The Cloned Food Conundrum

Cloned food is already on sale in the UK, according to the president of the National Farmers’ Union of Scotland, Jim McLaren, and in September 2010 the FSA said that it would be impossible to set up a regime to trace and label food from “Frankenfarm” animals.

The organisation said that this was because the international trade in embryos and semen from cloned animals is already so widespread that it cannot be stopped or regulated. As a result, consumers could be routinely eating meat and milk from the offspring of cloned cattle without realising it.

Keeping watch

Professor Hugh Pennington, one of the UK’s most eminent food scientists, told foodprocessing-technology.com that he agrees with the FSA opinion that it is effectively impossible to trace cloned food and therefore very difficult for regulators to limit its spread. “The information simply does not exist that would allow you to trace if an animal is the great-granddaughter of a cloned start up, while implementing such a system would be very expensive and not in the public interest because it would be difficult to identify any benefits that would arise.”

However, Pennington also believes that the spread of cloned food does not present any risks at all from a scientific point of view.

“Cloned food involves producing identical copies of plants and foods that have some inherent advantage, such as disease resistance, so the spread of such foods should be in the public interest. I think the real issue is whether or not the public can be persuaded of the advantages of cloned food rather than questioning its safety.”

An ethical issue?

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) remains totally opposed to cloning for food production “on animal welfare and ethical grounds. Cloning has huge potential to cause unnecessary pain, suffering and distress which cannot be justified by purely commercial benefits.”

The RSPCA argues that “cloning is inefficient, wastes animals’ lives and causes them suffering and distress at all stages of the process.”

Pennington, a former professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen, admits that the technology involved in cloning large animals such as cattle is still under development and that critics have seized on problems in this area.

“The first clones sometimes have a short life, for example, but I suspect these problems will be resolved, and I can’t see why the cloned animals should be any different from the original animal.”

The professor points out that in terms of health concerns, “generally speaking, we’re not actually consuming the cloned animal itself, but products from the progeny of cloned animals, so beef and milk, for example, are going to be as safe as that from non-cloned cows.

“Quite simply, cloning expands the population of high-quality products and man has been modifying his food to this end for hundreds of years.”

Warming public opinion

In terms of regulatory issues, Pennington believes that the FSA finds itself “in slight difficulty” because it has said that the progeny of cloned animals is a normal food, which then leads “to the argument of how far you have to go from the cloned original before declaring a product safe. Is it the grandson or granddaughter or even further down the line? There is no simple answer.”

Turning to public opposition to cloned foods, Pennington admits that it may prove an uphill struggle to convince people of the benefits of these products, but he is “moderately optimistic that whenever the FSA, or another organisation, does a survey on food, price always turns out to be the most important factor. Thus, if foods can be produced that are of a higher quality and considerably lower price than existing products, then I think the balance of the argument might shift. The technology could then be seen as being exploited in a positive manner. However, you still have to get rid of the lurking suspicion that there is something inherently unsound about the technology, a concern which leads to all sorts of safety concerns.”

Pennington admits that the food industry has been proven successful in highlighting the advantages of modern farming and the technological advances behind its development, while the public appears confused about what “natural” actually means.

“Apart from eating blackberries picked from hedgerows, very few of the foods that we consume are natural in the sense that they haven’t been subject to hundreds of years of breeding and selection. We don’t drink milk from wild cattle, and it’s the same with cereals and vegetables – potatoes are a long way from the original South American product.

There is a general lack of understanding of what natural means. Thus, crops and animals are farmed on land that is far from being natural – in the UK, the landscape is almost entirely manmade. All farming today is highly managed and artificial, and that is a good thing for us and for the animals, and the latter’s welfare is very important. On a modern farm, for example, milking is highly mechanised – the animal wanders in to the milking parlour when it feels like it. Not only is the cow happier, but modern methods result in cheaper milk for the consumer.”