Cloned Beef is Coming Down the Pike

It is not here yet, but cloned beef is “in the cards.” The idea is that if you have a great piece of steak, and are really happy with it, why not clone another cow from that steak, and have a great steak again? Apparently only 1 in 8000 cows “taste great!” It sounds like science fiction, but we getting very close to science fact.

Cloned Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner

“What if you could carve off a chunk of the most succulent slab of steak you’ve ever eaten, clone a bull from it, then produce weeks of identically delectable dinners? Irina Polejaeva, chief embryologist at ViaGen, a livestock-cloning lab in Austin, Texas, aims to bring cloned beef to the American dinner table within the next few years. Since 2005, ViaGen has cloned half a dozen cows from strips of beef, a procedure that enables the company to test the quality of the meat before bringing it back to life. Clones would head to a breeder, and their offspring would go into a chain of feedlots, slaughterhouses and, finally, your burger. But first, the Food and Drug Administration must rule on the safety of cloned meat, a decision that could make or break the most controversial idea in the food industry since the transgenic tomato.”

My question is, with the introduction of hormones and other chemicals in our current meat supply causing untold effects on consumers, how will we know what effects cloned meat will have on those same consumers? And once we know, will it be too late? Keep mine natural and organic, thanks!