"Okay, yeah," I said. I'll have the 20 oz Porterhouse, baked potato (extra butter), large green salad, and um…a slice of Dutch Apple Pie." But then my server asked, "How do want that steak, sir?" To which I replied, "Cloned."

Not bloody; not rare….cloned!

It was reported today that the FDA has now come out in favor of producing cloned livestock, etc., for the purpose of human consumption.

The reasoning behind the push for allowing this process (allegedly) is because cloning the best breeds will produce a generation of superbreeds which you, me, and corporate America can exploit…okay, mostly corporate America. Now I'm wondering if the price of fillet mignon will go down…probably not.

Listen, I like eating dead animals as much as the next guy, but I like to point out the obvious; just who the hell do these people think they are. They're screwing with mother nature, here. Gene manipulation is one thing, but cloning produces genetic changes which are unpredictable in at least a couple of ways: First, we don't know how those genetic alterations will affect the clone. Second, we don't know how ingesting food produced from these clones over a long period of time will affect us. And yet the FDA says, "Oh there's no risk and we're so confident that there's no risk, we're hoping we can put this stuff on the shelf with no labels." That's right. No labels. They do say that they may put labels on food that isn't cloned, though. That's kind of curious isn't it. I can hear the grocer now, "Hey! You don't want to eat that; it's organic!" Please!

Nevermind the moral and ethical ramifications, the FDA is reassuring us that the "risk assessment is 'strictly a science-based evaluation.'" Boy that sets my mind at ease. This is the FDA folks, one of the long arms of the Federal government and God knows they're "never" wrong. But here's a short excerpt from The Washington Post which describes the over-all scientific rigor used in determining the FDA's conclusion when it comes to gene alteration in clones.

…agency scientists decided to use the same simple but effective standard used by farmers since the dawn of agriculture: If a farm animal appears in all respects to be healthy, then presume that food from that animal is safe to eat.

There you have it: Looks like a cow ta me. Dig in boys! And six months later you're wondering why you're suddenly having health problems. "Gee doc," you say. "No. There's no history of this in my family. I just woke up this morning and had an extra nose."

Once again, um…I'll point out the obvious. The reason the observation method was, by and large, reliable (up until recently) is because the technology for cloning was nonexistent. And aside from selective breeding, we sure weren't screwing around with the genes of these animals. According to the article on which this post is based, some of the clones in question even had extra genes added, which had "nothing to do with food production.