What Are the Steps of Beef Cattle Being Slaughtered and Processed
My Big Beef with Cloned Cattle
The meat and milk from cloned animals are safe to eat and should be allowed for sale, according to the U.South. Food and Drug Administration.
And you'll never know, anyway, 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 commodity published in the Jan. ane issue of Theriogenology and in the total 678-page study posted on the FDA web site last week.
The less we know the better, obviously. Why else would the results of a 4-yr investigation in cloning safety exist announced quietly betwixt Christmas and New Year's?
Cloning dates back hundreds of days
On 1 level, we've immune cloned beef to penetrate America for years. Information technology's called McDonald's. While not technically cloned, all billion or then of the hamburger patties sold are indistinguishable from each other. This is our future.
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On another level, you lot might have already eaten existent cloned beef. Cloning livestock has been going on for v years at present, and the FDA merely 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 brand the sale of cloned animal products illegal.
Cloning advocates are already painting us concerned consumers as Luddites, with minds too feeble to cover that cloning is just an extension of creature husbandry practices that have taken place for centuries. This is a natural progression, they say, like feeding herbivorous cattle the ground-upwardly remains of other animals, which somehow brought nearly mad moo-cow disease.
As condom as cloned mother's milk
Are cloned animal products safe? Probably, but that's not the whole issue. Cloned cattle would be a flake off the old chipped beef, genetically identical to the progenitors. Scientists take the DNA of a prized bull or dairy cow and insert this into a hollowed-out well-nigh microscopic cattle egg. An electrical shock, eerily familiar to Frankenstein, induces the egg to grow.
Issue one is long-term human safety. While the do is likely safe, only a few years have passed since the dawn of cloning to truly empathize the touch this would take on millions of livestock consumed by hundreds of millions of people.
Issue two is the long-term viability of the food supply. Nature likes multifariousness; this is why most animals reproduce sexually. A disease tin more easily wipe out an entire herd if each animal is genetically identical.
Issue iii is the appalling secrecy. Consumers take the right to know whether their food product was raised in a affair that is adequate to them. Of grade the biggest producers don't want the FDA to require special labeling. The bulk of consumers are queasy with the idea of cloning animals, every bit revealed in a recent poll by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology.
Issue four is the necessity. Why do nosotros need to clone livestock? It's considering big concern, 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 time to come
Butchers accept almost entirely disappeared from America. Gone is the day of specialty cuts and regional flavors. Instead, four meatpacking companies slaughter and package most 85 percent of all beef in the United States, according to the USDA. Supermarkets but hire a few meat-cutters to trim the near finished production.
The biggest meat producers will likely crave their suppliers to provide a genetically perfected product, which simply the largest suppliers could afford to practice. One time once more, the little guy is marginalized. Already I am unable to buy many of the meat products I grew upwards with in my Italian neighborhood, similar sweetbreads. Small farmers are barred by police from slaughtering their own animals; and the overtaxed slaughterhouses volition only return certain cuts.
Such is the diversity of the American food supply system. Cloning will bring more than of the same. We have until Apr 2 to complain to the FDA about this. So the FDA will make its last conclusion.
Christopher Wanjek is the author of the books "Bad Medicine" and "Food At Work." Got a question about Bad Medicine? Email Wanjek. If it'south actually bad, he just might answer it in a hereafter 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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