Dolly for Dinner?
The FDA approves: "Cloned Meat Safe"
Just a few weeks ago, the Food and Drug Administration affirmed that cloned meat is safe to eat. However, a ban will remain in effect until after input on the issue is collected from the public.
I'm curious to know: Why are people afraid of eating cloned meat? To be be honset, the thought of it turns my own stomach, but I'm not quite sure why. After all, as a recent
webmd article notes, "Cloning is not the same as genetic engineering. No new genetic material is added to the animals. Instead, the animals are exact genetic copies of the animal being cloned." Technically, any kind of twins are clones since they share the same genes. Cattle farmers certainly don't keep twin cows out of the food supply.
I wonder if anxieties about consuming cloned meat has something to do with widespread cultural anxieties about cloning, including fears about scientists "playing God" or intervening into the processes of Nature. Cloned meat is imagined to be "tainted" if not only because of recent public controversies surrounding genetic engineering, cloning and other technologies. Perhaps more generally, people are wary of eating things they have imagined (either rightly or wrongly) as being produced in a lab (a Frankenstein situation?). We want to know where our food comes from and what is in it, but the reality is that our food supply is already plenty "unnatural": chicken pumped with estrogen, genetically modified vegatables, fruit sprayed with pesticides--just a few examples of the other kinds of chemical and biological modifications made to our food, all of which are FDA-approved. (Many European countries have been wary about these kinds of techniques. For example, genetically modified organisms, or GMOs for short, are banned for human consumption in the EU).
Any other thoughts on fears about cloned meat?
(Note: Dolly, the sheep, was the name given to the world's first cloned animal, the first animal, that is, cloned artificially through scientific intervention)
Just a few weeks ago, the Food and Drug Administration affirmed that cloned meat is safe to eat. However, a ban will remain in effect until after input on the issue is collected from the public.
I'm curious to know: Why are people afraid of eating cloned meat? To be be honset, the thought of it turns my own stomach, but I'm not quite sure why. After all, as a recent
webmd article notes, "Cloning is not the same as genetic engineering. No new genetic material is added to the animals. Instead, the animals are exact genetic copies of the animal being cloned." Technically, any kind of twins are clones since they share the same genes. Cattle farmers certainly don't keep twin cows out of the food supply.
I wonder if anxieties about consuming cloned meat has something to do with widespread cultural anxieties about cloning, including fears about scientists "playing God" or intervening into the processes of Nature. Cloned meat is imagined to be "tainted" if not only because of recent public controversies surrounding genetic engineering, cloning and other technologies. Perhaps more generally, people are wary of eating things they have imagined (either rightly or wrongly) as being produced in a lab (a Frankenstein situation?). We want to know where our food comes from and what is in it, but the reality is that our food supply is already plenty "unnatural": chicken pumped with estrogen, genetically modified vegatables, fruit sprayed with pesticides--just a few examples of the other kinds of chemical and biological modifications made to our food, all of which are FDA-approved. (Many European countries have been wary about these kinds of techniques. For example, genetically modified organisms, or GMOs for short, are banned for human consumption in the EU).
Any other thoughts on fears about cloned meat?
(Note: Dolly, the sheep, was the name given to the world's first cloned animal, the first animal, that is, cloned artificially through scientific intervention)
posted by britt rusert at 10:38 PM
1 Comments:
I defintely don't like the idea of eating a cloned animal and I especially don't like the idea that I won't be able to tell what in the meat department came from an original animal or a cloned animal. The process of cloning is too new, in my opinion, to test the saftey of it through human consumption. Something could be seriously wrong with cloned animals and we wouldn't know it until 5 or 10 years down the road when people start contracting a new kind of caner. Call me old fashioned but I think the whole operation needs a tad more research.
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