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Syndicate
Feb
07
| Chewing The Right Thing |
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| Thursday, 07 February 2008 | |
Lisa Sussman, NNN's Natural Mom, isn't happy with cloned beef in the supermarket -- but hey, that doesn't mean cloning couldn't come in handy...
 
Myself? I’m all for cloning!
You’ve probably heard that the clones are here. Well, nearly here. After years of debate, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the thumbs up last month for farmers to put cloned livestock into our food chain. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) retaliated with the very strong message that breeders should keep their cloned foodstuffs off the market indefinitely, but that’s a totally voluntary choice, so, you know, you don’t really have to if you don’t want to – uh, okay?
Meanwhile, the real powers that be – the biotech companies that have invested millions in this brave new technology – claim hey-diddle-diddle, they just want to take the angst every clueless consumer apparently experiences when shopping to put meat on the table. Just think – no more hours wasted in front of the butcher counter wondering: “That steak? No, wait, maybe that one looks a little juicier and more marbled?” By using Xeroxed cattle, goats and pigs, you’d be assured of the exact same mass-produced quality and cut of meat each and every time. Clone appétit!
All right, I’m not a scientist. So I can’t weigh in (at least with any real authority) on the safety issues of what some (okay, me) are calling "frankenfood" or just plain weird. It does seem to me that cloning isn't all that much of a radical departure from techniques already in use in the agri-industry. For instance, in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination allow breeders to accelerate evolution by cherry-picking superior traits in an animal herd — like cattle that have lean but tender beef or dairy cows that are proven milk producers. By reproducing the healthiest, most disease-resistant animals, cloning can minimize the need for antibiotics, growth hormones and other chemicals that can enter the food supply.
But all the same, something tells me all this shifting of our food production from the field to a laboratory is not a good direction to take. Frankly, I’m not all that thrilled about my local farmer playing matchmaker either. The so-called golden olden times is chockablock with examples of monoculture disasters: the Irish potato famine, Dutch elm disease, the boweevil cotton crisis…today, the banana, which has been bred to the point of sterility, is threatened to extinction by mysterious blight called, with scientific exactness, “sudden death.” So if it’s true that history has a bad habit of repeating itself when we don’t learn the lesson the first time, it would appear that the real scientific breakthrough would involve expanding and diversifying the gene pool and not shrinking it.
However, having just simultaneously researched the FDA news, organized playdates for my kids, caught up on my emails and worked out my family’s schedules for the next month, the following occurred to me: Scientists should stop cloning around in the barnyard. The public just isn’t ready for this sort of other meat. But how about Parent Cloning? I personally would be first in line to duplicate myself.
Think about it – we could be in two places at once or just double up on what we need to accomplish – no more worry and stress about how to pick up one child from the soccer practice and the other from boy scouts and not leave work because a project is due. The possibilities are endless. One of me could sit by the fire and catch up on all my reading, another could go to the gym, a third could have some quality time with my husband, a fourth and fifth could share out lap duty with the kids and then I would need one more to put in overtime so I can afford all of these extra mouths to feed. Hmmm, maybe a cloned cow or two wouldn’t be so bad after all.
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