Clone Burgers- Minneapolis Star Tribune article
Editorial: Why 'cloneburgers' are a bad way to go
The danger isn't about food safety; it's about food security.
The danger isn't about food safety; it's about food security.
Published: January 16, 2007
If beef is what's for dinner at your house, you undoubtedly know the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is preparing to approve the sale of cloned meat and milk to U.S. consumers.
But a related and potentially more significant announcement probably escaped your notice: Researchers for a United Nations agency reported last month that livestock breeds around the world are disappearing at alarming rates, with as many as one-fifth of cattle, hog, goat, horse and poultry varieties facing extinction. Some 190 breeds have vanished in the last 15 years, and perhaps another 1,500 are already thought to be at risk.
These extinctions are driven by agricultural practices that perpetuate the most profitable breeds and neglect the rest. The results are a shrinking gene pool and, potentially, threats to global food security. The connection to cloning is that this high-tech practice is likely to make matters worse, not better.
Those issues don't really concern the FDA, whose OK for cloned animal products will be based on their safety for human health, a conclusion based in turn on tests showing that meat and milk from clones are identical to those from animals born naturally. But they ought to concern Congress -- and they ought to prompt consumers to think more broadly about how their food is produced.
For American consumers, at least, the advancing globalization and industrialization of agriculture have made many foods plentiful, cheap and available in every season. But there have been tradeoffs, too, perhaps the most noticeable being the increasing flavorlessness of mass-produced chicken, beef, pork and salmon.
Among some shoppers there is growing awareness that factory-like livestock operations produce animals in conditions ranging from misery to torture, while promoting the extinction of small-scale farming and farm-dependent rural communities. But most find it easy to look the other way.
When biotech food issues occasionally make the headlines, it is nearly always for a wrong reason. The big risk posed by genetically engineered crops isn't that they'll poison people, it's that they may transfer their new traits to other plants, with catastrophic consequences. The problem with irradiation isn't that consumers will get radiation poisoning, it's that signs of declining freshness are masked.
And the big problem with the coming use of cloned livestock on production scales is not that "cloneburgers" will be dangerous to human health, nor even the uncomfortable reality that animals produced this way are much likelier to be defective at birth.
It's that this way of engineering foods, like so many previous production-oriented manipulations, will continue to narrow the diversity of food sources and thereby enlarge their vulnerability to disease, pests or other causes of collapse. Such is the unavoidable high price of cheap food.
But a related and potentially more significant announcement probably escaped your notice: Researchers for a United Nations agency reported last month that livestock breeds around the world are disappearing at alarming rates, with as many as one-fifth of cattle, hog, goat, horse and poultry varieties facing extinction. Some 190 breeds have vanished in the last 15 years, and perhaps another 1,500 are already thought to be at risk.
These extinctions are driven by agricultural practices that perpetuate the most profitable breeds and neglect the rest. The results are a shrinking gene pool and, potentially, threats to global food security. The connection to cloning is that this high-tech practice is likely to make matters worse, not better.
Those issues don't really concern the FDA, whose OK for cloned animal products will be based on their safety for human health, a conclusion based in turn on tests showing that meat and milk from clones are identical to those from animals born naturally. But they ought to concern Congress -- and they ought to prompt consumers to think more broadly about how their food is produced.
For American consumers, at least, the advancing globalization and industrialization of agriculture have made many foods plentiful, cheap and available in every season. But there have been tradeoffs, too, perhaps the most noticeable being the increasing flavorlessness of mass-produced chicken, beef, pork and salmon.
Among some shoppers there is growing awareness that factory-like livestock operations produce animals in conditions ranging from misery to torture, while promoting the extinction of small-scale farming and farm-dependent rural communities. But most find it easy to look the other way.
When biotech food issues occasionally make the headlines, it is nearly always for a wrong reason. The big risk posed by genetically engineered crops isn't that they'll poison people, it's that they may transfer their new traits to other plants, with catastrophic consequences. The problem with irradiation isn't that consumers will get radiation poisoning, it's that signs of declining freshness are masked.
And the big problem with the coming use of cloned livestock on production scales is not that "cloneburgers" will be dangerous to human health, nor even the uncomfortable reality that animals produced this way are much likelier to be defective at birth.
It's that this way of engineering foods, like so many previous production-oriented manipulations, will continue to narrow the diversity of food sources and thereby enlarge their vulnerability to disease, pests or other causes of collapse. Such is the unavoidable high price of cheap food.
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