Cloned Meat

A wonderful reply from the FSA spokesman on Breakfast this morning. When commenting on the monitoring of cloned beef or milk entering the country, Bill popped in with a remark on how they're relying on the producers to tell them and that therefore there might be many more. The reply - 'Well we don't speculate we use science and evidence'

Damnit we want speculation, wild speculation. If you can't know then there well may be a hundred, or two hundred, or possibly Up to half of all UK beef may be cloned! that's the kind of headlines we want. We being the media of course.

It's interesting that during all this talk over cloned cows in the country with cloned meat and cloned milk entering our food chain that why this might be a problem is being glossed over. Sure in the interests of consumer knowledge we should be informed as to where our products come from so as we can choose for ourselves whether to purchase them or not; but it's not as if any other product is completely honest. I mean take the delightful "Packaged in the UK" great but all the contents come from somewhere else. How about "Assembled in only the best Chinese sweatshops" don't see that on flashy bits of hardware.

Now if this was GM food it'd be different. I'm not one of those Frankenstein food people and I recognise that to an extent GM has been going on in simple breeding and selection, naysayers should think on that next time they pick up an orange carrot. However there's a difference between selected breeding and inserting something that would never be possible to naturally combine.

But this is cloning, studies seem to show that the meat is slightly more fatty, that the animals seem to have more difficulty in being born and when they survive tend to be larger. That's it nothing outside the variation that occurs naturally in animals, particularly ones that have been selectively bred for so long.

Yet despite this we're not getting labels the EU is proposing a straight ban despite the fact that

"no safety concerns have been identified so far with meat produced from cloned animals,"

The ban is in fact being put in place due to concerns over animal welfare, reduction in biodiversity, and ethical considerations. Animal welfare? Are they treating clones differently to others, or is this the tendency for them to be larger? Reduction in biodiversity? Yep I'll go with that, but it's not stopped selectively bred mono-crops from dominating. Ethical concerns? Um what?

But hey the mob, or at least the newspaper headlines that think they represent the mob, has spoken.