Feedlot Beef not Bad Enough for You?

I´m sure long-time readers are familiar enough with all the lovely accomodations at your local feedlot (prophylactic doses of antibiotics, confinement in feces, factory-trash food like broken potato chips and crackers and candies.)

Well, get ready for more Zombie Beef here in Argentina.

Nestled next to lush fields of genetically modified grains, the latest in monoculture is coming to a Cowshwitz near you: Cloned Beef.

"How´s that cloneburger gonna taste," you ask?  You won´t know the difference.

You ESPECIALLY won´t know the difference because no one is going to tell you.  Food companies hate labeling their cloned, genetically modified, and hormone injected products ...because they know you won´t buy them.  So what´s a poor multinational or lobbying group to do when faced with laws requiring them to tell you their frankenstein ingredients?  Simple ...they stop the laws from happening or make them go away.

"But can´t the non-clone producers simply put a Not Cloned label on their product?"  Well, if the milk hormone industry is any indicator, it looks like it´s pretty easy to get legislators to propose laws that make hormone-free lables illegal.

Get it?  Putting freak ingredients in food and not telling anyone: perfectly OK.  Not putting freak in food and telling everybody about it: go to jail.

Food labeling is at the heart of the Argentine beef cloning industry.  The European Union has been holding out against imports of meat or dairy from the descendents of cloned animals and is considering them only if clearly labeled.  The EU is also a leading buyer of Argentine beef.  For that reason, cloned cattle seem to be outside the food supply and general breeding stock in Argentina for the time being.  But Europe is also worried that cloned-meat labeling could start trade war at a time when recession could be on the horizon.  Expect them to cave-in on the issue of labeling.

The WSJ is reporting that there are less than 1000 cloned animals in the world right now but that "their numbers are rising and the costs falling" and Argentina is pushing to be the #1 cloner in the world.

So, is cloned beef safe to eat?  Probably ...who knows?  The best minds all say it is. Of course, the best minds all said it was perfectly safe to feed cattle beef by-products ...until the discovery of mad cow disease.

Is cloned beef cruel?  I suppose that there are crueler practices ...but only 10% of cloned beef cattle survive to viability.  Most are born deformed or susceptible to disease and die.  Detractors of cloned beef often cite very large birth weights in cloned calves resulting in complicated births that often require caesarian sectioning.

Is cloned beef ethical?  Tampering with the world food supply always makes me suspicious ...but what bothers me is that cloning shrinks the gene pool.  Only champion cattle are cloned and, while champions display the finest qualities of the breed, it what those champions don´t display that worries me.  If, for example, those champs are concealing a susceptibility to disease ...the worldwide herd could suffer a shock.

Least ethical of all, in my opinion, is the out-right refusal to tell the consumer what they are eating.  If you don´t want to buy cloned beef it should be a simple and transparent process:  the label should say if your steaks, roast, or ribs are cloned.  At very least, producers of non-cloned beef should be free to slap a big "Not Cloned" sticker on the package.