Necessary Roughness

The Washington Post reports that the FDA says that milk and meat from cloned animals is just as safe as the same products from normal animals.

But it represents a crucial milestone for the handful of biotechnology companies that see cloning as a welcome opportunity to sidestep the vagaries of sexual reproduction and instead mass-produce some of the nation’s finest meat- and milk-producing animals.

Fine, so you don’t like watching cattle have sex. That’s not my bag, either. Even if you successfully clone the perfect cow, you still have to implant the clones in numerous cattle to produce the calves. If cattle are like bison, they’re polygamous. A rancher is welcome to correct me, but if that’s the case, ranchers would have a pretty high female-to-male ratio in their herds, and they wouldn’t be keeping that many males. The savings in keeping an all-female herd would be minimal.

Even if a positive decision sails through, consumers will have to wait awhile for their first clone burger. Fewer than 1,000 cloned animals are living on U.S. farms, out of tens of millions of cattle and pigs. And it takes about two years to produce a cloned steer for slaughter and even longer to grow a cloned dairy cow old enough to be milked.

Moreover, with price tags up to $15,000 apiece, clones are currently too valuable to kill or milk directly. So most will initially be used as breeding stock to make high-quality offspring for slaughter or milking, a process that will take an extra couple of years.

If these are just clones, this seems like a heinous waste of money. Surely our taste buds can’t tell the difference between the Grand Champion of the Iowa State Fair and the Grand Champion of the Ohio State Fair, and if a “meat snob” says differently, he’s lying.

If this is just to get us used to the idea of clones in everyday life: wow, that’s an expensive ride.