Eating Dolly

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

I’m sure many of us buy meat and poultry from local farmers, but there’s always going to be a time when you don’t have time to get to the farmer’s market or something and you have to buy meat from the grocery store.  That being the case, you might have been a little disturbed yesterday when the FDA announced they were OK-ing the sale of meat and dairy from cloned animals without proper labeling.

Food from healthy clones of cattle, swine and goats is as safe as food from non-cloned animals, the Food and Drug Administration said in a report released Tuesday.

“Extensive evaluation of the available data has not identified any subtle hazards that might indicate food-consumption risks in healthy clones of cattle, swine, or goats,” the 968-page “final risk assessment” concluded.

“Thus, edible products from healthy clones that meet existing requirements for meat and milk in commerce pose no increased food consumption risk(s) relative to comparable products from sexually-derived animals.”

[...] About half of the more than 30,500 comments from the public the FDA has received about the matter have dealt with labeling, he said.

But, he added, agency regulators cannot require cloned products be labeled as such if—as they assert—there is no material difference between them and food produced by conventional methods.

“There’s really nothing for us to label,” he said.

Well, then.

The good news here is that in the event you are compelled to purchase meat or milk from the grocery, you can always purchase organic: the Organic Trade Association has assured the public that meat and dairy from cloned animals cannot be sold as ‘organic’, since that would be prohibited under the National Organic Program regulations.

Look for sales of organic meat and dairy to skyrocket.

Of course, all this brouhaha is a bigger argument than ever to only purchase locally grown meat and dairy from a farmer you know and trust.