ViaGen in the News
Frankenfood? Not quite.
Washington Post
February 16, 2007
EVER SINCE the Food and Drug Administration officially vouched for the safety of food derived from cloned animals last month, Americans have given themselves a long and unnecessary national stomachache. Citing concerns over everything from safety to ethics, many of them told pollsters that they are apprehensive about milk and meat from clones entering supermarkets. Members of Congress are preparing to push legislation requiring food from clones and their progeny to be labeled as such. And, The Post’s Rick Weiss reported recently, a new controversy is brewing over whether food providers can label products from the offspring of cloned animals as “organic,” even if ranchers follow federal criteria for such labels.
All of which is to say that there is a lot of misunderstanding about the issue of cloning livestock for food production. One of the most common — and commonly exploited — misconceptions is that once the meat and milk industries begin selling food from clones and their offspring, animal products from clones will flood supermarkets. In fact, cloning animals is very expensive; ranchers would not clone an animal only to slaughter it. Instead, ranchers will clone animals with desirable traits, such as leaner meat, and breed the resulting genetic copies with other animals, bettering herds over the course of generations.
The process is almost identical to time-tested methods of animal husbandry, and it is very similar to modern crop breeding. The result for consumers is consistently better meat and other animal products from the progeny of clones, which experts agree are safe to eat, not from clones themselves, which are also safe but which contain subtle genetic differences from parent animals that anti-cloning activists exploit to stoke public outcry. High-quality animal products will probably also become more abundant and, therefore, cheaper.
As the debate over cloned food intensifies — expect a battle involving the cloning industry, anti-cloning advocates, the FDA and Congress this year — it is important for the public not to overestimate the differences between cloning livestock for the purpose of breeding and what American ranchers and breeders already do to better their flocks and herds. The facts are less threatening than many Americans realize.