Cloned beef hash

Throughout most of this decade, the worst kept secret in American government was that the US Food and Drug Administration was preparing to approve meat from cloned livestock for human consumption. Journalists have been writing stories about this for years. And when the government finally took that fateful step in midJanuary, it triggered a flood of news coverage. Journalists couldn’t decide whether to spin this as another step towards a Brave New World of technology, or simply as an inevitable — even trivial — addition to the technologies we use to breed animals for human consumption. The struggle ultimately ended up being over how to accommodate the fears and handwringing of people who are afraid of cloned animals but can’t articulate much of a rationale, beyond a deep distrust of technology. US Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland, probably stated this “yuck factor” most clearly in a quote that got good play: “Just because something was created in a lab doesn’t mean we should have to eat it,” she said, calling the FDA’s decision “reckless”. Looked at the issue one way, it’s not bad counsel from a senator whose state is home to scientific institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, John Hopkins University and J. Craig Venter’s enterprises, to name a few notable labs with largely inedible products. Looked at another way, the quote is curiously anti-science. But the word ‘cloning’ seems to release all parties from strict reason. “I’m sure the science is fine today, and the government is making the right decision. But how many times has science come up with a different answer 20 years later?” dairy executive Bob Renaut asked in the Chicago Tribune a few days before the FDA went public with its decision. An editorial writer at the East Lansing State News voiced a less than comforting response to this kind of visceral reaction to cloned animals. “Eating something from a clone? That seems so... unnatural,” the editorial said. “But look at some of the things we already eat — hormonefed livestock, genetically altered fruit and vegetables and synthetic foods. Science is always affecting the food we eat daily.” The London Times put it more palatably: “Meddling with food... is the essence of agriculture.” And the Los Angeles Times noted that: “the livestock industry has a long record of using a variety of reproduction technologies to improve the quality of its herds. Breeders began using artificial insemination in the 1960s. Then they moved on to more sophisticated techniques like in vitro fertilization and embryo splitting, which turns a single genetically desirable animal into twins.” In other words, what’s the beef with cloning? FDA official Stephen Sundlof told the New York Times, “It is beyond our imagination to even have a theory for why the food is unsafe.” Another source in that article pointed out that the technology should appeal to an American public sold on the homogenization of our food supply. “When you buy a box of Cheerios in New York and one in Champaign, Illinois, you know they are going to be the same,” Jon Fisher, president and owner of Prairie State Semen in Illinois told the Times. “By shortening the genetic pool using clones, you can do a similar thing.” American scepticism of using clones as breeding stock touched only lightly on an issue that Europeans focused much more closely upon. Cloning raises ethical questions because it produces more sickly animals in the process, so there are issues of animal welfare. “It’s a technology that has arisen out of a huge burden of animal suffering and that is still going on,” Joyce D’Silva, of Compassion in World Farming, told the Guardian. “It looks like it is going to be used to produce the most highly productive animals — the cows that produce most milk, the pigs with