Ready for Cloned Food?

The FDA says it's OK...



Yes, the FDA has approved it, and they've supposedly validated a 2006 assessment that claimed that cloned foods are safe. How do they know this? Don't we also know from experience that cloned animals are known to have health problems? See here: In addition to low success rates, cloned animals tend to have more compromised immune function and higher rates of infection, tumor growth, and other disorders. Japanese studies have shown that cloned mice live in poor health and die early. About a third of the cloned calves born alive have died young, and many of them were abnormally large. Many cloned animals have not lived long enough to generate good data about how clones age. Appearing healthy at a young age unfortunately is not a good indicator of long term survival. Clones have been known to die mysteriously. For example, Australia's first cloned sheep appeared healthy and energetic on the day she died, and the results from her autopsy failed to determine a cause of death.

If cloned organisms are known to have such health problems, how can the FDA say that they're safe to eat?

Here we see another problem with leaving Republicans in charge of the executive branch. We have regulatory agencies that don't believe in regulating anything. Not only is it going to be allowed (with a moratorium being asked for, due to "market concerns"), but it won't even require labelling: FDA officials said there is no plan to specifically label food from cloned animals. The agency, they said, lacks legal authority to do that because it has found that food from clones is not different from conventional meat and milk.

Of course, talk of cloning puts me in mind of the movie Blade Runner. Replicants weren't labelled either. You had to figure them out by their lack of empathy.



And speaking of replicants lacking empathy, Mitt Romney won the Michigan Primary last night. He suddenly became aware while he was in Michigan that ordinary people aren't as in love with globalization as venture capitalists are. With the Democratic Primary in Michigan rendered meaningless, the entire night was simply handed to him. John McCain pretty much helped to hand it to him too, telling people with his straight talk that "your jobs probably won't be coming back." But hey, we'll see if we can retrain you. We don't build anything here anymore, and anything that can be done at a computer terminal will be done overseas from now on, but maybe we can retrain you for a McJob at 1/4 of your old paycheck.

Read My Mom in Michigan Has No Hope, by Jay Jonah Cash