Cloned meat "safe to eat" in the UK

The labeling issue is also relevant to cloned meat, as to label one means to label others.

 

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What does that mean? Is that meant to be answer to my post? You directly contradicted yourself in the two posts I quoted.

 

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No, I didn't, if you want clarification then please lets go over it again.

 

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Well is going to be very difficult to monitor let's say which glass of milk is coming from a cloned cow, year right, I can't tell wish cow is cloned at the farm where I work, I can take their number and look in the computer and I may let you know which one is cloned and which is not. But imagine you had a heard of Holsteins, they all look alike, and you have to milk 500 of them before 05:00 am, every day, You are welcome to come to Pennsylvania and find out which cow is cloned and label it's milk and them you have to rent a milk truck separated from the other milk truck to take it to the plant where they process the milk and etc. Yea right we are going to do it just wait...

 

I don't understand why they'd clone the meat anyways... It would take just as long to grow, and it interferes with the process of evolution. Unless they modified it to grow faster, but then it's GMO anyways.

 

Lets say you have a cow, a great cow, the greatest milking cow you ever saw, and you want more of her, well through cloning you can make many more of her with identical performance. By conventional breeding you could only produce one offspring at a time and with varying performance.

 

More likely you would clone a stud bull. A bull can multiply the genetic effort by making lots of offspring.

 

Yeah, hence why clone it when it can produce potentially thousands of offspring a year?

 

Cloning a stud bull would continue its thousands of offspring per year long after its normal lifetime. Those valuable genes pass on to many future generations. A valuable stud bull in one province could be cloned and the clone sent to other provinces, or even other countries to permit it to perform its service there.

This is not yet a standard procedure. Cloning is a new science and lots more development work is needed. However, in the future, we can expect especially valuable individual animals to have their usefulness extended by cloning.

 

Certainly, but the necessity for cloning a cow is so much greater.

 

Clone Equals money equals food, Evolution have nothing to do with this. No one care, Let me tell you this again NO ONE CARE down here at the farm if a bird with a fat head is going to change into a parrot in a thousand or millions of years, the reality is we have to produce food and we have to produce food yesterday for today. If yo have the best cow ever, (there is limit for selective breeding could do to get good genes into a breed of any animal) if you have the perfect bull for our standards, good semen production good behavior (20 people average in USA looses their lives every year in the dairy industry because the cattle attacked them and kill them, yes you don't have to go to Pamplona to get kill by a bull) great health etc. You want to have the same bull again and again and guess what now you do. Also if this bull produce excellent offspring with Betsy the cow, you want to do this breeding again and again, producing more of an excellent offspring wish they go to the production line right away. Evolution have nothing to do with this, as a matter of fact animals and plants have the tendency to revert to their wild type any change they get, and a Wild cow type will give you5 to 6 litters of milk no good for the business. We have the same cows since we have knowledge of ourself now we can have the best ones, always. Meat and milk productions is an Industry is not a farm product anymore. And when we get tired talking about this, let's start talking about genetically altered/engineered wheat or corn or any other grain now in YOUR pantry.

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sorry, Junior is hungry and Daddy have to feed him... or her.... Evolution? could we put tomato sauce on it? I doubt it...

 

Until disease hits that adversely affects that one genome. Now _all_ your cows are dead. Years ago it would only kill cows that (for example) had weakened immune systems, or (for autoimmune diseases) strong immune systems. The others would survive and prosper, the disease would die off and the species would continue.

That's the primary danger of monocrops. No diversity, and no protection against a disease that is deadly to that particular genome. For a good example of what can happen to a monoculture crop, google "Irish potato famine."

That's not to say that cloning does not have a place in agriculture. If it's used to propagate good genes, great. If it's used to make all genomes common, it has some very serious problem.

Over a million "juniors" died during the potato famine. I bet they wished they had a somewhat more diverse crop.

 

True a scenario to consider, but the improvements in production are generally worth the risk, at least they have been with other foods we have been cloning for decades such as bananas for example. Anyways since its unlikely cloned animal stocks will come to represent a majority of the stocks gene pool its unlikely to be a serious problem.

 

Bananas are a great example. If we have a serious banana blight hit, we could lose almost every banana on the planet - because they are all sterile stock. (effectively cloned.) That's not a big deal for us, but is a very big deal for people who rely on them for sustenance.

Well, we already did it with bananas - so perhaps the lesson here is "don't make the same mistake again."

 

And a blight would not effect ALL bananas the same why? What makes you think this?

 

I wonder how cloned meat could get out of a laboratory and mysteriously end up being sold at a meat counter in a supermarket. Does it have legs, perhaps?

 

It would today - because they are all genetically very, very similar. It would not (for example) affect apples as badly, because there are a great many different strains, and they are not genetically identical.

 

Uh, yes. A cloned cow has just as many legs as its progenitor.

 

Oh really..

 

Explanation about bananas

The banana in its natural state is almost inedible because it is full of small hard seeds. On rare occasions, a mutation occurs and creates a seedless banana. The mutation currently used is the Cavendish variety. To propogate these seedless varieties, cuttings from suckers (baby banana trees) at the base of the banana tree are used (no seeds, see).

End result is that vast areas of banana plantation are one clone.

In fact, one variety has already largely disappeared. The Gros Michel variety was once the big seller, and was a sweeter banana. A fungus disease appeared, making it uneconomic to grow this variety, at which point we switched to Cavendish. There is already a fungus disease that affects Cavendish (Black Sigatoka Disease) and efforts are being made to genetically modify a Cavendish banana to resist this disease.

The difficulty is the rarity of the seedless mutation, making the number of edible strains very limited.

I have to say, though, that bananas are an extreme case of cloning susceptibility to disease. I know of no other crop that relies so heavily on one clone.