ELI SAYEGH
Staff Writer
The next time you order a double-double from In-N-Out Burger, you may literally be getting a double.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has determined that milk and meat from cloned cattle, pigs and goats are safe to eat. With this decision, food producers, markets and restaurants have been given the green light to sell food products from cloned animals.
“While the safety of any food cannot be proven with absolute certainty, consumers should have confidence that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring will be safe,” said Greg Jaffe, the biotechnology director for The Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Jaffe, in a statement from the Center released to Reuters, added, “Just because the technology is safe, it doesn’t mean that as a society there is reason to embrace it.”
Critics argue that the long-term consequences are still unknown.
“It’s a new technology and we don’t think all the science is there,” said Chris Waldrop, director of the Consumer Federation of America’s Food Policy Institute, to CNN. “We don’t have enough information to make a decision.”
The largest obstacle may not be the scientific data. Instead, it may be the American public’s perception of cloning. A recent Pew Research poll showed that more than 64 percent of Americans are uncomfortable with animal cloning and 43 percent say they believe food from cloned animals is unsafe.
Why not label food products from clones and allow consumers to decide what they are comfortable with? Not likely, says the FDA, which decided not to require labeling, on the premise that clones and their offspring are indistinguishable from conventionally bred animals.
“There’s no way for the consumer to know whether they’re getting cloned meat,” said Will Rostov, a senior attorney at the Center for Food Safety, in an interview with Wired News.
There is a common sentiment that “natural” or “organic” foods are inherently healthier than artificially crafted foods. Many see the introduction of cloning as further erosion of the naturalistic, hands-off farming that our grandparents and great-grandparents engaged in.
But cloning is only the latest in a series of artificial procedures that are regularly utilized within the farming industry, including steroids, antibiotics, artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization.
Dr. Rodney Honeycutt is a professor of biology at Pepperdine who teaches courses in animal biology and genetics. Cloning, he explained, has a number of uses — studying the genetics of disease and the functioning of genes, creating genetically modified crops, and more controversially, harvesting stem cells for research.
Honeycutt emphasized that those concerned with animal cloning should remember that “we are eating genetically modified foods every day.”
The upside to cloning in animals and plants, said Honeycutt, is that “[it] can be used in the place of normal breeding to produce individuals possessing desired traits, such as increased muscle mass in cattle or increased corn yield per acre.” The result might be an elite breed of cattle that yields a tastier, tender steak.
All said, there is yet the ethical aspect to consider. The European Union’s Ethics Panel, for instance, recently presented a compelling argument against cloning animals.
They explained that surrogates carrying cloned embryos could suffer and that the clones themselves experienced a high rate of disease and other serious health problems. Worse yet, “about 20 percent of cloned calves do not survive the 24 first hours after birth, and an additional 15 percent die before weaning.”
But the data is limited and the studies are few. Perhaps the only point that carries any weight, as Fred Guterl of Newsweek magazine put it, is that “the milk from a retarded cow is not necessarily any different from the milk from a smarter than average cow.”
In its announcement, however, the FDA said moral and ethical questions lie outside of its legal responsibilities. The decision was made from a purely scientific standpoint, and it is hard to argue with that.
All things considered, should we be concerned?
“Personally, I doubt that cloned plants and animals are any threat to the health of humans. I would be more concerned about chemicals in our food and water supplies,” Honeycutt concluded.
It’s impossible to predict. In all likelihood, cloning animals is a safe practice, because it is theoretically sound. But this is never a fool-proof argument. Consider the example of Vioxx, an FDA-approved arthritis drug that was banned in 2004. Only after five years of mainstream use and 80 million prescriptions, the drug was found to have several potentially fatal side effects.
The bottom line is that health decisions entail vast consequences. There may be unexpected developments along the way – perhaps years or decades later. The introduction of new technology into human society is a grand-scale experiment. If such an experiment goes wrong, however, the costs are great.
If public opinion about cloned products was united among Americans and across the world, then I would see no reason for worry. But it’s a divisive issue and a discomforting notion for many. To date, consumers and industry groups have written more than 30,000 letters to the FDA protesting the decision. Other countries, such as Canada and France, have stated that they are unlikely to follow us.
In the future, cloning animals may become a completely normal part of our food industry, but for the time being, we need to be cautious. The economic and scientific advantages of cloning must be weighed against potentially unforeseen health effects (as unlikely as they may seem) and serious ethical concerns.
Consumers must have the choice of whether or not to partake in the cloned food market. After all, the consumer is a decision-maker at heart, and there is no reason that should change now.
01-24-2008
