posted February 24, 2007 08:09 AM         

"Our decision not to accept this milk is based on meeting our consumers' expectations," the company said in a statement.

"We see no consumer benefit from this technology."

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration tentatively ruled late last year that milk and meat from some cloned animals are safe to eat, bringing the controversial technology closer to American grocery carts.

Dean said if the FDA approves the sale of milk from clones it will work with its dairy farmers to ensure the milk they supply to the company does not come from those animals.

Proponents have touted cloned animals as safe and hope the technology will create animals that produce more milk, better meat and are more disease-resistant.

Opinion polls, however, show consumers are more wary. A survey by the International Food Information Council found that more than half of consumers were unlikely to buy food made from cloned animals, no matter what the government says.

Cloning animals involves taking the nuclei of cells from adults and fusing them into egg cells that are implanted into a surrogate mother. Hundreds of livestock animals already have been cloned, but producers and the nascent industry have voluntarily agreed not to sell any foods from these animals until the FDA decision is finalized. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070223/hl_nm/milk_clones_dc

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My opinion ... well at least most people don't want anything to do with it. I just think it's horrible. I don't care how "safe" it's supposed to be. I don't like it at all. Geez, if they do allow it ... is it going to say right on the package that it's from a clone? I somehow doubt that. Very sad.

posted February 26, 2007 08:00 AM         

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Shirley Trimmer knows her hamburgers. She prepares them with a handful of bread cubes, a little egg, chopped onions and just the right sprinkling of salt and pepper. Trimmer recently served burgers for a lunch meeting of the seven-member team that makes up the biotech company Cyagra, based in Elizabethtown, Pa.

But something was different about these hamburgers: They were made from the meat of cloned cows. Every Friday for the past year or so, Cyagra employees have been eating their way through the thousands of pounds of beef left over from the 11 clones that the company had raised and slaughtered for a cloned-meat study.

"We started with the steaks, which we grilled all summer long, and now we have hamburger meat left over," Trimmer says. Steve Mower, the company's director of marketing, says, "She cooks (the burgers) just right. They're delicious."

Like it or not, Trimmer and her colleagues may be getting a taste of the future. On Dec. 28, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an 800-page report that concluded meat and milk from clones are safe for consumption. The FDA has asked for public comment on the issue over the next couple of months, but it appears likely to give final approval for food from cloned animals.

Until then, the FDA has asked producers of clones and livestock breeders to voluntarily refrain from introducing food products from these animals.

"Based on the FDA's analysis of hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and other studies on the health and food composition of clones and their offspring, the draft risk assessment has determined that meat and milk from clones and their offspring are as safe as food we eat every day," says Stephen F. Sundlof, the director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine. "Cloning poses no unique risks to animal health when compared to other assisted reproductive technologies currently in use in U.S. agriculture."

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/News/ClonedBeefOnTheMenu.aspx

posted February 26, 2007 10:26 AM         

yeah .. okey dokey

"Cloning poses no unique risks to animal health when compared to other assisted reproductive technologies currently in use in U.S. agriculture."

I think he has a valid enough point here. Unfortunately, that defense doesn't speak very well for cloning.

posted February 26, 2007 12:12 PM         

We're getting too close to people-cloning if you ask me, and that just conjures up too many questions/doubts about the spiritual ethics of it all. Humans could come to really take life & creation for granted (as we do everything that makes life more convenient), and that can't be allowed. Not to mention the obvious question, does a living creature that was created by cloning have a soul? Where does the soul come from? Freind or Foe? Don't think we should dabble with that. Another result of this possibility is the issue of "perfect" humans, vs natually flawed humans. Who the heck wants a world filled with perfect people? How stupid would that be? How robbed we would be of so many things if we were all "high end" versions of a human being.