European Union Draft Report: 'Cloned Food Appears Safe'
Said a document release Friday by the European Food Safety Agency: “It is very unlikely that any difference exists in terms of food safety between food products originating from clones and their progeny compared with those derived from conventionally bred animals."
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5 Comments:
If there were a difference, then it wouldn't really be a "clone". Man... the anti-"frankenfood" people piss me off greatly.
wunami at 7:24PM on 01/13/08
Of course, if they're cloned, they're identically vulnerable to any given disease which may sweep through a herd/flock, which is already an issue in factory farming, and part of what underlies the heavy use of antibiotics in this industry.
mongoose at 3:32AM on 01/14/08
My issue with cloned and GMO food (animal AND vegetable) comes more from an ethical, natural standpoint than a food safety one. I don't know why it should piss you off so much wunami. I only hope that we are given the option to choose between cloned and non-cloned meat with strict labeling regulations. But what are the chances of that happening?
amber at 9:38AM on 01/14/08
My question: why would you want to clone your herd? The good old fashioned method of selective breeding does enough to ensure consistency and has to be cheaper. mongoose has it right that there are big dumb risks to breeding a monoculture.
GM animals are a whole different issue: one that I would only support if they can make cows that produce their own piperine.
drastic at 2:38PM on 01/14/08
Domestication and selective breeding are natural then? If we are assuming the cutoff for natural is things man does and what would have occured otherwise, then they aren't natural. Wouldn't have happened without human interference. Selective breeding is genetic modification. Just at a less reliable yield. It would be quite hard to only eating things that haven't been messed around with by humans. If that is the only way to be ethical, then we are screwed.
We could of course make a different assumption about the cutoff of what is natural or not. But why would it be cloning? Just because it is new? Selective breeding use to be new. How is cloning different at a base level compared to the many other things that humans do? Some things that humans do are natural and others are not? How do we decide which things? There's probably lots of ways, but let's say the things humans do that also happen in "nature" would be natural. So, taking a dump would be natural. And blogging wouldn't be. So pooping is ethically better than blogging because it is natural by an ethical, natural standpoint. Okay...maybe poop jokes is going to far. How about fighting? Animals fight in nature. We don't have antlers but if I went around headbutting people, most people probably woudln't think that's okay. But I can rant about someone on a blog and most people would be okay with that.
By far, the large majority of life on Earth reproduces by cloning. All the cells in your body were formed by cloning. Cloning the singular cell formed by sexual reproduction. So humans causing or doing cloning would be natural by the standard of things that also happen in nature being natural. Maybe that isn't your standard. Maybe you have a very good argument created logically from a base of reasonable assumptions. Then good for you.
What pisses me off is that many of the "frankenfood" people take a position without thinking about it. Like really thinking about it. I'm willing to say that there are a fair amount of anti-frankenfood people that were simply convinced by someone else using the negatively connotated (as in, frankenstien's monster...being a monster) word "frankenfood". Then they start sprouting whatever information that someone else fed them. Which was probably fed to that person by someone else and so on. And all along the line, none of them really thought hard about it. And I'm not say that YOU specifically did not think hard about it. Maybe you did. I don't know. I don't know you. You hadn't even posted when I said that.
wunami at 8:07PM on 01/14/08