Food Inc.

**DSM4Life** · 05-16-2010, 08:25 PM

Has anyone watched this movie yet ? Man, i don't even want to eat meat anymore. On top of that now they want to sell us cloned meat without labeling it so we won't even have a choice !

http://www.slashfood.com/2010/05/14/...-s-for-dinner/

**DSM4Life** · 05-16-2010, 08:26 PM

Call it Showdown at the Cloned Cow Corral. The European Union is split on whether cloned animals and their offspring should be allowed into the food supply of that continent.

News organizations across the pond report that two of the EU's governing arms say yes, one has said no -- twice -- and is likely to vote a final "no" in July, which will send the whole thing into a reconciliation process.

The irony here is that while the EU debates, meat and milk (only a very small amount, granted) from the offspring of cloned animals probably already is in the U.S. food supply -- and you have no way of knowing whether you're eating or drinking it.

Here's the deal: In January 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, after years of study, said it found no inherent safety problems with meat or milk from cow, goat or pig clones or their offspring. (The FDA didn't have enough information to weigh in on sheep.) It also lifted a long-standing voluntary moratorium on putting such meat and milk on the market while it studied clones.

Around the same time, the European Food Safety Authority also said there didn't seem to be safety concerns, but worried about the effect of cloning on animals. Adverse health impacts have been reported in cloned animals and their host mothers, and a lot of clones don't survive.

The same day as the FDA announcement, the U.S. Department of Agriculture chimed in, saying it needed to look at marketing and labeling issues and requested a continuation of the voluntary moratorium on marketing milk and meat from clones, but not on products from their offspring.

So it's widely thought that more than two years later, some of that meat and milk from the offspring of cloned animals (cows in particular) is entering the market. With the change of administration, the USDA has taken no further action.

To be clear, the odds of meat from the actual clones ever landing on your dinner plate are remote. Clones are hugely expensive to develop and their purpose really is to produce a superior animal to use for breeding. But after their breeding life is over, they could become hamburger or dog food.

"The challenge becomes the offspring," said Jaydee Hanson, a policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety. Clones' offspring are produced the old-fashioned way – or the old-fashioned way in the meat industry, which is usually artificial insemination. He said he's identified six sellers of cloned bull semen.

Hanson said studies simply have been too small and too short to accurately evaluate how successive generations from clones will hold up and whether they are safe to eat. "You have a new technology that really is untested," he said. "You don't know what's going to crop up. They really should be looking at four, five, six generations."

Objections to cloned animal products also focus on animal ethics. In 2008 the Center for Science in the Public Interest called on Congress to look at "the animal-welfare, ethical, and environmental implications of cloning."

Greg Jaffe, director of CSPI's biotechnology project, said the main reason people use clones is to develop superior genetics they can take into the next generations. And that, he said, is the core of another big concern: "That it's first step to genetically engineered animals."

A recent report by Testbiotech prepared for a German member of the European Parliament also expressed concern about the animal ethics of cloning, but went further, questioning whether milk or meat from cloned animals or their offspring might pose risks to consumers.

Hanson said the old belief that if animal looks healthy it probably is just won't work in the world of cloning. "Just because an animal can walk into the slaughterhouse," he said, "it may not be healthy to eat."

Read more: http://www.slashfood.com/2010/05/14/...#ixzz0o9LTZ0L3

**Igifuno** · 05-16-2010, 08:39 PM

I don't know if I want to read more.. and I definetely don't want to watch the trailer. I heard the same feedback from someone else who watched it to and the last thing I need is for meat to gross me out.

**C-MaN** · 05-16-2010, 08:56 PM

The movie opened my eyes to say the least.

**dec11** · 05-16-2010, 09:00 PM

so many meats on the shelves are rubbish these days, big chains like tesco etc sell water /sugar pumped tasteless crap, i mite start my own farm.............