H.S. For Sunday 112008

Hey folks,

Well, they did it folks, on Tuesday the AP reported this.

Just over a decade after scientists cloned the first animal, the last major barrier to selling meat and milk from clones has fallen: The U.S. government declared this food safe Tuesday.

Now, will people buy it?

I won’t.

Consumer anxiety about cloning is serious enough that several major food companies, including the big dairy producer Dean Foods Co. and Smithfield Foods Inc., say they aren't planning to sell products from cloned animals.

And the industry says most Americans would never eat a cloned animal for sheer economic reasons: At $10,000 to $20,000 per cloned cow — compared with $1,000 for an ordinary steer — they're too valuable. They would be used primarily for breeding, to produce a steady supply of cattle that are particularly tender, for instance, or for prize dairy cows. It would be offspring of clones that consumers would eat.

Do we have a shortage? I do not every remember hearing that. As a matter of fact, some of the Chicken Little Crowd think we have too many animals. Remember this from the NYT back on December 27, 2006?

"When you think about the growth of human population over the last century or so, it is all too easy to imagine it merely as an increase in the number of humans. But as we multiply, so do all the things associated with us, including our livestock. At present, there are about 1.5 billion cattle and domestic buffalo and about 1.7 billion sheep and goats. With pigs and poultry, they form a critical part of our enormous biological footprint upon this planet.

Just how enormous was not really apparent until the publication of a new report, called "Livestock’s Long Shadow," by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Consider these numbers. Global livestock grazing and feed production use "30 percent of the land surface of the planet." Livestock — which consume more food than they yield — also compete directly with humans for water. And the drive to expand grazing land destroys more biologically sensitive terrain, rain forests especially, than anything else.

But what is even more striking, and alarming, is that livestock are responsible for about 18 percent of the global warming effect, more than transportation’s contribution. The culprits are methane — the natural result of bovine digestion — and the nitrogen emitted by manure. Deforestation of grazing land adds to the effect.

There are no easy trade-offs when it comes to global warming — such as cutting back on cattle to make room for cars. The human passion for meat is certainly not about to end anytime soon. As "Livestock’s Long Shadow" makes clear, our health and the health of the planet depend on pushing livestock production in more sustainable directions."

So, should we feel save to assume that they are not FOR this? Back to the AP.

But it will be hard to tell which foods do contain ingredients originating from cloned animals. The Food and Drug Administration ruled that labels won't have to reveal whether the food comes from cloned cows, pigs or goats, or the clones' offspring, because those ingredients are no different than meat or milk from livestock bred the old-fashioned way.

WRONG, and Told you so.

"We found nothing in the food that could potentially be hazardous. The food in every respect is indistinguishable from food from any other animal," FDA food safety chief Dr. Stephen Sundlof said. "It is beyond our imagination to even find a theory that would cause the food to be unsafe."

Then you are an idiot.

Still, the government asked producers to continue a voluntary moratorium on sales of meat or milk from clones for a little longer, for marketing reasons. The Agriculture Department said it needed a transition period to get the safety findings to foreign trade partners and food companies.

"This is about market acceptance," USDA Undersecretary Bruce Knight said, adding that he expected this period to last months.

The two main U.S. cloning companies, Viagen Inc. and Trans Ova Genetics, already have produced more than 600 cloned animals for U.S. breeders, including copies of prize-winning cows and rodeo bulls. They agreed to USDA's call for a continued moratorium Tuesday, but stressed that it applied only to clones themselves, not those animals' conventionally produced offspring, which can begin selling immediately.

The FDA spent six years tracking the safety of cloning, and its decision was long expected, but it came after an emotional fight by opponents. Congress passed legislation last month urging further study of the issue, a call echoed by consumer advocates who also asked that foods from cloned animals be labeled as such.

Their objections aren't just about food safety but also include animal welfare since many attempts at livestock cloning still end in fatal birth defects.

"If you have moral objections to a particular food, or ethical objections to them, FDA's saying, 'Tough, you've got to eat it,'" said Carol Tucker-Foreman of the Consumer Federation of America, who pledged to push for more food producers to shun clone-derived ingredients.

Yup!

"The FDA did not give adequate consideration to the welfare of these animals or their surrogate mothers," said Wayne Pacelle of the Humane Society of the United States.

Or Humans that may eat this unwillingly.

This was a day forecast since Scottish scientists in 1997 introduced the world to Dolly the sheep, the first successfully cloned animal. Ironically, sheep aren't on the list of FDA's approved cloned animals; the agency said there wasn't as much data about their safety as about cows, pigs and goats.

The FDA isn't alone in calling cloned food safe. European regulators last week issued a draft report reaching the same conclusion, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has found no cause for concern.

A lot of people will lose A LOT of money if something WAS found.

By its very definition, a successfully cloned animal should be no different from the original animal whose DNA was used to create it.

Along with what?

Still, FDA isn't surprised by the outcry since it pored over 30,500 comments from the public — many of them negative — before issuing Tuesday's ruling. A September 2006 poll by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that 64 percent of Americans were uncomfortable with animal cloning. And when FDA convened its own focus groups, it found a third of consumers would never eat food from cloned animals, while another third weren't worried and the rest fell somewhere in the middle.

They do not care, it’s, like all Liberal agendas, all about money. They do not CARE about you.

The public should understand that cloning is just another form of breeding, like the artificial insemination that ranchers widely use, Trans Ova President David Faber said.

Wrong.

"Our farmer and rancher clients are pleased, because it provided them with another reproductive tool," he said, pledging to "be a good steward of the technology."

{Laughing} They PLEDGE to be “Good Stewards”?

But cloning technology isn't perfected. Aside from birth defects, Dolly was euthanized in 2003, well short of her normal lifespan, because of a lung disease that raised questions about how cloned animals will age.

Yet, there is no risk to humans. Idiots.

The FDA's report acknowledges that, Currently, it is not possible to draw any conclusions regarding the longevity of livestock clones or possible long-term health consequences for the animal.

OR US!

But the agency concluded that cloned animals that are born healthy are no different than their non-cloned counterparts during their prime food-producing years, and go on to reproduce normally as well. Moreover, it is working with a group of international scientists that will issue guidelines later this year on how to clone, to minimize risk to the animals.

Folks, you buy it, eat it, love it, if you want to. I will not buy it, eat it, or love it. As a matter of fact, I doubt I will buy ANYTHING from ANY of these companies that sell Cloned Products. I do not care what else they sell. They will not get a dime of my money. If they sell it without letting us know, I will look into possible lawsuits.

Sorry, I'm not feeling like being a Ginnie Pig today, tomorrow, or any other day. If you feel like it, please feel free.
Peter

Sources:
AP - FDA says cloned animals safe is food
OPNTalk - Cloned Food. Do You Want To Know?
NYT - Meat and the Planet