Consumer market rejection seems to be the ongoing theme of U.S. food politics in the waning days of Bush's inept Food and Drug Administration. Given FDA's repeated failure to protect our nation's food supply or to respond quickly and appropriately to outbreaks of food-borne illnesses, consumers have turned to food companies and demanded that they now take the lead in safeguarding our nation's food.
Public opposition to milk and meat from clones has caused 20 major food companies, restaurants, dairies, and supermarket chains to refuse to produce, use or sell food from clones. These companies have taken action despite FDA's claims that food from clones and their offspring is safe.
Last January, FDA announced that it would allow clones and their offspring to enter the food supply despite the lack of scientific studies available to prove that clones are safe for human consumption. The FDA won't require any special procedures for tracking and handling food products from clones and their offspring or require product labeling. This unfortunate situation not only deprives people of their right to know the processes used to produce the milk and meat they consume, but it also deprives them of their right to choose or refuse such foods.
U.S. consumers are not alone in their opposition to food from clones. Yesterday, the European Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for an E.U.-wide ban on the use of animal clones and their offspring in food. They also voted to prohibit the import of clones, their offspring, semen, embryos, and milk and meat derived from cloned animals or their offspring. In January, the European Group on Ethics released a report which stated that it didn't see any convincing arguments to justify the use of cloning for food production, particularly given the suffering and health problems surrogates and clones experience.
Imagine a U.S. government agency calling for the prohibition of a food technology, staunchly supported by agribusiness, because it deems the technology "ethically questionable"! That resolution simply would never happen here, but that's exactly what happened in Europe.
In this country, we have neither a standard nor a process for assessing the ethics or cruelty of a given food production technology. That's not surprising given the fact that the U.S. leads the world in unencumbered and unregulated corporate behavior. For the most part, ethical considerations in food production are only taken into account if citizens manage to put them to a vote on a ballot initiative, like Californians did for this November's election. If passed, Proposition 2, the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act, would halt the use of battery cages for laying hens, and crates for veal and pregnant and nursing pigs. Clearly, the FDA and USDA are not prepared to take this type of ethical action, so concerned citizens have no other choice but to put the issue to a vote and force companies to change their production practices through public mandate.
FDA's failure to pursue its primary mission as protector of our nation's food supply is also the reason why food safety, animal welfare, environmental, and consumer groups have decided to take matters into their own hands with respect to clones. This past May, the Center for Food Safety and Friends of the Earth began surveying companies about their position on clones. So far, 20 leading food processors, restaurants, retailers, and dairies have said that they won't produce, use or sell milk or meat products from cloned animals. Action taken by these companies represents a growing industry trend of responding to consumer demands for better food safety, environmental protection, and animal welfare practices in the absence of FDA protections.
The list of companies rejecting clones reads like a page out of "Who's Who" in the food industry: Kraft Foods, General Mills, Gerber/Nestle, Campbell Soup Company, Gossner Foods, Smithfield Foods, Ben & Jerry's, Amy's Kitchen, California Pizza Kitchen, Hain Celestial, PCC Natural Markets, Albertsons, SUPERVALU, Harris Teeter, and Clover-Stornetta, Oberweis, Prairie, Byrne, Plainview, and Cloverland dairies. Nine of these companies also refuse to use ingredients from the offspring of clones, while the other 11 remain silent on the issue. Those industry leaders include: Ben & Jerry's, Amy's Kitchen, Clover-Stornetta, Oberweis Dairy, Prairie Farms Dairy, Plainview Dairy, Gossner Foods, PCC Natural Markets, and Hain Celestial.
Obviously, the struggle to keep food from clones and their offspring out of America's food supply is far from over. Since we can't rely upon FDA to ensure safe food, it's up to all of us to use our consumer power to keep our food and farm animals protected from the use of cloning technology.
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Comments
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MAD MAC Posted 5:15 pm
05 Sep 2008
Yeah, Americans are dying in droves.....
.... from unsafe foods. Hundreds of thousands of people have already died last year because the FDA has failed in its charter to ensure relative safety of the US food supply................
Who are the absolute idiots who write this drivel?
Victory in Pattani
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caniscandida Posted 3:06 am
06 Sep 2008
ethical confusions
From the way this is presented, the opposition of American consumers to meat and other food products from cloned animals is exclusively based on concerns about the healthfulness of those products. Actually, I tend to agree with the FDA, assuming I understand the cloning process well enough to have an opinion: there seems to be no reason to suspect that those products should be less healthful than products from normally-reproducing animals. Still, the concern is not altogether unreasonable.
On the other hand, it is not especially enlightened, with regard to ethics. The Europeans seem much more explicitly to be paying attention to reports of cruelty, of one kind or another, to the animals involved in the cloning process.
That is a good bit better. But then, it seems odd to complain about the cruelty suffered by one small population of farm animals, and to uncomplaining about the cruelty suffered by the great majority of farm animals.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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MAD MAC Posted 3:15 am
06 Sep 2008
The cloning, Saxib, is not an ethical issue.
As you point out, either you eat meat or you don't. Now, I do not approve of raising animals in constraints, so that they spend their entire lives in a cage and are then killed. Animals should be raised in fields, where they can graze and do whatever the hell it is that animals like to do - before I eat them.
Victory in Pattani
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moyesii Posted 5:14 am
06 Sep 2008
The real issue is food from offspring of clones
I think the real issue is food from the offspring of clones, and for the most part, the food industry has not taken any sort of meaningful stand on that issue. For producers, the real value of clones lies in reproducing top breeders and using the clones to breed for specific traits, such as bigger and more productive offspring. Therefore, the companies that have stated that they won't use food from cloned animals are really making empty promises since it's primarily the food from the offspring of these clones that they intend to market.
Here's a quote from Trans Ova Genetics President David Faber:
Therefore, I don't think the companies that have pledged not to sell food from clones deserve praise for trying to spin a purely economic decision on cloning as a socially responsible one, since it's merely not profitable for them at this point to be using clones as meat animals. If they said that they would not use food from cloned animals or their offspring anytime now or in the future, that would be a real victory for consumers, but they won't ever say that.
Here is Smithfield Foods' statement from their website:
And here's the statement from Kraft:
The offspring of top breeding animals -- whether cloned or not -- can be sold to other producers for big bucks, therefore making it a profitable business to breed clones and sell their offspring. And since there's no regulation, no tracking, and no uniform policies on food from cloned animal offspring, it seems virtually guaranteed that meat and dairy from cloned animals (perhaps the spent breeding clones are sent to slaughter) and their offspring will eventually dominate the food supply as more producers switch to breeding with cloned animals and their offspring for a competitive edge. And it's no surprise that food from cloned animals has already entered the food supply, as the de facto integration is wearing down consumer resistance to the idea of eating meat and dairy from clones, thus following the same insidious path with which GMO crops were ambushed into the American food supply.
Here's a telling statement:
I don't know if animal breeds can be patented (as are their GMO seed counterparts), but as long as these cloning companies can continue to tout "new and improved" breeds, I assume that producers will want to keep buying from them in order to stay competitive. Agribusiness sees a profit in reducing the animal gene pool by cloning, and further controlling and concentrating all animal and plant genetic lines.
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MAD MAC Posted 5:58 am
06 Sep 2008
Why would that be a victory for consumers?
"If they said that they would not use food from cloned animals or their offspring anytime now or in the future, that would be a real victory for consumers, but they won't ever say that."
There are only two concerns I can see:
a. Safety. There is NO reason to believe there are safety concerns - so that's out the window.
b. Patent. Here is a legitimate concern given what happened with Monsantos genetically modified crops.
If issue "b" can be addressed, then this whole thing is a non-issue.
Victory in Pattani
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caniscandida Posted 7:16 am
06 Sep 2008
"Saxib"??
You are way out in front of the pack, Mad Mac. Of course, I am still further ahead -- ha ha -- , being the sole representative in the Gristmill community (I believe) of the teensy "I cry for fish" minority (peek, if you dare, at the extraordinarily dispiriting and unpleasant "Palin Around" thread, dominated by the painfully logodiarrhaeic Saluki). Still, you are on the right side; you grasp the basic considerations, unlike many carnivores.
Movesii has done a lot of work, and has given us a lot of good information. But I am not sure why M. wishes to narrow the discussion with the expression "the real issue." And certainly we could use a good working definition of "socially responsible." In the context of a charged-up GOP base, gladly swallowing John McCain's simplistic equation of "service" as "enlisting in a branch of the military," as well as his perverse, nay bizarrissimo, description of the Democrats, and not the Republicans, as the "Me First" party, we could use some clarification in this case too.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Angelsnecropolis Posted 8:54 am
06 Sep 2008
We Eat GM Anyways
What most people don't understand is that we have been eating genetically modified plants and animals for centuries. Even before peas were being bread for green or yellow colors, we have been mating our animals and plants with those that have the most desirable traits whether that is flavor, texture, shape, color, or any other quality.
By interfering with the processes of natural selection humans are altering the gene pool of the food they eat to get the traits that we want in our food. The only difference in this method of GM and others is it isn't done in a science lab. I've always been a supporter of GM food but only if the traits it creates benefit human society. It's a complete disgrace to the human race when corporations like Monsanto create self destructive seeds so that growers have to continuously buy their seeds. That is just unacceptable.
In regards to cloning... this is just another new technology that people will throw their arms up about without even knowing the facts. One can make the claim that we "don't know if it's safe" but that only show the ignorance of the subject in question. I would challenge the deniers to find evidence to support claims that cloned food is not safe before trying to incite "fear of the new."
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moyesii Posted 11:31 am
06 Sep 2008
Traditional breeding vs. genetic engineering
Angelsnecropolis, You're confusing traditional breeding and genetic engineering, which are completely different in both their means and ends. This has already been discussed to death on grist before. The USDA itself differentiates these two processes.
And why do you assume that anti-GMO people are all luddites? Just because some of us don't care to go into a dissertation here on the subject doesn't mean that we haven't done our research. According to this report, there is a very high failure rate in the cloning process, and even among those few that reach full-term, clones and their offspring often suffer from hidden genetic defects that don't manifest until adulthood or postmortem. Therefore, I don't see how anyone can claim that traditional breeding and genetic engineering are the same or even similar processes or that the end products are not radically different. And taking into account the high prevalence of disease and genetic defects among clones and their offspring, it seems quite rational that people should be concerned about the safety of consuming these foods.
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cavecanem Posted 1:21 am
08 Sep 2008
My main issue...
My main issue... is the fact that the FDA disallows product labelling. Let them clone animals, but allow people the choice to avoid their food.
They are just afraid of labelling, because they know most people won't eat it.
Food labels should let us know if it is genetically modified (in the current sense) and if meat is cloned.
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