Cloned beef: It's what's for dinner

[Doondoo]

The cloned steak was served medium rare. Inside the unusually hushed atrium of Campanile, the guests lifted slices of beef onto their plates. Executive chef Mark Peel had prepared the porterhouse with fleur de sel and cracked black pepper before pan-searing it with a little canola oil — a simple preparation to highlight the meat's natural flavor. It was the centerpiece of a dinner party convened to taste the future of food.

After years of research, meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring are moving toward supermarkets, restaurants and backyard barbecues. The Food and Drug Administration recently declared the fare safe to eat, although it took scientists 678 pages to make their case. They said the meat was so much like regular beef that special labeling would be unnecessary.

Thousands of consumers, unswayed by the promise of genetically superior steaks, have written the agency in opposition. Still, cloned products could become part of the food supply by year's end. The general public has been shielded from cloned meat by a voluntary moratorium issued by the FDA in 2001. But six intrepid diners agreed to participate in cloned beef's debut on the culinary scene in a private dinner convened by The Times.

Several prospective diners declined the invitation.

Eric Schlosser, author of "Fast Food Nation" and self-described omnivore, said: "I'd rather eat my running shoes than eat meat from a cloned animal."

Spago chef Lee Hefter, who recently opened the Beverly Hills steakhouse Cut, agreed to host this dinner before abruptly changing his mind.

"I don't want people to think that I would ever use it," he said. "I don't want to condone cloned beef. I don't want to eat it. I don't want it in my kitchen."



http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-clone4mar04,0,3131170.story?coll=la-home-nation

[JitterbugPerfume]

1. yuck

even if it were proven to be perfectly safe, I still choose not to eat it.

As time goes by , I eat meat less and less

[aikoaiko]

2. Is there any data on cloned animal meat being dangerous for consumption?

:shrug:

[mike_c]

3. good gawd, we eat cloned plants every day, and have for centuries...

...with no ill effects. This fear of cloned meat is really knee-jerk fear of anything new and different. Meat is meat-- if a clone is genetically indistinguishable from the top-quality naturally born steer that it was cloned from, and you can't tell the difference between their meat down to the genetic level, what is there to fear? Kooties?

Cloned animals will never replace naturally conceived zygotes as long as there is open pasture and rain, for simple economic reasons. This is a lot of wasted hysteria, IMO.

[Buzz Clik]

4. "...unswayed by the promise of genetically superior steaks..." So, what is swaying them?

Unbridled, irrational fear?

We're not talking GMOs here -- these critters are 100% bovine. What's the beef?

[gulliver]

5. Yeah, I would rather eat a porterhouse from a ten-year-old...

... dairy cow that a farmer was just able to get to her feet. Don't give me meat from a 1.5-year-old clone of a steer chosen because it was healthy enough to require no drugs and produced the highest quality of beef. I want my steak produced by sexual reproduction only. That's much more appetizing and ethical.

;-)

The Spago chef, Lee Hefter, is funny too. He won't serve cloned beef, but I'll bet he has no problem with veal and lamb. Chef politicians...