The Other White Meat

The article “The Other White Meat” discusses the question of cloning and its ethics and safety. Cloning is a technology that has been in existence since the mid 1990s when scientists successfully cloned a farm animal. Since that time, genetic engineers have been experimenting with the idea of cloning prize animals with superior traits in order to create a “supper breed”. The benefits of a super breed animal that had the most meat or milk production would of course be a huge asset for farmers with narrow profit margins.

Unfortunately however there are two major barriers that have stopped the mass use of these relatively new cloning technologies. First, technology scares the average consumer so much that they have all but destroyed the possibility of clones in the food system. The consumer feels that animals that have not been conceived in the conventional way are unnatural and are therefore unfit for consumption. Although there is no evidence that this is the case the FDA under strong pressure from consumers has discouraged the sale and distribution of any GM animals. Second, at this time the cost of cloning an animal is still prohibitively expensive. According to the article if a farmer were today to go out and get a conventional animal cloned it could cost in excess of twenty thousand dollars which compared to conventional methods is multiple times the price.

Discussion Questions:

1. What makes the average consumer so wary about the consumption of meat from cloned animals?

2. Do you believe it is ethical to clone an animal? If not, why not?

Note: all facts and statistics are taken from the article “The Other White Meat” in Best Food Writing/