 issue of Time Magazine shown above can be found at:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601970310,00.html