Next time you buy a pound of chuck at the supermarket, think about where it comes from. If the FDA approves the sale of cloned meat and milk, you won’t know whether that roast was cut from a cloned cow. Similarly to GMO foods, the FDA has decided it will not label foods as products of cloned animals if cloned meat and milk is approved for sale to the public. But you may have already bought milk from a cloned animal. Despite the FDA’s request not to sell cloned animal products until they are officially approved as safe, milk from cloned cows has already been on the market for some time.
The research on the safety of consuming cloned animals does not appear particularly extensive, at least according to this article. The Center for Food Safety raises other concerns, such as the health of cloned animals and the ethical treatment of animals that are cloned.
I wonder what will happen when the clones are cloned? And the cloned clones are cloned? How will cloning only the most popular breeds affect biodiversity?
Once again, it looks like we’re jumping head first into a powerful, large scale experiment whose ramifications we don’t entirely understand.
Check out the full text of the FDA’s draft proposal, and submit your comments before April 2, 2007.
