Cloned beef is on the way, it is safe to eat but is it necessary?
The first beef from cattle that have been cloned rather than bred conventionally will be hitting supermarket shelves in the U.S.A within the next few months.
The cloning process eliminates the need for sex, eggs are taken from females, all the genetic matter is removed and then the "voided" egg is fertilised from the nucleus of a cell taken from the ear of a prizwinning bull and implanted in the womb of a cow. The process may produce genertic carbon copies of animals that are the finest example of their species, but is it fair to females? Come to that is it fair to males. The sex act cannot be replaced by having someone tickle your ear for a few seconds.
Inevitably this new arrival in the food chain with spark ethical protests and we will be asked by organisations of the right and left, "would you eat meat from a cloned animal?"
Personally, I would not give a hoot if my dinner is cloned, a steak is a steak and we should remember the first animals ever farmed for food were snails and as they are hermaphrodites they clone themselves in a manner of speaking.
Archaeological evidence traces snail farming back to 10,500BC and in all that time the question of whether it is ethical to eat animals that have shagged themselves has never arisen. Whatever snails do to in the privacy of their shells is their own business.
I, myself would not eat snails but for aesthetic rather than ethical reasons. If I don't like the look of something there is no way it is going in my mouth. This probably goes a long way towards explaining why I'm 100% straight.
Having said all that, it is quite unlikely I shall ever eat cloned beef. While in my view it is not unethical, it is bad for the planet.
Prime quality beef from grain fed cattle has an enormous carbon footprint and is a huge drain on food stocks. About seven pounds of good quality grain is needed to produce one pound of edible meat. With a global food crunch lurking in the shadow of the credit crunch, to encourace meat eating looks like economic madness.
Considering the case of cloned beef, the adverse energy balance is even worse. I recently read a description of how many scientists are involved in producing beef this way. Add up the cost of feeding them, keeping them in warm, comfortable sheds and providing enough electronic gadgets to keep them amused and cloning is totally unfeasible.
The question need to ask then is how much harm are we willing to do to the planet just so scientists can prove their ability to do in the laboratory what animals have been doing in the wild for millions of years without any fuss.
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Comments: 49
As for the cloned beef issue, I don't eat red meat for a number of reasons, but mostly because it is extremely bad for the environment. I refuse to buy another hamburger (or anything else for that matter) from a fast food restaurant....I think their mass production of beef has resulted in unhealthy and inhumane farm practices. And the pollution produced and resources wasted to produce these Big Macs for the world to get fat on is criminal.
As for the cloning, as you say.....there really is no difference between that and beef resulting from a night of bovine ecstacy...except for the parties involved.
The energy-consumption issue with cloned meat is very similar to that with ethanol production for alternative fuels. With current technology and the focus on using corn instead of grasses as a source of ethanol, it costs almost as much in energy to produce a gallon of ethanol as it does to produce a gallon of gasoline.
I do eat beef, but would just as soon go back to a less greedy world where cows were grassfed, lean but healthy. My understand is that New Zealand beef is like that now.
I lost a good friend to Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease which could be caused by such practices.
BTW nice to see you're out of the dark zone.
Interestingly, nanotechnologists are able to create a very geed facsimilies of tissue in the lab now. I believe steaks that have never been party of an animal are available but cost around $50 a pound - or maybe £50 a pound, expensive anyway.
So the clonging is pointless, we can just get all this gloop, mix in a bit of nano-bioengineering stuff and get good steak with no lips and arseholes left over for MacDonalds to make fast food with.
All we have to do is factor in the economies of scale to bring that price down.
Not if you are a bull. They will not even get hand jobs under the new breeding regime.
There are some issues the scientists conveniently overlook. A clone is fine, but who knows how a clone of a clone of a clone of a clone of a clone will turn out.
In nature higher life forms work best if genes are mixed up regularly. They evolved that was because that's how they work best.
Cloning is fine, but there is no need to do it and no benefit. I'd be happier to see agriculturalists and biologists working to reintroduce the Bison, an animal evolved to do well on the poor grazing on North America without the need for expensive fodder.
What's needed is long term thinking instead of short term solutions.
That's right, cattle eat grass and roots. It worked well for millions of years.
Thanks for the invite.
I always try to find a subject that will provoke some lively discussion. Don't always suceed but I try :-)
Actually, that's happening now, Ian. Even in CT, we have many restaurants who serve Bison rather than cattle beef. It is healthier (leaner) and very tasty. We're also looking into Emu - had it in Australia and liked it - noticed that there are some restaurants trying it out. Of course, the bison is an easier animal to raise than the emu from a cooperation standpt., or that's my general impression.
3 replies to one comment, you are my favourite this week. Just had a text basck fron daughter dear, currently travelling across France on her way home. She said "remember I want a choppy tea when I get home tomorrow." (British thing) She also said yes, when she spent a year in NZ a couple of years back they were very proud of their green policies in farming. Couse they have lots of grass and not many people to clutter it up. I think there are about 5 million people in the same land area as 60 million of us Brits share.
Agribusiness has ever been about increasing profits rather than improving the quality of life, but isn't everything these days?
Venison is getting very popular in Britain again. Deer do much better than cattle on the unfarmable uplands and arable lowland is at such a premium (see above comment) Added to that cattle are destructive grazers and pasture takes a long time to recover.
All my Green Party campain literature is helping me out here :-)
I wonder what it says about an animal that it can't be trusted to have sex correctly?
Cattle not trusted to have their own sex. You need to get out into the country more, they're always at it. Mind you there's a lot of organic farming around where I live.
And what do you mean, you got mad cow jokes in first. Outrageous. I was doing posts on Heather Mills McCartney weeks ago. :-)
On the nanotech thing I think you are confusing nanotech with biotech. As far as I know nobody has managed to grow living tissue in the lab yet. The story I read, and I can't find it because its just a little snippet tucked away in memory from a much longer item and I don't remember the title and have no keywords to narrow the search down to less than a few thousand results, was about growing "something" but not living tissue.
Anyway, there was no question of their creating anything like real meat, what they created must have been more like SPAM (I guess I could get sued for that) it had the taste and texture of a meat but was really just a lump of... well sauted goo I guess.
Would we eat it? Well it isn't that different really to yogurt.
There are all sorts of risks attached to the use of nanotech molecules in food, what the little buggers might build with the stuff they find in our stomachs for instance (anyone fancy playing John Hurt's role in a remake of Alien?)
Biotech however just manages to do expensively and inefficiently what nature does cheaply and efficiently but too slowly for modern business.
If the theocrats in this country have their way, we will probably all have a church-appointed observer looking in the window to make sure we stick to the missionary position with only man-woman combinations allowed.
I eat red meat, but never in the form of a hamburger from a fast food joint. I've probably eaten fewer of those in my lifetime than many people eat in a month.
I've been too worried about my own sex life to think much about the bull's. Darn. I bought a share in a farm (where I'll have access to fresh veggies, fruit, eggs, and meat) and didn't even think to ask if the bull is bored. I'll know better next time.
If the theocrats could find a way to enable us to reproduce without having sex at all they would. Fortunately human artificial insemination involves us guys doing something the fundies hate more than full sex.
Or, watch the Discovery Channel!
"If the theocrats could find a way to enable us to reproduce without having sex at all they would. Fortunately human artificial insemination involves us guys doing something the fundies hate more than full sex."
You would think that with this mindset they would be much more supportive of homosexuality. And, as with a good deal other animals, I'm sure there are bi- and homosexual cattle. We just like to think they are cleaning each other to make ourselves feel better.
Re "the first beef from cattle that have been cloned rather than bred conventionally will be hitting supermarket shelves in the U.S.A within the next few months," that too is totally fictional. In a few years (not a few months) folks in the U.S. will be able to buy beef from conventionally-bred cows that are descended from cattle that have been cloned, but they're not going to be able to buy beef from the actual cattle that have been cloned, unless perhaps at some specialty shop whose patrons are willing to pay hundreds of pounds per steak.
Anyway, innocent error, all the news hype would certainly leave one with the impression that our kids will be force-fed cloneburgers next week.
Wow, I never thought of that. Do you suppose they give each other moo jobs?
My sister and I became vegetarians back in the 70's for two very different reasons, though we merged them eventually.
For me, the final straw was in 1971, when I killed a large animal with a bow, and saw his strong desire for life disappear from its eyes... and hauntingly saw myself in that experience.
She did it because she realized that it takes ten kilos of real food away from the starving people of the world for us to eat one kilo of beef or poultry.
Did anybody else notice how Stephanie neatly sidestepped any acknowledgement of this segment of Ian's article?
Many of the folks I worked with in biotech were hopeful to someday be able to grow organs in the zero-g of space but that has not, to my knowledge, happened.
I have never heard of homosexual Bulls though I'm sure they exists but over here we had the case of Hamish the Homosexual Sheep a few years ago. He made the tabloids and television news back then but since his fifteen minutes of fame he has only made mutton stew.
I would not have thought it possible to sqeeze so much misunderstanding into one short comment.
OK, a clone; yes it is a calf, nobody said it wasn't. The point is a clone only has DNA from one parent which is not quite the norm.
You are obviously one of those people who thinks the newspapers make up all their stories. There has been a race going on for several years to get the first cloned livestock ready for the table. From a scientific p.o.v. it is very interesting. From a comic p.o.v. it has a lorra lorra potential laughs.
I don't think you quite grasped the post is intended as comedy. I see a few people like that in my threads. Are you related to Bret W or Borg Mother in some way? Or a clone perhaps?
Its a long article but very interesting.
Cloned Cattle Story
Or carrots. My Grandad use to sing this:
Boiled beef and carrots,
Boiled beef and carrots,
That's the stuff for your "Derby Kell",
Makes you fit and keeps you well.
Don't live like vegetarians
On the stuff they give to parrots,
From Morn til' night, blow out your kite
On boiled beef and carrots.
BTW Derby Kell is old slang for belly, as for the line "bow out your kite - well I suppose it was the sage in the recipe that was responsible.
I can understand how killing a large animal would have that effect.
From an environmental perspective if we all eat less meat , particularly the varieties that need to be fed grain and beans we can gain a lot of benefit.
Then again if we are prepared to pay a more realistic price we can return to eating meat and poultry that has developed naturally rather than having been intensively farmed. Economics aside, the cruelties of modern farming should make many people think again about our lifestyles.
Me and Steph tease each other all the time but she knows I think she's a sweetie. And yes I have noticed how nimble she is, very agile for someone who so recently gave birth :-)
Can't grow a tumour in a laboratory? Why is it so difficult to recruit people to scientific careers then, it seems like a very healthy environment to work in.
I think he was named Hamish by Tabloid paper headline writers - they're the kings of alliterative headlines and dodgy puns. A senior British politician, formerly nicknamed Two Jags on account of having two official luxury cars and later Two Shags when his long term mitress was revealed, admitted this week to having suffered from Bulimia. One of the Tabloids led with the headline Spew Jags
I do legally have another French name, due to how we moved to French Canada when young.
Sandy does have a good point though, cloned beef with cabbage does sound good in a strange sort of way. ;)
I don't eat meat