Meat From Animal Cloning: Safe, or Maybe Not Safe, or Maybe, Already Being Consumed, or Definitely, Government Doesn’t Know What is Going On

The government has taken two actions that certainly don’t give one cause for confidence. On one hand, the FDA has said meat from cloned animals is safe! No question! Eat away! On the other hand the people at the Department of Agriculture seem to be not so sure. It is urging a volunteer moratorium on marketing meat. From the story:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture yesterday asked U.S. farmers to keep their cloned animals off the market indefinitely even as Food and Drug Administration officials announced that food from cloned livestock is safe to eat.

Bruce I. Knight, the USDA’s undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, requested an ongoing “voluntary moratorium” to buy time for “an acceptance process” that Knight said consumers in the United States and abroad will need, “given the emotional nature of this issue.”

Yet even as the two agencies sought a unified message — that food from clones is safe for people but perhaps dangerous to U.S. markets and trade relations — evidence surfaced suggesting that Americans and others are probably already eating meat from the offspring of clones.

Executives from the nation’s major cattle cloning companies conceded yesterday that they have not been able to keep track of how many offspring of clones have entered the food supply, despite a years-old request by the FDA to keep them off the market pending completion of the agency’s safety report.