Why 'cloneburgers' are a bad way to go

[nosmokes]

original-startribune

*Editorial*: Why 'cloneburgers' are a bad way to go

The danger isn't about food safety; it's about food security.

If beef is what's for dinner at your house, you undoubtedly know the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is preparing to approve the sale of cloned meat and milk to U.S. consumers.

But a related and potentially more significant announcement probably escaped your notice: Researchers for a United Nations agency reported last month that livestock breeds around the world are disappearing at alarming rates, with as many as one-fifth of cattle, hog, goat, horse and poultry varieties facing extinction. Some 190 breeds have vanished in the last 15 years, and perhaps another 1,500 are already thought to be at risk.

These extinctions are driven by agricultural practices that perpetuate the most profitable breeds and neglect the rest. The results are a shrinking gene pool and, potentially, threats to global food security. The connection to cloning is that this high-tech practice is likely to make matters worse, not better.

Those issues don't really concern the FDA, whose OK for cloned animal products will be based on their safety for human health, a conclusion based in turn on tests showing that meat and milk from clones are identical to those from animals born naturally. But they ought to concern Congress -- and they ought to prompt consumers to think more broadly about how their food is produced.
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complete article here

[in_cog_ni_to]

1. non-labeled cloned meat is what turned me into a vegetarian and

the fact there's a virulent new strain of E-coli in the UK which doesn't respond to antibiotics The strain has become immune to antibiotics because they've used so much of it over the years. I'm never eating meat again.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. Don't be deceived -- it's not just meat.

E. coli may be bacteria from animals' colons, but it is most efficiently carried by plants. Reason? People eat many of their vegetables raw, but almost never eat uncooked meat. The good news is that E. coli is destroyed by cooking; the bad news is that to avoid E. coli, you have to cook everything, which decreases the nutrient content of many vegetables.

Whatever your reasons for vegetarianism may be, avoiding E. coli shouldn't be one of them.

The entire food chain has been imperiled by a number of destructive practices. And if I had to rank them, I wouldn't even pick hasty genetic modification as the top; I'd pick soil depletion as the main threat to human health. There is even a good case to be made that depleted soil lacks microorganisms that can destroy or denature prions, like the one that causes Mad Cow Disease.

I'd also put things like trans-fats and xenoestrogen pollution up there. There is a general degredation of our food supply going on, and no comprehensive movement to oppose it.

--p!

[Karenina]

6. Dolphins are washing up on beaches

with empty stomachs. The natural food chain has been poisoned and broken.
Fasten your seat belts kids, it's going to be a VERY BUMPY ride.

[Warpy]

4. Gotcha

I tried some organic beef this winter, bought it just before we got slammed with record snowfall, craved the heaviness because it was so cold.

It was a very nice cut done southwestern style.

The beef tasted like grease and cardboard. I've totally lost my taste for it.

I still eat seafood, at least for the time being. That will be the next thing to go.

Give me tofu any day. Once you learn how to prepare it so it doesn't fall apart, it's hard to return to flesh foods.

[peacebuzzard]

7. Hello. Nice to meet a like mind.

I started eliminating meat for various reasons as well and my last was seafood. I have been off all flesh for over a year now.

I feel so much better.

I am attempting to eat as much as I can from just organic sources.

Anybody posting here with any interest, come and visit the vegan, vegetarian and animal rights forum.

[Parche]

2. Send In The Clones

The Beef Council thinks this post is a bunch of Bull!!!

[dkofos]

5. Maybe the Bulls will sue

[The2ndWheel]

8. The funny part being

"These extinctions are driven by agricultural practices that perpetuate the most profitable breeds and neglect the rest. The results are a shrinking gene pool and, potentially, threats to global food security. The connection to cloning is that this high-tech practice is likely to make matters worse, not better."

that we can't stop those practices because to do so would kill billions around the planet. Yet to keep doing what we've been doing will make the problem worse when we can no longer push the problem into the future. So onward and upward.