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WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government has decided that food from cloned animals is safe to eat and does not require special labeling.
The Food and Drug Administration planned to brief industry groups in advance of an announcement Thursday morning. The FDA indicated it would approve cloned livestock in a scientific journal article published online earlier this month.
Consumer groups say labels are a must, because surveys have shown people to be uncomfortable with the idea of cloned livestock.
However, FDA concluded that cloned animals are "virtually indistinguishable" from conventional livestock and that no identification is needed to judge their safety for the food supply.
"Meat and milk from clones and their progeny is as safe to eat as corresponding products derived from animals produced using contemporary agricultural practices," FDA scientists Larisa Rudenko and John C. Matheson wrote in the January 1 issue of Theriogenology.
Labels should only be used if the health characteristics of a food are significantly altered by how it is produced, said Barb Glenn of the Biotechnology Industry Organization.
"The bottom line is, we don't want to misinform consumers with some sort of implied message of difference," Glenn said. "There is no difference. These foods are as safe as foods from animals that are raised conventionally."
Critics of cloning say the verdict is still out on the safety of food from cloned animals.
"Consumers are going to be having a product that has potential safety issues and has a whole load of ethical issues tied to it, without any labeling," said Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the Center for Food Safety.
Carol Tucker Foreman, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, said the FDA is ignoring research that shows cloning results in more deaths and deformed animals than other reproductive technologies.
The consumer federation will ask food companies and supermarkets to refuse to sell food from clones, she said.
"Meat and milk from cloned animals have no benefit for consumers, and consumers don't want them in their foods," Foreman said.
The FDA scientists wrote that by the time clones reached 6 to 18 months of age, they were virtually indistinguishable from conventionally bred animals.
Final approval of cloned animals for food is months away; the FDA will accept comments from the public after issuing a draft risk assessment on Thursday.
Those in favor of the technology say it would be used primarily for breeding and not for steak or pork tenderloin.
Cloning lets farmers and ranchers make copies of exceptional animals, such as pigs that fatten rapidly or cows that are superior milk producers.
"It's not a genetically engineered animal; no genes have been changed or moved or deleted," Glenn said. "It's simply a genetic twin that we can then use for future matings to improve the overall health and well-being of the herd."
Thus, consumers would mostly get food from their offspring and not the clones themselves, Glenn said.
Still, some clones would eventually end up in the food supply. As with conventional livestock, a cloned bull or cow that outlived its usefulness would probably wind up at a hamburger plant, and a cloned dairy cow would be milked during her breeding years.
That's unlikely to happen soon, because FDA officials have asked farmers and cloning companies since 2001 to voluntarily keep clones and their offspring out of the food supply. The informal ban would remain in place for several months while FDA accepts comments from the public.
Approval of cloned livestock has taken five years because of pressure from big food companies nervous that consumers might reject milk and meat from cloned animals.
To produce a clone, the nucleus of a donor egg is removed and replaced with the DNA of a cow, pig or other animal. A tiny electric shock coaxes the egg to grow into a copy of the original animal. Cloning companies say it's just another reproductive technology, such as artificial insemination, yet there can be differences between the two because of chance and environmental influences.
Some surveys have shown people to be uncomfortable with food from cloned animals; 64 percent said they were uncomfortable in a September poll by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a nonpartisan research group.
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Goal for 2008: Half as many penalties.
I dont know I am pretty progressive in my thinking imo. Meaning I am open to a ton of things society isnt. But I have to say I think cloning will turn out ugly because we dont really know what we are doing yet.
I would want labels because I do not want to buy it.
But then again I pay a ton extra every week to buy organic foods because I think what we do to food now is disgusting.
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Goal for 2008: Half as many penalties.
Just put freaking labels on it and let consumers decide whether to eat it.
And I don't think these animals should be labeled "organic" either, even if they produce in an organic fashion they were created in a lab, not organically.
Our FrankenFood is terrible with all the hormones and stuff pumped into the livestock and the engineering going on.
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I'm the anti-TNT. I don't do drama.
I dont know I am pretty progressive in my thinking imo. Meaning I am open to a ton of things society isnt. But I have to say I think cloning will turn out ugly because we dont really know what we are doing yet.
I would want labels because I do not want to buy it.
I hate all the preservatives and thing they do to our food in the name of saftey or greater profits.
There is one thing they could do that would make most of the preservatives obsolete. It doesn't affect the food at all, except to kill and bugs present.
That is gamma irraditation. As soon as you mention this, consumers go ballistic. It has the word irradiation, must be bad, evil and dangerous. Well it is very well understood and is only dangerous to echoli and it's brethern [can explain more if interested, but that is a true statement.
The technology has been around for decades but the one try they made had the infamous 'labels' guess what nobody would by the stuff. They prefer their milk products [etc] full of chemical preservatives.
It really is safe and if you treated an orange with it, You could leave that orange on the shelf for months [or longer] and it would still be fresh. Ditto milk, treat a carton of milk and there are no bugs in it, none zippo.
One of the biggest problems isn't the stuff they put in food it's the gross overuse of antibiotics on animals that will probably cause the most problems.
Cattle ranchers absolutely overuse the stuff causing the probablility that some form of bacteria will grow resistant to it to skyrocket.
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At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
I think my point Jersey was that the stuff they don't label is usually because the aggra-businesses lobby against it. Much of the stuff they do label [such are irradiation] are things that aggra business either doesn't care about. They do care that you don't know about much of the stuff they use to produce food
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