FDA Says Cloned Animals Safe for Food

[Capper]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- 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?
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.
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.
"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."

Wired News - AP News

No thank you, I'll eat road kill before I eat cloned meat.

[screwballl]

wouldn't bother me since all the bad stuff and preservatives are added after the fact
I would rather have a required label though....

[oldman_gamer]

Humm....road kill , as in dead skunk in the middle of the road?:sheep:


Road Kill Cafe



Road Kill Cookbook

[Stormcrow]

Meh, its only an animal with the exact same DNA sequence as another, not like cloning would produce a mutant offspring or anything if done right (and it's surprising a simple procedure). The only problem with cloning is the animal inherits the same genetic traits, good and bad, from the host parent. With a bit of conditioning and screening most negative traits can be filtered out. Besides, we are all eating cloned plants anyway already.

[oldman_gamer]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Meh, its only an animal with the exact same DNA sequence as another, not like cloning would produce a mutant offspring or anything if done right (and it's surprising a simple procedure). The only problem with cloning is the animal inherits the same genetic traits, good and bad, from the host parent. With a bit of conditioning and screening most negative traits can be filtered out. Besides, we are all eating cloned plants anyway already.

I grow my own weeds.I mean veggies.:canabis:

[Panda Man]

Eating a cow that popped out of another cow, eating a cow that popped out of a lab.... same difference, they're both cooked the same, right? :P Meh, a required label sounds good to me as well. The big deal is the ethics behind all of this and whatnot.....

[PTRMAN]

Welcome to the 21st Century! Awesome that we CAN clone animals, but not sure why we need to? I guess once they get a prime cow, in this case, they want to duplicate it?

[Panda Man]

One of the big things you have to look at are what the after effects will be. For example, some states are already overpopulated with deer. Cloning deer might throw mother nature too far off balance and we could see some serious problems from the overpopulated deer. Tampering with such delicate systems is nothing to take lightly :\

[PTRMAN]

Agreed, but who would clone deer in an already deer-overpopulated area?

I think we'll only see commercial cloning (i.e. for food) in the near future. Otherwise its just too expensive. Except for all those eccentrics who can't stand the idea of little Fifi passing on...

[Panda Man]

Originally Posted by PTRMAN

Agreed, but who would clone deer in an already deer-overpopulated area?

Well without hunting them for food and cloning them instead, the deer would overpopulate the areas themselves, we wouldn't be releasing them into wild :P

As a side note, this really isn't the greatest example seeing as how hunting only makes up about 6% of all deer deaths anyways, with about 35% dieing from starvation.