http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/7932179/How-would-you-fancy-cloned-beef.htmlThe men in white coats are out in force, assuring us that milk and meat from cloned cattle presents no risk to human health. It's just food like any other food, they say. However, the Food Standards Agency seems startled, as though it has been roused from its bed in the middle of the night. It agrees that cloned food is safe to eat – or, rather, it prefers to hedge its bets, saying that there is no evidence to the contrary. Its only objection to the cloned milk and meat that has slipped silently into our food appears to be bureaucratic: the necessary forms have not been filled in nor permissions sought.
Consumers, on the other hand, can't get rid of the persistent, queasy feeling that there is something disturbing about food from clones. This isn't a uniquely British attitude, another expression of our dewy-eyed fondness for cuddly pets. Only last month, the European Parliament voted to ban cloned meat and milk. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration has been attacked by consumer and environmental groups for approving cloned food without adequate safety checks.
Such opposition is dismissed by advocates of cloning as irrational and backward, another example of how the over-sensitive ethical antennae of neurotic consumers with too much food in their bellies can get in the way of scientific progress feeding a hungry world. More evidence of the public's ignorance of science.
But while public objections to cloned food may not yet be fully formed, the instinct is right. We have every reason to be alarmed. Cloning is predicated on extreme animal suffering. Cloned food brings no additional nutritional benefits for human health, and insufficient research has been done to say with any authority that it presents no risks. As with genetically modified food, cloning is a standard-bearer for the increasingly dysfunctional, hi-tech agri-business system that has gripped farming for half a century, a system obsessed with churning out more food, faster, irrespective of the damage done to animals, human health and the environment. This places it at the heart of the debate about how we want to feed ourselves.
Cloning can sound like a neat, useful science. What farmer wouldn't want to make Identikit copies of his best milker or his leanest, fastest-growing pig? In reality, this technology is hopelessly hit-and-miss, generating a steady roll-call of deaths and defects. First, the embryo has to be implanted into a surrogate mother using a potentially painful surgical procedure. If they do not miscarry, these mothers often don't give birth naturally and must instead undergo a caesarean.
All this animal suffering, and for what? In one study of cloned sheep published in 2006, out of 93 clones transferred to surrogate mothers, only 12 reached full-term. Of these, three were stillborn and five died within 24 hours, displaying degenerative lesions in the liver and kidneys. Another two died 24 hours after birth, from respiratory distress syndrome. The final two cloned lambs showed respiratory dysfunction and died at around one month old due to a bacterial complication. Similar findings were reported in 2007, in a review that summarised five years of commercial cattle cloning in three countries. On average, 42 per cent of cattle clones died between delivery and 150 days of life.
As with GM food, cloning is a logical extension of the drive to increase the productivity of farm animals using conventional selective breeding techniques. The consequences of this mission are already only too apparent. The broilerhouse chickens that feed us have developed frames that can barely support their top-heavy breasts. Our dairy cows have difficulty walking because their udders are so distended and tender. To meet the output expected of them, more are increasingly kept indoors and "zero-grazed". The lives of too many of our pigs are blighted by painful lameness and heart problems.
Last week, plans that will horrify animal welfare experts were submitted to create Britain's largest dairy farm – a factory in Lincolnshire for more than 8,000 "battery cows". The cattle will be held on a circular milking parlour inside giant metal sheds with little access to grass or sunshine, and milked for 23 hours a day.
Even those who can turn a blind eye to animal suffering must worry that by pushing our farm animals beyond their natural limits, we are leaving ourselves more exposed to disease. Advocates of cloning argue that such fears are groundless, basing this on the fact that because the primary DNA sequence is unchanged, there is no reason to think that cloned food should be any less safe than its non-cloned equivalent.
However, the database here is extremely limited. There is little peer-reviewed research on the impact on human health of eating cloned food. A handful of studies has found some differences in milk composition between cloned and uncloned cows. Both the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) accept that cloned animals suffer from more infections than conventionally bred livestock. Might their meat and milk carry a higher burden of infectious pathogens? It's too early to tell, but the EFSA has raised the possibility: "Should evidence become available of reduced immunocompetence of clones… it should be investigated whether, and if so to what extent, consumption of meat and milk derived from clones or their offspring may lead to an increased human exposure to transmissible agents."
The notion that cloned animals could help feed a hungry world is flawed. Whether you are talking pigs, cows or sheep, the only way that cloned animals can hit the production targets expected of them is by munching their way through mountains of cereals and protein, food that would generate much more in the way of human nutrition if fed to people. Grass and forage simply won't do the trick. Twenty kilos of cereals have to be fed to intensively-reared cattle to produce 1 kg of edible beef. The great virtue of outdoor-reared, free-range livestock is that they can convert grass into food that we can eat, using land that is not suitable for other forms of food production. The great inefficiency of their factory-farmed counterparts is that they devour grains that humans could eat directly. Already 58 per cent of EU-grown cereals go to feed livestock.
Marketing cloned food to the British public won't be easy. No wonder supermarkets are rushing to assure us that they won't have it on their shelves.
Attempts to relax us by saying that familiar fruits are "clones" are as patronising as they are dishonest. The fruit and vegetables we eat now are the product of slow, selective breeding that has evolved over millennia.
A battle royal is looming. Quite correctly, cloning is perceived as taking us away from inherently resilient, self-reliant, tried-and-tested agriculture and into the hands of the reckless gamblers in the laboratories of profit-driven corporations that do not merit our trust. That's a food future that few people relish. And who can blame them?
Joanna Blythman is an investigative food journalist and author of 'Bad Food Britain: How a Nation Ruined Its Appetite' (Fourth Estate)
