Most Popular Beef Cattle in Us
My Big Beef with Cloned Cattle
The meat and milk from cloned animals are rubber to eat and should be allowed for sale, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
And you'll never know, anyway, because the labeling volition be a clone of the labeling used for not-cloned beef. No special labeling is needed, the FDA says in an commodity published in the Jan. 1 effect of Theriogenology and in the full 678-page study posted on the FDA web site last week.
The less we know the better, apparently. Why else would the results of a iv-twelvemonth investigation in cloning safety be announced quietly betwixt Christmas and New Year's?
Cloning dates dorsum hundreds of days
On one level, nosotros've immune cloned beef to penetrate America for years. It's chosen McDonald'south. While not technically cloned, all billion or so of the hamburger patties sold are duplicate from each other. This is our time to come.
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On another level, y'all might have already eaten real cloned beef. Cloning livestock has been going on for five years now, and the FDA merely initiated a voluntary moratorium in 2003 on the commercial auction of the offspring of cloned animals. In this era of censorship and compromised priorities at the CDC, EPA and NASA, the FDA didn't have the teeth to make the sale of cloned brute products illegal.
Cloning advocates are already painting us concerned consumers as Luddites, with minds too feeble to comprehend that cloning is just an extension of animal husbandry practices that have taken place for centuries. This is a natural progression, they say, like feeding herbivorous cattle the footing-up remains of other animals, which somehow brought nearly mad cow illness.
As rubber as cloned mother'southward milk
Are cloned fauna products safety? Probably, but that'due south not the whole issue. Cloned cattle would be a scrap off the old chipped beef, genetically identical to the progenitors. Scientists accept the DNA of a prized balderdash or dairy moo-cow and insert this into a hollowed-out about microscopic cattle egg. An electrical shock, eerily familiar to Frankenstein, induces the egg to abound.
Result one is long-term man condom. While the practice is likely rubber, only a few years accept passed since the dawn of cloning to truly sympathize the touch on this would accept on millions of livestock consumed by hundreds of millions of people.
Issue two is the long-term viability of the food supply. Nature likes diversity; this is why most animals reproduce sexually. A affliction tin can more hands wipe out an entire herd if each animal is genetically identical.
Result three is the appalling secrecy. Consumers have the right to know whether their food product was raised in a matter that is acceptable to them. Of course the biggest producers don't desire the FDA to require special labeling. The majority of consumers are queasy with the idea of cloning animals, as revealed in a contempo poll by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology.
Issue four is the necessity. Why do we need to clone livestock? It'due south because big business, the face up of American farming practices, demands identical products for mass production. And these identical slabs of meat line the meat sections of identical supermarkets from Albuquerque to Yonkers.
Uncertain future
Butchers have almost entirely disappeared from America. Gone is the 24-hour interval of specialty cuts and regional flavors. Instead, four meatpacking companies slaughter and bundle almost 85 percent of all beef in the United States, according to the USDA. Supermarkets just hire a few meat-cutters to trim the nearly finished product.
The biggest meat producers will likely require their suppliers to provide a genetically perfected product, which simply the largest suppliers could beget to do. Once again, the lilliputian guy is marginalized. Already I am unable to buy many of the meat products I grew up with in my Italian neighborhood, like sweetbreads. Small farmers are barred past law from slaughtering their own animals; and the overtaxed slaughterhouses volition just render certain cuts.
Such is the diversity of the American nutrient supply system. Cloning will bring more of the aforementioned. We take until April 2 to complain to the FDA nigh this. And then the FDA will make its final conclusion.
Christopher Wanjek is the writer of the books "Bad Medicine" and "Food At Work." Got a question nigh Bad Medicine? E-mail Wanjek. If it's really bad, he just might reply it in a future cavalcade. Bad Medicine appears each Tuesday on LIveScience.
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Source: https://www.livescience.com/9484-big-beef-cloned-cattle.html
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