We are rightfully absorbed in the immediate legal challenges to the availability of raw milk in California and New York.
But when I read recently that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will declare any day now that milk and meat from cloned animals and their offspring is safe to consume, I got this uneasy feeling we will be the victims of an end run.
The Wall Street Journal’s article predicting the approval pointed out that, while there may be initial resistance to such milk and meat, it can be expected to fade as consumers get used to the idea. “Consumers…have a long history of turning up their noses at technological innovations in food. It took years for consumers to accept pasteurized milk as safe.”
Those two sentences clarify a few things for me. They begin to explain why the U.S. Department of Agriculture and agribusiness are so relentless in pushing the National Animal Identification System. NAIS will enable agribusiness to document each cloned animal’s (patented) genetic strains, and make farming untenable for smaller farms that aren’t part of the cloning/transgenics "revolution."
The officials know from their experience with milk that gaining acceptance from farmers for a practice that will create financial ruin for many could take a number of years. After all, who wants to put themselves out of business?
But think about it. The effect of pasteurization, aside from likely undermining our society’s overall health, served to put many thousands of dairy farmers out of business by continually eroding their margins. Once people realized what was going on, it was too late to reverse the situation.
Not only that, once consumers finally do knuckle under, they wonder how things could have been otherwise. Isn’t that the way it is with milk? Now that we are three or four generations removed from the days when certified raw milk was easily available, most consumers wonder that anyone could be so kooky as to prefer unpasteurized milk.
The vision the regulators and agribusiness execs have today is that a few years down the road, few people will remember, or care, whether their milk and meat come from real animals or cloned animals. Sure, a few kooks might head out to real farms for the real stuff, but who cares about them?
There is something else that worries me about the coming cloning revolution—something I haven’t seen written about yet. I’ve read in a number of places, including the WSJ article, that the animals being cloned so far may be great milk producers or providers of tender meat, but that they are more prone to health problems than conventionally-bred animals.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if cloned animals, with their limited genetic diversity, were prone to outbreaks of diseases we don’t even know about yet? Then the authorities really would need to make use of NAIS, as the basis for eliminating much of the country’s entire milk and meat supply.
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Thank you, Kathryn, for updating us on the story of your destroyed barn. It’s wonderful to learn that so many people responded in such giving ways, though I must say I’m not surprised. There are lots of people out there who truly care. As you say, we shouldn’t underestimate "the power of strength of conviction and community." And with the insurance company showing signs of giving as well, the story could actually have as happy an ending as is possible in such a situation.
On the subject of the illnesses blamed on Organic Pastures Dairy Co., I’m not sure what else there is to say that hasn’t been said. This situation, more than any other, seems to stimulate the kind of negative emotions leading to the Internet misbehavior that is so offensive to most people here. Hopefully Mary and Melissa will return to trying to work the situation out with lawyers and other professionals, and not on this blog.
I see the basket of my food items shrinking all the time. It is getting to the point of if I don’t know where it came from and have no knowledge of the farmers methods, then I won’t buy it. GM/cloning is Not for me either.
Thanks for that link. I remember my dad saying they fed the pigs "clabbered" milk. I told him about that story, he was amazed. It appears that it will be harder and harder to obtain healthy food.
The PLU codes were all originally four digit numbers, but around ten or so years ago the standards body defined two additional prefixes. A prefix of ‘9’ indicates that the product is organic, so conventional bananas are 4011 and organic bananas are 94011. They also defined a prefix of ‘8’ to indicate a second category that was expected to become popular and prevalent, but if you search every grocery store you will not find a single five-digit PLU beginning with an ‘8’. As you’ve probably guessed, an ‘8’ prefix indicates that the product was genetically modified and while most groceries now have an organic section none would dare carry any proudly-marked GM foods!
Also, a few years back irradiated meat was going to become the norm and back before we bought bulk beef from our farmer I used to see the ‘Irradiated for your protection’ label on some pre-packaged meat. Granted that we very rarely buy conventional beef anymore, but I don’t believe that consumers warmed to that idea either and I don’t think it went anywhere. My point is that while the industry tries out all kinds of scary ideas to cut their costs and improve their profits, not everything works and they still do respond to market forces.
I wish it was as simple as straightforward market pressures, but as we don’t actually have a free market and they work tirelessly to ensure consumers do not understand the industrial food chain, it doesn’t quite work out that way.
"fododood", saying that out loud gave me my first laugh in a long time.
On the issue of food safety, a few years ago I started writing a futuristic fiction book, and one of the characters was raising cloned dairy cows. On researching the idea, I found there are dairy goats being raised on a military base up north, cloned and bred for milk that can be used to produce a spider silk fiber. At a later date I returned to the site, and it had claims that the goat milk was also safe to drink.
I posted it on a goat forum, and there were all sorts of questions about how they intended to keep the genetics of these goats out of the goat population. The chemical components of spider silk even if in liquid form, are not a large part of the human diet.
It figures that when trying to put together futuristic scenarios, running into a roadblock is going to be a real, live roadblock for the govt. also.
Gwen
I assume you are THE Gary Cox, from Columbus? 🙂
"Soylent green" indeed comes to mind when speaking of the Frankenfood.