US Cattle Cloned from Dead Cows

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Just when you think the lack of U.S. food regulation has reached its inept pinnacle, recent news reports indicate some US cloned cattle have been created from the cells of dead animals. And since the U.S. approved cloning over two years ago, you may have already grilled a cloned steak this summer from beef cells extracted from a dead carcass.

That’s because in 2008, the Food and Drug Administration approved as safe for consumption, meat and milk from cloned animals, and no special “clone” label is required on products from clones or cloned offspring.

Farmers claim it’s only possible to tell that the animal’s meat is of exceptionally high quality by inspecting its carcass. “The animals are hanging on a rail ready to go to the meat counter,” Brady Hicks of the JR Simplot company in Idaho told BBC News.

“We identify carcasses that have certain carcass characteristics that we want, but it’s too late to reproduce the genetics of the animal. But through cloning we can resurrect that animal.”

“These ‘resurrected’ animals are then bred with naturally born cows. The next step is to see if their offspring – whose meat can be sold to consumers in the US – have the same qualities as the grandparent from which the cells were originally taken.”

Scott Simplot, the head of JR Simplot company boasts of his goal to raise the standard of the great American steak. But Whole Foods Market — a pseudo organic food chain — wants nothing to do with Simplot’s great American Franken-beef, and has banned the sale of products of cloning.

Whole Foods global vice-president, Margaret Wittenberg, says even though meat and milk from cloned animals has been allowed to go on sale in the US, most Americans have never heard of it. “A lot of customers in the United States are oblivious of it,” she said.

“You don’t hear about it in the media. And when you do tell people about it they look at you and say ‘you’re kidding! They’re not doing that are they? Why would they?'”

Mark Walton, president of the leading US animal cloning company, ViaGen, says it’s a mistake that cloning is not used by livestock farmers in Europe, and scoffs at the European Parliament’s request to ban it altogether.

“If I were a European farmer and my competitors in the US, China and South America were using the technology, I’d be concerned about losing all access to it,” he said.

But despite the European Parliament’s request for a ban on the sale of foods from cloned animals and their offspring, the New York Times reports that a handful of breeders in Switzerland, Britain and other countries have imported semen and embryos from cloned animals or their progeny from the United States.

European vendors have been operating in stealth, so cloned meat and dairy products are believed to already be on supermarket shelves. The Daily Mail reports more than 100 cows descended from cloned cattle have been born on British farms which has caused alarm about their secret spread into the food system.

Mark Walton believes the use of cloning in agriculture will eventually become the norm – not just in the US but across the world. Walton is right, but only because consumers don’t have a choice. Since meat and milk from cloned animals aren’t required to be labeled in the U.S., consumers have no clue what they’re putting on their dinner plates.

Even European citizens who resolutely oppose genetically modified crops and animal cloning, and whose European Parliament has requested a cloning ban, are forced to eat cloned meat that has surreptitiously entered their food chain. The fact is, we are all prisoners held hostage by corporate food empires who decide what we eat unless we buy locally grown, organic food.

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