Some Food For Thought

On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration declared cloned animals to be safe for consumption. Although the matter got the FDA's approval, some Americans are still wary about eating food from a cloned source. FDA officials insist there is nothing wrong with consuming this type of food.

"We found nothing in the food that could potentially be hazardous. The food in every respect is indistinguishable from food from any other animal," FDA food safety chief Dr. Stephen Sundlof said. "It is beyond our imagination to even find a theory that would cause the food to be unsafe."

The FDA spent six years tracking the safety of cloning, and its decision came after much opposition. Last month, Congress passed legislation which urged further study of the issue. Many members of the public are also protesting the idea of cloned food products.

"If you have moral objections to a particular food, or ethical objections to them, FDA's saying, 'Tough, you've got to eat it,'" said Carol Tucker-Foreman of the Consumer Federation of America, who pledged to push for more food producers to shun clone-derived ingredients.

Sundlof said about half of the 30,500 comments from the public the FDA has received have dealt with labeling.

[Sundlof said] 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.

Consumers won't be able to figure it out for themselves, he said. No test exists that could distinguish meat from a cloned animal from other meat.

While FDA officials insist cloned animals are safe for consumption, they also acknowledge it is not possible to draw conclusions about the long-term health consequences for the animal. In 2003, the first cloned animal, a sheep named Dolly, was euthanized because of a lung disease. She contracted the disease years before her life expectancy.

Even members from the FDA's own focus groups said they were uncomfortable with eating food from cloned animals.

A September 2006 poll by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that 64 percent of Americans were uncomfortable with animal cloning. And when FDA convened its own focus groups, it found a third of consumers would never eat food from cloned animals, while another third weren't worried and the rest fell somewhere in the middle.

Please don't pass me the cloned hamburger.