It's getting to be old news now, but it bears repeating: The things you eat
are not what you think they are. Carnivorous or Vegan, your rice and beans and fish and soy are warped well beyond the simple assurances that packaging provides...
"After four years of deliberation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced today that meat from cloned animals and their offspring is safe to eat.
But despite public unease and lingering scientific uncertainty, the FDA won’t require such meat to be labeled or tracked.
Food producers say they’re not about to put cloned meat on American dinner plates, as the procedure is too expensive and inefficient, and a third of U.S. adults say they won’t eat cloned meat regardless of its approval. Instead, farmers will purchase cloned animals to serve as breeding stock for their entire herds.
People tend to feel less repulsed at eating the offspring, so it’s clone descendants that we’ll eat — though we probably won’t know for sure. The FDA says clone-derived products don’t need to be labeled."
-Wired Science
This is the cut-and-paste answer that Monsanto gives, of course. And why would it differ? Legislation rarely even bothers to change the wording of the agendas handed to them by their milk-teat lobbyists, their only true constituency.
Of course it's even easier now with the new
"Food Safety" Czar being a
Monsanto inside man, lobbyist and executive."Some might ask what the harm would be in requiring the labeling of products. U.S. labeling laws are based on health and safety. Requiring labeling for ingredients that don’t pose a health issue would undermine both our labeling laws and consumer confidence. Ensuring that such labeling is accurate would also put a huge burden on regulatory agencies...The law allows for voluntary labeling so long as the information is accurate, truthful and avoids misleading consumers about the food...
Mandatory labeling of food containing GM ingredients might seem like a no-brainer. However, once you consider the facts, it becomes clear there is no sense in mandatory GMO labeling."
-Monsanto Website
This is in spite the fact that the
differences between cloned and "natural" specimens are many and obvious. For therapeutic purposes, cloned embryos only need to be sustained for a few days, until they’re old enough to be harvested for stem cells.
Carrying them to birth adds orders of magnitude more room for error: that’s why so few implanted cloned embryos are actually born, and why so many of those end up dying young. Dolly, for example, lasted just six years before dying from a progressive lung disease. Cloned pigs have a nasty habit of dropping dead from heart attacks. Cloned cows sometimes die shortly after birth – and those are the lucky ones. Here’s how the Washington Post’s Rick Weiss described the outtakes of livestock clones intended for our dinner tables:
Many are monstrously overweight — several times their normal size — and filled with fluids to the point of looking like they’re about to burst. Others are born with normal bodies but big, hideous, so-called ‘bull heads.’ Others look okay on the outside but have peculiar abnormalities of the heart, lungs or other organs — including livers that are mysteriously filled with fat — or defective thymus glands that blunt normal development of the animals’ immune systems.
Rob Riggle and The Natural Life Cycle of Steaks.
Exotic, Kinky, Full of Science"...While the success of cloned meat ultimately depends on non-vegetarians, the final product is likely to be superior in quality to the ground meat which is currently on the market, according to Matheny, who is a vegetarian. “This is meat that has been pulled from the animal with a vacuum tube, and then whipped into a slurry which then has a binder, textures and seasoning added to it,” he explained."
-Taking a
Moral Stand for Tasteless AbominationAnd then there was the recent series of successful
primate clonings, until now thought too complicated to yet perform, and the production of
human-animal genetic "Chimera" embryo, like this
cute little guy, a sheep with fifteen percent human DNA. Wonder what he tastes like? Wonder if it's familiar?
