Closing the Barn Door…

…After the Cows Have Gotten Out….

Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote a good op ed about cloned meat in the January 23, 2008, edition of the New York Times. If you haven’t heard yet, the FDA has approved the sale of cloned meat and dairy products from clones and their offspring. Interestingly, the next day the USDA asked farmers not to put their cloned animals on the market so consumers could get over their fears of eating cloned meat and dairy.

For Klinkenborg, the issue isn’t health or safety (though, I have to say, to us here, health and safety are big issues to consider…). But he brings up an interesting point – cloned meat only benefits large corporations. The more uniform the meat, the easier to process – and the more money the corporation makes, not the farmers. The more uniform the meat, the more control the company has.

He also talks about how we’re losing so much genetic diversity among animals. So many breeds are now extinct. (Slow Food is one of the groups who are actually working to bring animal breeds back from extinction, and companies like Heritage Foods USA work with farmers to sell old breeds of common animals like turkeys and hogs.)

What Klinkenborg doesn’t get into with genetic diversity is the safety aspect. If we allow the genetic diversity of an animal species to die out to where we only have one or two types of chickens, let’s say, it’s much much easier for a disease to wipe out all the chickens. Genetic diversity helps protect animals from the conditions in which they live, but also from diseases and other ailments. And when you add cloning into this, you’re getting rid of all diversity.

How boring is that? It’s like only having one flavor of ice cream – is that what we want?