Meat and Milk From Cloning Are Safe?

"Meat and milk from cloning are safe, 2 FDA scientists say. The study, which deems labeling unnecessary, signals the agency's receptiveness to formally approving such food.”

This was a recent headline in the LA Times on December 23^rd, 2006. The report goes on to explain, “A long-awaited study by federal scientists concludes that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring is safe to eat and should be allowed to enter the food supply without any special labeling.” This study is no more than a review of information provided by the cloning industry as pointed out in the LA Times article “Two of the largest studies were provided by commercial clone producers Cyagra Inc. and ViaGen Inc.”

I guess most individuals would be surprised that the FDA relies on the manufacturers of chemicals, and now cloning companies, to show the safety of new additives into our food supply. According to the investigative journalist Randall Fitzgerald in his book The Hundred-Year Lie, quoting Jerry Avorn, a physician with the Harvard Medical School:

“There is a comforting shared myth that by the time the FDA approves a new drug [and apparently cloned meat], the product has been studied exhaustively and determined to be a worthwhile new addition, and that all of its actions in the body, good and bad, are well defined… In fact none of these assumptions is quite correct. The FDA itself does not study any drugs prior to approval, relying on the company that makes the product [cloned meat and dairy in this instance] to generate that information.”

Our government depends on safety data supplied by the drug manufacturers [and the cloning industry] to make its approval decisions. To [Marcia] Angell former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, relying on the drug companies “for unbiased evaluations of their products makes about as much sense as relying on beer companies to teach us about alcoholism.”

I bring this up just to point out the dangerous methods used by the FDA to approve substances in our food supply. Fitzgerald goes on to explain, “Commenting on the public perceptions of objectivity and safety afforded by the FDA, and FDA commissioner, Herbert Lay, made this revealing statement in 1969, which still holds true today: ‘The thing that bugs me is that people think the FDA is protecting them. It isn’t. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it’s doing are as different as night an day.’”

The LA Times article goes on to quote a few of the skeptics “The FDA ‘has been trying to foist this bad science on us for several years,’ said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Food Safety in Washington. ‘When there is so much concern among so many Americans, this is really a rush to judgment.’… Kimbrell, said too few animals had been cloned to conclude that they were safe to eat. He also called for more independent research provided by companies that are not in the cloning business.”

“A study released this month by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that 64% of Americans were uncomfortable with animal cloning and 43% believed food from clones was unsafe.”

The Industry Goes Forward

Despite public concern, companies, with our FDA’s approval, go forward with their profiting schemes and new science. They will get away with it by keeping the public ignorant of the facts. By not labeling cloned meat or GMO foods, our general public can walk on blindly about our food supply, with the myth that the FDA is taking care of us. They have eliminated our right to choose what we eat. If the public knew that most every processed food in America contains some GMO ingredients, we might make the choice not to consume those products. If the FDA requires cloned meat or cloned milk to be labeled, I doubt if the public would choose those products as well. However, we can go about our lives, because “ignorance is bliss”, believing the myth that Big Brother loves his citizens more than the industrial dollars of multinational corporations.

Is this a democracy or is it facism? If the public is concerned about our food supply and our rights as citizens, we need to contact our legislators and the FDA letting them know that we want our food labelled, we want the right to choose. We want our representatives to listen to our voices and to not just go forward with industry agendas depite our concerns. It is time to get active and to end the final stages of corporate take over of our food supply, before it is too late. Our children will never have the freedoms that we enjoy today.

Resources:

LA Times article: Meat and Milk from Cloning are Safe, 2 FDA Scientists Say

The Hundred-Year Lie, by Randall Fitzgerald