This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 11:41am and is filed under Food Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
SuzannaB’s questions about whether I think food from clones is “yucky” prompted me to take a look at the lighter side of cloning.
Sometimes a little humor lets us see the absurdity in extreme perceptions and stances on a subject. The comic strip “Mother Goose and Grimm” is currently doing a series on meat from cloned animals (parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5).
Like most depictions of cloning, these cartoons show that it produces a bunch of full-grown carbon copies of an individual, identical in both body and mind (a complete myth in all parts, by the way). Cloning has inspired artists and writers for decades, usually with much darker and less humorous results. In many books and movies, cloning is a black magic power to resurrect, simulate, and multiply, usually with dire consequences. These depictions tap into primal human fears about identity theft and loss of self, as well as what New York Sun writer Andrew Stuttaford called “humanity’s fear of its own ingenuity” (see his interesting survey of Hollywood’s treatment of cloning here).
Unfortunately, by the time Dolly was born, the word “cloning” had become almost completely taken over by a horrifying fictional meaning, which has clouded and confused discussions about cloning ever since.
Pundits and cloning’s opponents like to imply that cloned meat tastes bad, or more accurately, leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. For some people, the idea of meat from clones provokes a knee-jerk reaction of “yuck”. In reading many, many reactions to the FDA’s announcement on the safety of meat from cloned animals and their offspring, I would classify the vast majority as gut-level rejection or knee-jerk. So no, SuzannaB, I don’t find the idea “yucky” and am actually quite comfortable with the meat that may eventually reach my table with its origins in a cloned parent, grandparent or other ancestor.
A closing thought: As a Mom, maybe the ultimate revenge on my children would be to clone myself and make them raise ME.
March 18th, 2008 at 1:08pm
Oh right. When you clone you get a BABY, not a full-grown animal leaping out of a test tube.
Wouldn’t it be funny if our children did have to raise us? Then again, they’ll probably be changing our diapers when we’re 93 can’t remember the name of the current President of the United States, and still think we’re in charge of them, so that’s probably a lot worse than a new cute little baby!
March 23rd, 2008 at 10:32am
This made me giggle! One of Brian’s favorite longed-for advancements is what he refers lovingly to as “vat-grown meat”. He adores the idea that he could eat perfect lamb without the guilt associated with it and that the efficiency of “growing” only the parts needed for food would be vastly more efficient that the inhumane factory farms of today while also doing away with the cruelty of them.
Yeah, he’s a bit extreme sometimes, but I get where he is coming from and honestly, many of our medicines, cleaners, processed foods, and personal care ingredients are essentially chemistry set copies of natural ones. The leap isn’t so hard to make. =)
March 25th, 2008 at 9:13am
As a society (especially in the US), we have grown so separated from our food that we have become uncomfortable with many of the “facts of life”. Fruits and vegetables have blemishes and are grown (usually) in dirt. Meat, eggs and milk come from live animals.
Organisms eating other organisms is the natural order of things. Until we can create nutrition directly from the sun, harvesting it through plants and animals is necessary.
Even I draw the line at vat-grown meat. Just as wine does, meat, vegetables and fruit all draw their unique flavor profiles from their life’s experiences. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to replicate that in a petri dish.