Consumers may not be able to avoid cloned food
Pastor Dale Morgan
Consumers may not be able to avoid cloned food*
Bernadette Tansey, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, February 18, 2008
Less than a dozen years after Dolly the sheep became the world's first
cloned mammal, grocers and restaurateurs are digesting the fact that
milk and meat from cloned animals could soon filter into their supply
chains.
The government took major steps toward easing cloned livestock and their
offspring into the food supply in mid-January, when the Food and Drug
Administration concluded they're safe to eat.
The question is, will consumers swallow the new technology? And how will
food businesses cope if their customers balk?
Many food merchants are still framing their policies while they warily
monitor public opinion. The historic commercial debut of cloning comes
in an era when a significant segment of consumers have rejected other
foods the FDA deemed safe, such as milk from hormone-treated cows and
genetically modified corn.
Cloning is an attempt to create a new animal using the DNA from an
existing adult animal. The FDA, while noting that livestock cloning
produces many malformed or ill newborn animals, said cloned animals that
survive for several months after birth can be healthy. They can
reproduce normally and produce healthy young, the FDA said. The agency
said it found no signs that food from healthy clones is harmful to
humans, and predicted that sickly clones would be excluded from the food
supply.
Consumer groups, however, have called FDA's positive safety assessment
hasty and ill-founded. The Center for Food Safety said the FDA based
many conclusions on small or limited studies, many of them financed by
cloning companies. Clones that appear healthy can have infections, or
abnormalities that could affect food quality such as unusual proteins or
imbalances between protein and fats, the group said. Further studies
should be done to evaluate clones and their offspring, the organization
said.
Such groups are urging consumers to press their supermarkets and
restaurants to refuse food from clones. And those businesses are being
peppered with inquiries like "Will my hamburger meat come from a cloned
cow?" and "Are clones kosher?"
Independent grocer Sam Mogannam said he didn't need any calls from his
customers to know if they'd accept food from cloned lineages. He's sure
they won't. And he has no intention of stocking any at Bi-Rite Market,
which he bills as a mecca for organic, sustainable and non-artificial
foods in San Francisco's Mission District.
"We believe in allowing nature to take its due course," he said. "I know
our customers wouldn't support us if they knew we were knowingly
accepting products from clones or their offspring."
But food merchants, from small shop owners to national supermarket
chains, could face formidable challenges if they want to guarantee
customers the option of avoiding all products linked to cloning.
No public system is in place to alert food sellers when products from
animal lines that include clones could reach their shelves - whether in
the form of a rib-eye steak, a quart of low-fat milk, a can of beef
minestrone or a wedge of sharp cheddar.
Consumer groups such as the Center for Food Safety and Consumers Union
support mandatory labeling of all products linked to cloning, from raw
meat to meatball sandwiches. They're backing bills proposed in Congress
and by a few state legislators, including state Sen. Carole Migden,
D-San Francisco. Without labeling, they argue, any food safety problems
that did arise from cloning would never be linked to the technology.
Some retailers, after hearing from customers, are also calling for some
form of government action. Two supermarket chains with a significant
presence in Northern California, Safeway and Whole Foods Market, say the
government should oversee a system to track clones through the food
supply. It should also consider other means, such as food labeling, to
ensure that consumers can make informed choices about products of
cloning, the companies said.
"The lack of effective governmental oversight and tracking could mean
consumers will lose the ability to choose clone-free products," Whole
Foods spokeswoman Margaret Wittenberg said.
The FDA maintains that no labeling or disclosure requirements are
necessary to protect public health. The agency, after years of study,
issued a lengthy report Jan. 15 concluding that milk and meat from
cloned cattle, pigs and goats are safe for consumption. The FDA said it
had too little information to assess cloned sheep, but it found no food
safety problems connected with the progeny of clones.
The offspring of all cloned livestock were immediately cleared as food
sources by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, based on the FDA's
findings. Clones themselves - cattle, pigs and goats - will also enter
the food supply. But when, and under what regulatory scheme, if any, has
not yet been decided.
The USDA is inviting industry input as it develops a plan to usher
cloned animals into the market. In the meantime, the agency is asking
companies that have created or purchased clones to honor a voluntary ban
on selling their meat or milk for food.
This means that Ditto, a cloned cow created by a UC Davis researcher,
can't be a food source just yet because the university honors the
temporary ban. But UC Davis is now free to sell milk or meat from
Ditto's daughter, an unnamed Holstein cow conceived by sexual reproduction.
Even before the FDA's favorable report, a few clone owners admitted in
various news reports that they had already sold milk or meat from the
animals as food.
As the rules stand now, livestock breeders and milk or meat suppliers
have no legal obligation to disclose to either food manufacturers or
consumers that a product came from a cloned animal line. Some vendors
plan to keep their products clear of cloned lineages, but the FDA may
not permit packages to bear a voluntary label such as "clone free."
Safeway Inc. of Pleasanton, one of the nation's largest food retailers,
said its customers are demanding more information. The company
acknowledged that the government conducted important studies on food
from clones. But to help shoppers make informed choices about products
tied to cloning, Safeway supports additional studies "that would help
ensure changes to federal policy are done in a manner that maintains
consumer confidence and informed decision making."
The Pleasanton chain, which has 269 stores in Northern California, is
asking its suppliers to deliver no products from cloned animals while
the government mulls its options. "Meanwhile, the federal government
should exercise its authority and expertise to determine an appropriate
regulatory framework, including traceability and labeling," Safeway said
in response to a Chronicle inquiry. Safeway declined to say whether it
will accept foods from the offspring of clones.
Trader Joe's, a Monrovia (Los Angeles County) grocery chain that carries
many organic product lines, did not respond to The Chronicle's query.
Bruce Knight, USDA undersecretary for marketing, said the agency is
willing to help industry members create a tracking and certification
program if they request it. The USDA already administers standards and
certification of organic products. Knight said the USDA would work with
companies that want to set up voluntary labeling of food from clones.
Few food businesses have actively sought to sell products from cloned
animal lines, but all could be affected by the few U.S. cloning
companies in business. Their customers are farmers who want replicas of
valuable breeding animals - clones of a prize bull, for example, whose
semen fetches high prices for artificial insemination. As breeders,
cloned animals could quickly influence the gene pool of U.S. livestock.
The preserved semen of one bull can be sent throughout the country to
produce thousands of descendants.
One healthy cloned calf can cost as much as $20,000. But these expensive
animals may enter the meat supply when their reproductive lives wane.
Their milk will also be sold for dairy products.
At this point, retailers that want to avoid food from clones are relying
on private agreements with their suppliers, who in turn have to trust
their own sources. Meat packers may be able to exclude some clones by
consulting an industry database of cloned animals whose owners volunteer
to register them. The two major livestock cloning companies, ViaGen Inc.
and Trans Ova Genetics, are developing the registry with the
certification company AgInfoLink. Meatpackers would be able to scan or
read an animal's ear tag to identify clones, said AgInfoLink executive
Glenn Smith.
At this point, AgInfoLink doesn't plan to track the milk, semen or
offspring of clones. But Smith said that could change if retailers
request such services.
Most food outlets that have taken a stand on cloning have said they will
exclude clones themselves, but not necessarily food from their progeny.
Natural foods retailer Whole Foods Market of Austin, Texas, which has 24
stores in Northern California, said its products will remain free of
both clones and their descendants.
"We are working with our supplier community to develop a chain of
custody records that trace product breeding stock through multiple
generations," said Edmund LaMacchia, vice president of purchasing for
perishables.
It's not clear, however, that all USDA-certified organic operations will
be completely "clone free." Some organic producers say they're not sure
yet how they can guarantee that their animals have no ties to cloning.
That includes Albert Straus, president of Straus Family Creamery in
Marin County, which supplies all the dairy products for Sam Mogannam's
Mission District market and nearby ice cream store.
Like most dairy operators, Straus relies on artificial insemination to
reproduce his herd. Straus wants the government to require semen
suppliers to reveal whether their products come from a cloned bull or
its young. Without such certainty, Straus said, dairies might lose their
organic certification from the USDA.
USDA's organic standards do rule out clones, but the agency may permit
the use of a clone's descendants, Knight said. Therefore, consumers who
want to avoid food from both clones and their offspring may not be able
to rely solely on the organic label.
Buying only kosher foods won't insulate consumers from products of
cloning at all. Rabbi Menachem Genack of the Orthodox Union, which
certifies food items as kosher, said cloned animals would qualify as
long as they belong to a single kosher species, such as cattle, sheep
and goats.
At this point, consumer choice rests on a patchwork chain of voluntary
agreements among suppliers and retailers.
The first time many Americans take a bite of food from a cloned animal
or its offspring, they may never know it.
Cloning's imperfections at center of debate
Twenty years from now, the eating public may blithely accept food from
cloned animals. But at this point, consumer groups are aghast at
government actions to usher cloned livestock and their offspring into
the U.S. food supply. To a large extent, the resistance stems from the
fact that livestock cloning is still an imperfect art.
The Food and Drug Administration found in January that food from healthy
clones and their progeny is safe. But in the same lengthy report, the
FDA also detailed snags in the current art of animal cloning that reduce
its rate of producing healthy clones to less than 10 percent. Many
cloned embryos die or develop into sickly newborns.
Among consumer groups, those technical snags have raised questions not
only about food safety, but also about animal welfare and ethics. They
contend that further study may reveal health dangers the FDA didn't
discover, as new testing methods emerge. In the FDA's view, future
research will not only confirm the safety of food from clones, but will
also improve methods of creating them.
Clones are made by coaxing a single adult cell from the original animal
- call it a bull named George - to form an embryo that will become
George2. The nucleus containing George's DNA is swapped into an egg cell
from a cow, after the egg's nucleus is removed. The hope is that the
resulting embryo, implanted in a surrogate mother, will be an exact copy
of George. But about 90 percent of the time, that doesn't happen.
Clones can be born grossly malformed, and many die within six months.
The fetuses can grow too large, causing difficult, extended pregnancies
ending with delivery by cesarean section, the FDA found in a review of
scientific studies.
But the FDA said clones that survive past six months are often healthy
and fertile. Their offspring have even fewer health problems, the agency
said. No significant differences appeared in milk or meat from cloned
animal lines and their non-cloned counterparts, FDA reported.
The FDA acknowledged that newborn clones are often sick or dying, but
said those animals would never pass inspection for entry into the food
supply.
Consumer groups aren't convinced that cloning raises no safety concerns.
For example, they suspect that many young clones will survive only
through treatment with antibiotics and other drugs. Such animals could
enter the food supply and affect human health, they contend.
An ethics board advising the European Food Safety Authority concluded in
January that cloning for food production cannot be justified at this
point because of the suffering of both deformed clones and their
surrogate mothers, or dams, in animal breeding terms.
On the question of food safety, however, the European Food Safety
Authority agreed with the FDA. The FDA, whose purview is limited to food
safety, did not evaluate the ethics of cloning.
Online resources
Read the FDA's risk
assessment of cloning: www.fda.gov/cvm/
cloning.htm
Read the Center for Food Safety's critique of FDA's report:
www.centerforfood safety.org/Policy.cfm