FDA Set To Approve Products from Cloned Cows

phantomlord writes "The FDA is currently set to allow beef and milk from cloned animals onto the market. Further, the products will likely not be branded as such and there is no way to know if we're currently consuming products from cloned animals." From the article: "Farmers and companies that have been growing cloned barnyard animals from single cells in anticipation of a lucrative market say cloning will bring consumers a level of consistency and quality impossible to attain with conventional breeding, making perfectly marbled beef and reliably lean and tasty pork the norm on grocery shelves. But groups opposed to the new technology, including a coalition of powerful food companies concerned that the public will reject Dolly-the-Lamb chops and clonal cream in their coffee, have not given up."

Re:Food

[Cadallin]

"I don't see how a naturally born animal will have health benefits over and above a clone."

This is the statement I take issue with. I'm not exactly sure how far we've come since then but dolly died young of progressive lung disease, and the articles I can find suggest that other cloned animals since are not particularly healthy, and that the process is far, far less efficient than simply breeding animals. By which I mean it often takes dozens of attempts to produce a single viable embryo.

Given this information I'd guess that clones would not be a good way of producing animals identical to high quality stock at all.

Re:I'm excited.

[pubjames]

Your rant makes me think you probably have lots of arguments with your wife about this...

Re:Really REALLY excited.

[mpapet]

More supply means lower prices. Lower prices means more business opportunities.

You mistakenly believe that the market for cattle operates efficiently. There is no reason to believe that the market for cattle would operate any differently than, say the market for desktop computer operating systems. It's exposed to the same amount of legislative influence, graft and corruption required to remain in a market that any other market for goods or services. Another example was the de-regulated power industry that California used for a while. Where was the greater supply of energy at lower prices promised? ...which means a stronger economic outlook for those who can't afford the high barrier to entry created by the high cost to breed cattle.

Like most barriers to entry, they are legislated to address two needs:
1. Public perception that "something must be done!"
This is why your food supply is one of the safest in the world. Do you want more e-coli in your food supply or less?
2. Protection from competition.
This is why quickie-mart capitalism exists. It fulfills the rhetorical need to justify absurd policies.

I doubt there is any opportunity to look at the issue objectively because like most quickie-mart economic believers, it's a belief that has it's own self-satisfying logic to it. No amount of objective analysis of how a market actually works versus your imagined and largely academic concept of how it -should- work will change your postion.

Aged cancerous ridden beef

[Anonymous Coward]

In Australia I worked on cattle stations for most of my early life. One of the things I learnt is that fast food franchises are not the most fussy purchasers of beef. They tend to purchase very low grade beef. This includes bulls with broken penises, cancer eyes, destructive cysts and other cancers (cancer eye being one of the most prevelant in Australia) and cows who have long since reached their potential of reproducing (dry or otherwise). If you ever smell an animal with cancer you'll never look at eating a hamburger again, but hey, I still love prime quality beef.

I honestly think that if this trend could be changed by making beef cheaper through cloning, the percieved health risks would be minimal compared to the beef currently being sold in lower grades.

Re:I'm excited.

[perrin]

I am usually impressed by feats of intelligence. But for once, I must say that I am duly impressed by idiocy. I thought the post was satire at first. But then, of course, requiring people to phone the factory for every product they want to buy to ask what it contains and hope for someone clueful to tell you something truthful, just makes sense if you will just, I don't know, stand on your head and sing 'lalalalalala' at the same time.

I do not really know how labelling works in the US, but it works fine over here in Old Europe.

Re:More food??

[Anonymous Coward]

Heaven forbid the technology that may one day eliminate global starvation is immoral to a few people!

You are confused. The technology to eliminater global starvation is decades old. Distribution and politics are all that have prevented it being applied. Cloning has nothing to do with it; in fact cloning will be used to spread it by locking farmers into sterile livestock which they have to replace from the "manufacturer". This lockin will ensure big profits and keep the market safe for the cloners. In the long run, this will mean more starvation as poorer farmers go to the wall in difficult times. That is immoral and it is the intended application of this technology which has, in fact, no other application or demand.

Re:Big deal?

[crosstalk]

I know this is not the total point of your comment, but usually the mother and the twins suffer. Most times the mothers goes into keotosis, and then suffers a distended abomasum(then requiring surgery to fix) many times the twins are underweight are have to be pulled(there was significant talk in the Vet community about aborting twins if found as soon as possible(like during the pregnancy checking time frame) The way this is done at 30 days is you sometimes can feel if there are twins because the econmic repercusions were worse than having to abort and recycle the cow(and recycle I mean giving shots of uterine/ovarian hormones to cause them to come back into estrous.

Now in relation to your question on what the big deal is, Not to me, clone it, whatever, I personally wait for the days of the food replicator. Now I think as someone else pointed out we need a stock that keeps breading regulalry to keep problems from cropping up from only having one genetic line available.

Re:Food

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody to stop the non-clone cow producers from advertising as such

Yes there is: the government. The same government that prevents organic cattle ranchers from testing their cattle for BSE and advertising the beef as being BSE free. The FDA refuses to allow "BSE Free" labels on beef because of large cattle corporations; ie, it's cheaper for the corporations to bribe FDA officials to prevent others from labelling their beef as free of BSE than it is to test their own beef for BSE before slaughter.

(Posting anonymously because I've already moderated this thread)

Re:I'm excited.

[dada21]

Doesn't matter if you're rich or poor -- the overall numbers is what matters. One rich person spending $600 on a pound of kobe beef doesn't create a market demand in any huge way. 600 poor people spending $1 on low quality beef DOES create demand, and the beef supplier who sells $2/pound beef will try hard to reduce the price to attract those 600 new customers.

Voting with your dollars works every day -- look at items that have fallen in price even though your voted government destroys the value of the dollar every day with inflationary policies (designed to make the poor more poor and the rich wealthier). Your voted government is the largest cause of poverty in the world -- did you see that 50% of Mexico's stock market is controlled by one family? Sweden's too? http://blog.mises.org/archives/005755.asp [mises.org] That's socialism for you -- as if the poor are helped by it.

Re:I'm excited.

[QMO]

Did you know that referencing mises.org decreases the credibility of your post. (On second thought, maybe that was your intention.)

Re:I'm excited.

[rhombic]

You should pay more attention, this one has consequences. Cholesterol is not a trans fat, BTW (it's actually not a fat at all; it's a lipid but not a fat.) Personal opinion plays no role, there's a perfectly good chemical definition on whether something is a trans fat or not.

Any unsaturated fatty acid produced naturally in a foodstuff has all cis double bonds. We have enzymes that deal perfectly well with these unsaturated fats. When polyunsaturated fats are partially hydrogenated through chemical means, some of the bonds isomerize to trans rather than cis. We have no enzymes to deal with a trans bond in a fatty acid, so they get treated in some funky ways. One of the impacts is that they appear to cause higher cholesterol, and appear to be much worse for you than even fully saturated fats like lard. Of course, any foodstuff that has less than 1g of trans fat per serving, even if they have 0.99g per serving, can label themselves as "0g trans fat". This stuff is bad for you on the mg scale, and should be labeled like cholsterol on mg's rather than grams, but that's what money will buy ya from the FDA. For a good review, see Zaloga et al, "Trans fatty acids and coronary heart disease", Nutr Clin Pract. 2006 Oct;21(5):505-12.

What do these have to do w/ GM food? Nothing at all ;). I think the analogy is that for years, margarine (which is positively loaded with trans fatty acids) was presented as the healthful alternative to butter. Now it appears that it's much worse for you than butter. Without enough study to understand the real biology of what's going on, jumping to the conclusion that something newly made is good for you is unjustified. FWIW, I have nothing at all against GM foods, or for that matter cloned animals, which aren't necessarily GM'd anyway. Jumping to the conclusion that something new is bad is unjustified, but failing to study new foodstuffs for potential risks and then being willing to drop bad ideas is important too.

RecklessWanderer: please read

[giafly]

I definitely have no interest in a slow [nfbofalabama.org] painful [podiatrynetwork.com] death [nfbofalabama.org]

Then I suggest you avoid doing things likely to cause diabetes, or make it worse [bupa.co.uk], which unfortunately means being careful what you eat.

BTW I think my second link answers why they didn't say what you were examining your feet for.

Re:this is the opposite of GM

[maxume]

The calcium carbonate(cement) is an antacid; the corn gives them mad indigestion.

Re:More food??

[An Onerous Coward]

Global starvation isn't a result of our growing our cows inefficiently. It's a result of growing our cows at all. It takes 5-10 calories of grain to produce one calorie of meat. If you care about starving people, rather than about scoring points against environmentalists, then you shouldn't eat meat and you shouldn't go back for seconds. But I don't get the feeling that you care much for the whole "live simply so that others may simply live" lifestyle. You strike me as more of an SUV kind of guy.

Re:If you don't want to eat cloned food...

[dodongo]

Your implicit suggestion that I misrepresented the article is right-on. Mea culpa.

I don't know why, but I do actually have a strong psychological distinction between grafting in flora and cloning in fauna. Maybe it's the hundreds of years of history the former technique has behind it. So you may scoff at my distinction, and well, that's fine. :)

Re:Consistency

[thebaron2]

The pathogens that you need to worry about when you're talking beef and pork will be no more likely to occur no matter where the beef comes from.

The biggest chance that you have for contamination occuring takes place when raw product, already chopped/sliced/ground is delivered to manufacturing plants. From that point on, most meat is treated as though it were already contaminated. What I mean by that is that no matter how "safe" you "know" your raw material is, you must still meet certain USDA and FSIS (Food Safety and Inspection Service) "kill standards" when meat is processed.

Whether you're talking regular, home grown cattle or cloned cattle, all meat must be cooked to AT LEAST 160 degrees Fahrenheit internal temperature in order to kill any possible pathogens. In addition to that, most meat is treated with anti-microbial agents or even "zapped" with irradiation technologies to achieve at least a 6-8 Log reduction in pathogen counts at some point in the processing cycle, depending on which technology you use.

Furthermore, meat products are required by law to achieve a certain Water Activity level before they can be sold on the market. The Water Activity is a measure of the potential water energy available in a product that would sustain microbial growth after processing and packaging. Beef Jerky, for example, MUST attain a Water Activity level of .85 or below, with most Inspectors and regulatory agents demanding Water Activity of .80 or below. At these levels, it is impossible to meat pathogens to grow, and it doesn't matter if the meat is "au natural" or clones.

Safety is not an issue here - what surprises me the most is that there won't be package labeling requirements if you use cloned animals. Labeling requirements are so strict as it is, that I can't believe that new requirements won't pop up and get forced on the industry - which, IMO, would be a good thing.