Thursday, December 28, 2006

Cloned Meat and Milk: A little too Gargamel for me!

This Thursday (the 28th of December) the US FDA took a big step towards approving the sale of meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring without special labelling. They found that meat and milk from cloned animals were virtually indistinguishable from normal animals. Now, I am no food scientist. But this all seems to be a terrible mistake for the conventional non-all-natural/organic meat industry. While they will no doubt see financial gain from breeding then cloning super Über-livestock, I can only imagine that such mad scientist techniques will only drive a lot of "on the fencers" over to shopping in specialty/health food stores.
It does surprise me that Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy - BSE (aka Mad Cow Disease) didn't teach the industry any lessons. I am sure that feeding animals ground up dead animals of the same species seemed like a good idea at the time. And I don't remember seeing any special labels telling me which animals ate their own. I am just so glad that I work at a health food restaurant and can buy my family's meat from reliable natural sources. I assume the news cycle will not report on this whole thing that much and no one will notice until an entire generation gets some kind of new super cancer from eating too much DNA from essentially the same animal (or whatever else might go wrong.)
You have to love the fact that there will be no special packaging. This is because they know that sales would be in the toilet if they actually told us what meat is cloned and which isn't. To me it is an unethical trick, and it just further reduces my faith in humanity.

That's just my .000002 cents worth. I'll step down from my soapboxnow.

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