Fit Fare

The FDA cautiously announced last Thursday that meat and milk from cloned animals is safe for human consumption. Some farmers, like rancher and vet Donald Coover of Kansas, see this as a boon: they’ll be able to produce a fairly standard, high-quality “product,” demonstrating the very best characteristics their stock has to offer, without depending on the chancy genetics of sexual reproduction. We wouldn’t even be eating the cloned animals themselves, say advocates. At close to $20,000 a pop, they’re too pricey to just get ground into burgers. Instead, cloned animals would be used mostly for breeding, to ensure a certain uniformity throughout a farmer’s stock.

On the surface, this seems like a sound, consumer-savvy business practice: Americans love a predictable, high-quality, standardized product experience - chains from Starbucks to Denny’s can attest to that. According to the FDA, numerous studies have also shown no real differences exist between meat and milk from healthy cloned animals, and those from their more traditionally born counterparts. Stephen F. Sundlof, chief of veterinary medicine for the FDA says they “have looked very, very closely,” at the results, and nothing indicates cloned food “is conceivably hazardous to the public health.”

Unfortunately for farmers like Coover and other advocates of cloning animals for food, it’s unclear whether anyone would eat the stuff, given the chance. A September poll by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that 64 percent of Americans polled were “uncomfortable” with food from cloned sources. Oh, and by the way, the jury is still out on not only the safety of such food, but the ethics surrounding its production.

Michael Pollan, author of the bestselling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is against the practice, because of the very uniformity of quality cloning advocates are after. He calls such uniformity a “monoculture,” explaining in a recent San Francisco Chronicle piece, “wherever you have a monoculture, it’s exquisitely vulnerable to all kinds of shocks, in this case disease. To keep a paddock full of genetically identical animals healthy would take more drugs.” More antibiotics that would trickle their way into our own bodies, reducing their antibiotic effectiveness for treating human disease, and increasing antibiotic resistance in common germs already omnipresent in our food supply (anybody remember the Taco Bell debacle of ‘06?) 

The Humane Society of the United States believes the FDA should ban sales of food from a supply chain containing cloned farm animals, citing “serious concerns about the health and welfare of cloned animals.” Carol Tucker Foreman, Food Policy Director of the Consumer Federation of America, agrees. She says the FDA has ignored outright studies that show more cloned animals die or are deformed than those conceived more traditionally. Foreman also thinks cloning doesn’t make economic sense. Take the hypothetical example of a cow, cloned because of a superior ability to produce milk in quantity. According to Foreman, the U.S. government is already buying surplus milk from American dairy farmers, because U.S. farmers are producing more milk than Americans can drink. “Since 1999, dairy support programs have cost taxpayers over $5 billion,” said Foreman. Andrew Kimbrell at the Center for Food Safety puts it more strongly, saying “this administration has not been paying attention to food safety. So this is like a Katrina on your plate.”

One thing that is clear is that this debate is far from resolved. Food from cloned animals may or may not be safe, ethical, or economically viable. Fortunately for us, the FDA is still accepting public comment until April. Look into the matter and then go and let them know what you decide.