Clone-Generated Milk, Meat May Be Approved

Clone-Generated Milk, Meat May Be Approved
Favorable FDA Ruling Seen as Imminent

By Justin Gillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 6, 2005; Page A01

The Food and Drug Administration is expected to rule soon that milk from cloned animals and meat from their offspring are safe to eat, raising the question of whether Americans are ready to welcome one of modern biology's most controversial achievements to the dinner table.

Hundreds of cloned pigs, cows and other animals are already living on farms around the country, as companies and livestock producers experiment and await a decision from the FDA.



Elvis is one of two calves cloned by Austin-based ViaGen Inc. (By Carol Guzy -- The Washington Post)

The agricultural industry has observed a voluntary FDA moratorium on using the products of clones, but it has recently become clear that a few offspring of cloned pigs and cows are already trickling into the food supply. Many in agriculture believe such genetic copies are the next logical step in improving the nation's livestock.

Consumer groups counter that many Americans are likely to be revolted by the idea of serving clone milk to their children or tossing meat from the progeny of clones onto the backyard grill. This "yuck factor," as it's often called, has come to light repeatedly in public-opinion surveys. Asked earlier this year in a poll by the International Food Information Council whether they'd willingly buy meat, milk and eggs that come from clones if the FDA declared them to be safe, 63 percent of consumers said no.


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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/05/AR2005100502074.html

They keep trying don't they, baskards.

Since our government is determined to screw everything up.

Or...try growing your own food, if you have time, resources, etc. (vegetables, of course....meat is a different story)

Very good stuff there... and good prices.

Time for another letter to my elected officials!

...so, you could potentially get a cloned heir on an organic farm. I would like to think that no organic farm would want one, but what if they don't know.

What we need is someone to track these animals and make public where they go. I think we have the right to know where our food comes from. I don't know who would do that - god knows we couldn't trust any govt agency - but if that's not done I'm going to wonder about any dairy or meat!

Inquiring minds want to know!

And any other authority figure. If the gubmint says that they're kids won't develop an extra set of testicles in utero if mom drinks cloned cows' milk, that's good enough for them.

No hormones, no slop or genetically altered feed. Just fat happy local cows and a milkman that delivers. Just had a great portabello mushroom Garden Burger for dinner... I'm just about thru with meat of any kind, and commercially produced dairy products. I only eat chicken and turkey now, and that is not too often any more. They're killing us with this shit!

This is messing around with Mother Nature ... don't think good things will come out of this. Seems so cruel to me. Totally disregard for animals. Because of so much cruelty going on with animals for profits,and they also are putting shit in them, etc. I turned into vegetarian, working on to be a vegan.

I have no problem with this, especially compared to the problem I have with the hormones they pump everything up with. I swear that stuff doesn't digest right and creates problems all over the place.

Clone burgers
Clone dogs
T-bone clone
cloneballs

Let each person decide for themselves whether they wish to consume such foods. There will be plenty who don't.

Peace.

They want to force feed us whatever the hell they want, and keep us in the dark about what we're putting in our mouths. THAT's THE POINT!

No one is going to force that stuff down my gullet, I can assure you.

Notice again in my original post my whole point was that as long as food producers are required to label clone/GM foods as such, then those who want them can have them, and those who don't can avoid them.

I have no interest in telling other people what to eat, and I have no interest in other people telling me what to eat.

Peace.

away with those labels entirely. They have already been pretty successful in this regard, and will likely continue to push for a more ambiguous labeling regarding GM, organic, and...egads!...cloned foods. They know that those distinctions will kill their market.

...and they won't label clone product either. You'll eat whatever shit the agrocorp decides to feed you, and you won't be able to read anything about it on a label. At least here in the US, there's no labelling.

Where did you get the idea it's "required" to label GM food?

That's my whole point. We should be working to ensure full and accurate labeling, so that people can make their own decisions. However, we should not be working to force our eating preferences on all people. As I said previously, no one is going to tell me what I can or cannot eat, and I won't try to do it to others, either.

Peace.

There have been several instances where foods that were not labeled as being made from GM products were proven to be GM. Corn chips and cattle feed made from the Starlink corn is coming to mind.

It was a fight bush won. A woman on his first cabinet that also worked for Monsanto is the one who led it.

We should be working to enact labeling requirements, not bans, so that each person can make their own choice.

Peace.

cells of baby clones are as old as the animals they come from, and because of a number of other difficulties that haven't yet been worked out, clones are not the same as the originals, nor are they as healthy as the originals.

I would think that since unhealthy animals might provide unhealthy meat and milk, so it would be both an ethical issue of unhealthy animals, and a health-safety issue, because of the inferior quality of food they might provide.

Except that with cloning there would be no genetic diversity what so ever.

Think of how easily disease or pests could move through and wipe out such a herd.

in our bodies everyday dictated by corporations? This issue needs to be front and center and fought loudly and without compromise.

of cloned products so that consumers won't have the option of deciding whether or not to purchase them . . . the GM industry will want it, and the Congress will no doubt comply (in exchange for some very significant financial contributions) . . .

edited for spelling

maybe it will gross you out to know that they will soon replicate racks of muscle tissue (large petri dishes)----
They'll be replicating the cells via cloning---no animal need die---

But I'm sure that most mindless knuckledraggers would rather see an innocent defenseless animal be hacked apart with no anesthesia--

Yuck factor
?

Isn't the cruel bloody murder of a fellow mammal in itself a
"yuck factor"?
:puke:

Check out the documentary, "the future of food". On the surface this seems fairly innocuous, however it's fair from that.

Right now the monsanto corporation owns the right to several genetically modified seeds.

If farmer A grows any of these seeds, they have to pay monsanto, however, if farmer A lives next to farmer B and farmer B's crops get cross pollinated by farmer A's monsanto seeds, farmer B has to pay monsanto for the use of their seeds.

This means if a bee, fly, butterfly in farmer A's field lands in farmer B's field and pollinates his crops with pollin from farmer A's field, farmer B is liable.

If there is a huge storm, and blows pollin from farmer A's field into farmer B's fields and cross pollinates, farmer B is liable.

Once called "an act of God", no longer applies.

During the hay days of moron reagen, he allowed major corps to patent living organisms that they have developed. This started back in the late 70's. A small company created a bacteria that could eat oil (for clean up in oil spills), the Carter admin, held fast to the law preventing that patents will not apply to living things.

However, heavily lobbied after Carter was out, reagen thought it fine and gave the nod to the FDA and the patent office and chose to disregard over 200 years of constitutional law. Funny how that works.

So fast forward to today. Farmers, traditionally, keep seed, sometimes for decades for their own crops. Several farmers have had to destroy generations of seed because monsanto forced them to via this patent law because they found that the farmers seed had become, either cross pollinated or had monsanto seed in with theirs. This has destroyed several farmers trying to fight this law. So far, monsanto has yet to loose a judgement.

The genetically modified seed will inherently become weaker and weaker over time as mother nature works her magic. That is the basic failure of genetically modified food over the long term.

95% of all seeds that were around in the year 1900 are now extinct, most lost in the last 25 years due to aggressive farming methords by the agracorps, lobbying and forced seed destruction due to cross pollination of their genetically modified brand.

Now on to the beef. Expect more of the same. People will argue, well cows aren't seed. So there won't be any cross pollination. Don't bet on it. There have been several situations were loose herds have intermingled with private herds. Cross pollination. Also, inherently, like stated before, nature has a way of taking it's toll in the long run.

Modified foods may look like anything else but down on the genetic level that are very far from the real thing.

One small example: in a gene sequence a genetically modified food, uses a small piece of an antibody strain as a trigger to determine one from the other. That piece is placed into the sequence of the genetically modified seed. That trigger being an antibody also causes strange and long term effects upon the food. Either more resistant to disease or less resistant. Either way, it causes all sorts of problems down the road. Not to just the food, but to humans. Food allergies have tripled since the early 1980's.

There are volumes out there on all of this.

Eat organic. there is a logic to it. It's not a new wave, earth mother, tree hugging thing, it's about your health and avoiding putting crap in your system, that will in the long run, cause all sorts of problems.

Corn, canola, cotton, and soy are all controlled by monsanto.

The old saying, "you are what you eat" applies, at the current rate, if we keep eating these modified food, we will be more a product of the chemical industry than human. At which point will they start calling us in as infringement upon their patents?

Very informative.

:applause:

Even non-GM crops today are hybrids, and hybrids don't breed true from generation to generation. Before Monsanto and Cargill cornered the market on genetically-engineered corn and soybeans, they cornered the market on hybrid corn and soybeans.

The only farmers that still save seed from previous crops are those who do all-organic or heirloom cropping, a small subset of the US farm population.

"The genetically modified seed will inherently become weaker and weaker over time as mother nature works her magic. That is the basic failure of genetically modified food over the long term."

I'm curious, do you have a link to this claim? I don't see how GM crops would weaken over time; the worst-case scenario is that they'd simply revert back to their non-GM ancestors if the inserted genes were selected against through nature or human decisions. An analogy would be hogs released into the wild centuries ago. They reverted back to their wild-boar heritage.

Other than that, everything you said is pretty much spot-on with regards to Monsanto's monopoly of GM seed technology.

"Even non-GM crops today are hybrids, and hybrids don't breed true from generation to generation. Before Monsanto and Cargill cornered the market on genetically-engineered corn and soybeans, they cornered the market on hybrid corn and soybeans."

True, but they weren't allowed to patent the old hybrids. Cornering a market and not allowing unauthorized use of accidentally cross pollinated seed are two different things.

"The only farmers that still save seed from previous crops are those who do all-organic or heirloom cropping, a small subset of the US farm population."

Actually, seed saving is done by many farmers and not just organic and heirloom crops. I have two friends in Montana that have farms that both save seed. Their family has done so for about the last 60 years. They grow conveniently grown produce. Non-organic, non-heirloom. Just regular stuff.

"The genetically modified seed will inherently become weaker and weaker over time as mother nature works her magic. That is the basic failure of genetically modified food over the long term."

"I'm curious, do you have a link to this claim? I don't see how GM crops would weaken over time; the worst-case scenario is that they'd simply revert back to their non-GM ancestors if the inserted genes were selected against through nature or human decisions. An analogy would be hogs released into the wild centuries ago. They reverted back to their wild-boar heritage."

The example I gave was very basic, but the idea is: the genetically modified seed has been so diluted to protect against a variety of pests, pesticides and herbicides it has, as a genetic strain become weaker, a sort of "Frankenseed". Several dozen gene strains from various other organisms, the least of which is vegetable, have been placed into the seeds genome. No long term studies have been done as to the effect this will have on the general population, they only find out by trial and error upon the population. Sometimes with horrible effects. For example: There was a genetically modified tomato that came out several years ago, the name of which escapes me at the moment, but it promised longer shelf life and better flavor. The longer shelf life was true, but the better flavor didn't fly. However, what was found out after it was out in the public after 3 months, that a 1/3 of people who ate it, where developing various forms of allergic reactions to it. They pulled it.

Another example:Round up safe seed. This has been developed by monsanto. When sprayed with startup, it doesn't die. however, everything around it does. (Round up used by the agracorps have been likened to Agent Orange in it's strength) As a result, because of repeated use of round up, "super weeds" have begun to grow in areas originally resistant. These super weeds in certain areas of the Monsanto crops have overwhelmed the genetically modified crops. This is a similar case, in a way, to using anti-bacterial soap. You kill the original bacteria, but in the process, create super bacteria that has is impervious to the soap. So now Monsanto is faced with developing a new seed that can out live the "super weeds" and the new version of round up. So by the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, what are you really eating? Is it corn or a chemical project?

Also any basic geneticist or farmer will tell you, that if you don't have healthy cross pollinating of your crops, you will over time, have a weakened yield. I understand your analogy about the wild hogs but that's just it, monsanto doesn't want that to happen. What they are in essence trying to do, is keep their seed from cross pollinating. Why? Because otherwise, it becomes very hard for them to control. They want to do all their cross pollinating in the lab. Which to me, defeats the very concept of cross pollination. Randomness and varieties is what makes a crop strong.

"Other than that, everything you said is pretty much spot-on with regards to Monsanto's monopoly of GM seed technology."

monsanto's monopoly of GM is a very recent thing. Within the last 5 years...who has been prez during this time?

In the documentary, they give a long list of the former monsanto executives that now work for bush*. It's scary. Needless to say, they occupy various high positions in the FDA, dept of ag, etc. it's sick.

I'll tell you, up until I saw this doc and then did some follow up reading, I ate regular produce just like everyone else and I thought I was being careful. Not anymore, it may cost more, but I'll eat less and get healthy food instead.

Thanks for the reply.

Cloning is expensive, and is meant to create a genetically pure animal that can then be bred. It's offspring will become the steak of tomorrow.

If Big Money wants it, Big Money will get it.

The yuck factor can be neatly side-stepped by changing the rules on labeling. The clone-sourced milk and meat won't taste any different, and we greedy Americans will wolf it down--as soon as Big Money hides its origins.

so badly? I mean how much worse can you do?

simply letting animals do what animals do - breed.