ShareThisBy SUE VORENBERG
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Give Stan Chavez a choice cut of juicy cloned cow meat and he'll munch it on down, he said.
Just don't tell him what it is or where it came from.
"I'd rather not know specifically what I'm eating," said Chavez, 40, wrangling his two kids as he shopped at Keller's Farm Store in Albuquerque, N.M. "I don't see any difference between cloned meat and normal meat _ but if it was pointed out to me, no, I probably wouldn't want to eat it."
Chavez said he has no problem with the Food and Drug Administration's announcement Thursday that most cloned livestock is safe to eat and doesn't need to be separately labeled.
The FDA has studied cloned livestock for more than five years.
Animals are cloned by using a technique called reproductive cloning. In it, scientists transfer genetic material from the cell of an adult animal into an egg that has had the nucleus _ and all its genetic material _ removed. The clone egg is then placed in a female animal and grows like a normal creature.
The result is a replica of the original adult animal.
The meat industry is interested in cloning because it would allow the most choice animals _ the biggest or the best-tasting _ to be reproduced on a larger scale.
Unlabeled cloned meat won't make it to the market until after the FDA takes comment from the public and reviews its decision _ a process that could take months _ but even if it does get final approval, Keller's won't be selling it, said Mike Keller, owner of Keller's Farm Store.
"The cloned meats and even genetically engineered crops and such scare me," Keller said. "I think years down the road, we're going to pay the price for messing with nature."
Overall, cloned food is nothing new. In fact, wine grapes have been cloned for thousands of years, said Art Caplin, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.
"If Americans thought hard about it, we're already eating cloned food," Caplin said. Would he eat a cloned steak or milk from a cloned cow? Absolutely, he said. "There's no evidence that it's unsafe or dangerous or unhealthy."
The bigger issue is that the meat should be labeled. People have a right to know what they're eating, even if the FDA says it's harmless, he said.
Adam Sifre, 23, agrees with that. He said he wouldn't eat cloned meat and worries that unlabeled cloned meat will eventually make it into his kitchen.
"It wasn't brought into this world naturally," said Sifre. "It's a carbon copy. That's just not right."
Introducing cloned cows into cattle populations could also narrow the gene pool and lead to mutations _ or even some new and unpleasant mad-cow-like diseases, said Carol Sandoval, 37, pondering the announcement as she shopped for hams.
"Probably everything over there is bioengineered," Sandoval said, waving her hand at the produce section. "I feel like a human guinea pig. But I don't know what we can do about it."
Mutations are possible, but only in smaller animal populations. Harmful mutations also happen in the cloning process fairly regularly. But mutant animals wouldn't get anywhere near the American dinner plate _ that would be bad business, Caplin said.
"It's true that cloning has produced a number of animals that have ended up deformed or dead," Caplin said. "But the goal of this is to clone the best meat producers in a population, the highest quality meat, things like that."
Elizabeth Cleavall, 32, who is pregnant, said she'd eat cloned meat and drink cloned milk. Morally, ethically, she has no problem with cloning, she said.
"God gave us the gift to even clone in the first place," Cleavall said. "But things like that should be labeled. People who think it's morally wrong and unnatural shouldn't have to buy it."
