Cloned food creates dilemma

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Don't look for answers in this week's column. All I have for you are questions and observations. Very disturbing questions.

According to an Associated Press report, the Food and Drug Administration is at the tail end of a five-year study on cloned food. Although they're still probably a few months away from approving it outright, they have concluded that meat and milk from cloned animals are safe for human consumption. I'll let you ponder that for a moment. Take all the time you want. I'll be right here waiting to continue.

I wasn't even aware this was an issue. It makes me wonder what other strange studies the FDA is working on. Is there a crack team of FDA researchers working on papers such as "The Klingon Diet: Is Food Best Served Live?" Or "Soylent Green: The Food of Tomorrow"?

It seems like only yesterday that Scottish scientists cloned a sheep, and already we're asking if they're edible and, more important, tasty. Only a couple of hundred cloned animals are alive today, and the process for making them is so expensive that it's unlikely they'll end up on anyone's plate soon, unless Donald Trump really wants to show off for the next season of "The Apprentice."

Most of those cloned animals, however, are, to put it delicately, anatomically correct, so the process for making babies of cloned animals is pretty cheap, and those animals probably will end up in the food chain first.

The FDA's argument is that it's virtually impossible to tell a normal adult animal from a cloned one, and therefore, it's safe for human consumption. Creepy, but safe for human consumption.

On the off chance that someone reading this has gotten all his or her information about cloning from old Michael Keaton movies, they're not growing full-grown hogs in a beaker. Cloned animals start out as a cell from an adult animal, which scientists swap out with the nucleus of, as the AP puts it, a donor egg.

Donor? The animal in question gave permission? Anyway, they give that egg a good jolt of electricity, and after more or less the normal gestation period, you end up with a baby animal that is genetically the twin of the animal that the original cell came from. OK, it's a little more complicated than that, but you get the picture.

This seems like a lot of effort just to find another way to make pork chops, but there is a method to their madness. If you have a particularly robust animal, you no longer have to play genetic roulette to get a similarly robust animal. In the long run, it's probably going to play hell with the genetics of animals, but in the short run, someone probably is going to make a lot of money.

Of course, if all cows are genetically identical, and some disease comes along that they're particularly susceptible to, so much for the species. There's still something to be said for genetic diversity. The whole process is a little too "The Bovines from Brazil" for me.

Perhaps when you heard the phrase "cloned meat" you were imagining taking a cell from a pot roast and cloning another pot roast. Scientists can't do this yet, but they're trying. The term is "vat meat," and obviously the marketing folks are going to have to come up with a more appetizing name if they expect anyone to eat it. They can grow meat in limited quantities, but it doesn't have the proper texture or density. The FDA's not even talking about this bit of Frankenfood yet, but it probably has a study group working on it.

Vat meat brings up an interesting moral dilemma. I have friends who are vegetarians for moral reasons. With vat meat, you could have cruelty-free meat. Heck, you could eat steak cloned from a cow and wash it down with a glass of milk from the same cow while watching that cow blissfully grazing in your pasture, assuming, of course, that you have a pasture. If you can bring yourself to eat meat because it never had a face, where do you then draw the line? Is cloned panda steak OK? How about bald eagle?

Chew on that one for a while. Not literally, of course. Yet.

F. Andrew Taylor is a Las Vegas freelance writer. His column appears twice monthly. Contact him at fandrewt@cox.net.