By Luke Anderson
We don’t talk about food much here at OhGizmo, and for good reason. I’ve yet to find a piece of food that is considered a gadget (not counting those food-shaped USB drives, they aren’t actually food to begin with). However, I thought that I would bring up the topic somewhat briefly because there has been a recent development in the state of cloned meat.
The FDA has officially announced that cloned beef and dairy are completely safe for human consumption. There are plenty of activists out there that aren’t going to be pleased with this news, but I don’t really see any reason why we shouldn’t do this, so long as it has been deemed safe. I’d eat some cloned beef, what about you guys?
VIA [ Consumerist ]
Sure, no reason not to. Its only a small step from all the current artificial breeding methods in use to cloning. Besides, we will probably never get any cloned goodies on our plates or in our glasses. Its just too expensive to be used that way. Now as a way to propagate superior breeding stock, now we’re talking.
No, I would not eat cloned beef…
…I’m vegan. (Yes, I’m fine with vegetative reproduction (“plant cloning”), so long as there remains diversity in the available species.)
Soylent Green is safe, too. So what? The real problem is a political one. We’re giving more and more control over what we eat into the hands of just a few bio-hightech megacorporations whose only true obligation is finding new ways to more efficiently redistribute YOUR money to THEIR shareholders.
This is a perfect case of big money telling our government to tell us what’s good for us. There are no long term studies on the effects of cloned meat on human bodies. Cloned animals have very different hormone and cellular makeups than traditionally made animals. But not to worry, you won’t know if the meat you’re eating is cloned or not because big agriculture has already told the FDA to tell us that we don’t need to tell the consumer where their meat is from and how it was produced. so enjoy!
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Cloned animals have very different hormone and cellular makeups than traditionally made animals.
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Please provide a reference to a reputable scientific source for this statement. Otherwise, stop scaremongering.
Big Corp (Big Agriculture, et al) are not the only ones with an agenda. Scaremongering naturalist/conservative/fear-of-change/progress-is-bad/I-don’t-understand-so-I’m-against-it groups also have agendas…
I study biotechnology at the Uni of Ghent (the inventors of trangene stuff) so
quote “Cloned animals have very different hormone and cellular makeups than traditionally made animals.”
If hormones levels would be so different and cellular makeups too then the thing wouldn’t be alive. As long as it looks like a cow no huge changes have been made. None the less what’s the point of cloning simple cows? Way to expensive…
And long time studies… As long as hormones comaparible to human hormones are not overproduced no harm can be made, it comes out as poo eather way, transgenic or not, it’ll still be brown and smelly.
And you guys have been injecting your cattle with way to much hormones allready so I don’t see why there is a problem for the american market.
Why are we cloning something that is so abundant. They need to focus on highly endangered animals like the California Condor. Shoot a little cloned embryo into a unfertilized eye and sell the little hatchlings to zoos. Make money and save a species.
Though I may sounds like a tree huggin hippie I would totally eat cloned beef. Where’s the beef!? In my petri dish!
i second the above two comments
After we get cloned cows down we need to move to lab-grown meat.
I would eat cloned beef. I see no problem with it :D.
Although lab-grown meat sounds gross :S
I would imagine that cloning cattle only saves the ‘farmer’ money. Making new cattle the old fashioned way takes time and money. Cows cant simply be put together and told to ‘hump’ and go buck-wild. Most farmers have to have their cattle artificially inseminated. So you gotta pay $$ for the donated jizz, you gotta pay for the guy to go in and gather the creamy substance, and then you have to pay for the other guy to use the giant turkey-baster to put the stuff in. And after all that, you still dont know what youre going to get.
Our meat is tainted already (as noted in the comment above with hormones). This isnt going to change much of anything.
As for the vegan. Do you drink bottled water? Hell, do you drink anything out of a plastic bottle? If so, you might wanna look into the wonderful residues that come off of those containers and are ingested by you. Trust me, cloned cattle is the least of your worries.