Is Cloned Food Safe?

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Jan. 15, 2008 -- After years of debate, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued its final risk assessment on cloning, stating that meat and dairy products from cloned cows, pigs, and goats (and their offspring) are safe.

That doesn’t mean meat and dairy products from cloned animals will be appearing on grocery store shelves right away. The FDA has asked the meat and dairy industry to continue its voluntary moratorium on using cloned food products. Although FDA spokespeople won’t say how long that moratorium will last—it could be months, if not a couple of years, before consumers would find cloned meat and dairy products in supermarkets.

To understand more about what the FDA ruling will ultimately mean for consumers, I spoke with Jaydee Hanson, a policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group that has been closely following the cloning issue.

What are the risks of cloned animal products entering the food-supply?
The real problem is that we don’t know, but neither does the FDA. Our review of the FDA studies is very troubling. The FDA is relying on very little peer-reviewed research on the impacts of consuming meat and dairy products from cloned cows, pigs, and goats.

The Center for Food Safety has petitioned the FDA to use the process they originally said they were going to use to evaluate the safety of food from cloned animals, which are the same standards they use to review new animal drugs. The process they used for evaluating cloning could not even be used for a new antibiotic used in animals because the science is not adequate.

We know that cloned animals are born sicker and therefore require more antibiotics. We also know that cloning can create chromosomal abnormalities and problems with gene expression. In addition, there’s reason to question whether products from cloned animals can cause allergic reactions. These are all issues the FDA review process has not addressed.

Another problem from a food safety perspective is the overall health of cloned animals. About half of the cloned animals die unexpectedly and the scientists can’t tell us why. They look healthy but then they suddenly die. Sick animals cannot be put into the food system, but if they don’t look sick, then they can and will go into the food system. We need multigenerational studies to understand why cloned animals are so unhealthy and whether these problems pose any kind of health risks for human consumption.

Will the FDA require companies selling meat and dairy products from cloned animals to label their products as such for consumers?

No.

Will there be any tracking system to allow the FDA to trace potential health problems with meat or dairy products back to cloned animals?

Not the way the FDA is currently doing it. The cloning industry has said they will implement voluntary tracking of cloned animals by putting radio frequency identification tags on the animals’ ears, like how Wal-Mart tracks shipments from China to the U.S. In theory, this would allow slaughterhouses to separate and track meat from cloned animals.

However, we believe the FDA and the USDA need to require mandatory tracking, and also mandatory labeling, of food sold to consumers. Otherwise, how would you be able to track whether or not eating cloned foods is causing allergic reactions or other health problems?

In addition, the industry is only proposing tracking cloned animals, not the offspring of cloned animals, which may also contain genetic abnormalities that could impact food safety.

Will companies that don’t use any cloned animals in their products be allowed to label them as clone-free?

So far, yes.

Hormel and Smithfield, two of the country’s largest pork producers, have said that they won’t use products from cloned animals. And Dean Foods, one of the country’s largest dairy producers, has also said they won’t use products from cloned animals.

However, there is the question of whether meat packers will actually have the ability to keep cloned and non-cloned meat separate. Genetically engineered “Starlink” corn was not approved for human consumption, but it ended up in taco shells anyway because the two different kinds of corn weren’t kept separate.

Unless the FDA requires tracking and separation of every single cloned animal and their offspring, consumers can’t know for sure that what they are eating is clone-free.

What can consumers do to avoid consuming meat and dairy products from cloned animals?

Right now, the only way to have 100 percent assurance that food is clone-free is to go organic. The Organic Standards Board at U.S. Department of Agriculture has already said that meat and dairy products cannot be labeled organic if they come from clone animals or the offspring of clones. Choosing products labeled “natural” will not be good enough since there’s no requirement that foods labeled “natural” be clone-free.