The Identical Make Believe

The Identical Make Believe

Imagine eating an entire organism that has been reproduced from a single cell taken from the parent organism and in a genetically identical manner. This means the cloned animal is an exact duplicate in every way of its parent; it has the same exact DNA. Surely this dish is not going to feel great to the stomach as it looked on the menu. Producers want to clone animals in order to speed up the demanding production process. Many scientists do not understand the fact that cloning in and of itself is a controversial topic that scratches upon morality, ethics, and religion and should not be performed for the sake of speeding up production especially if consumers are being misled.

The Natural Publishing Group created a consensus from a poll about cloning and received the following results “Humans have complex relationships with animals and give them much greater moral status than plants. In both North America and Europe, numerous surveys have suggested that public attitudes are generally ambivalent or negative toward a range of biotechnologies, including GM animals, GM crops and animal cloning” (Suk, “Dolly for Dinner”, 46). With that being said, the public themselves are incredibly sensitive to the idea that an animal could be cloned, an exact replica made from the original and made into their food. Many people that eat meat and processed foods don’t understand the realities of what is being put in those foods, what is being injected, and how it was raised and cultured. The public are not fully educated about the foods they are ingesting in their bodies, and what long term effects might occur in their lives and influence them exceedingly in the future.

“There are certain things only a government can do. And one of those things is ensuring that the foods we eat are safe and do not cause us harm.”- President Obama. The FDA is in charge of insuring that the food being distributed to the people is securely handled and safe to eat. The problem with this statement is the following supporting fact from the feature article about “Dolly for Dinner”. “A more general potential trade issue is that there is no scientific method (and no obvious basis) for distinguishing between the meat and milk of cloned and non-cloned animals (or the meat and milk from the offspring of cloned sires). Thus any labeling requirements related to the products of cloned animals would need to rely upon traceability regimes, which may be feasible in small, niche markets but less so in international commodity markets” (Suk, 47). This is very disturbing even to comprehend. It is practically saying that if producers decide to clone animals and produce food products from those animals, the FDA will refuse to label the food as “cloned food”, and the consumer is being misled into eating something they think is natural. This issue is morally and ethically challenging because many consumers