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Consumers may not be able to avoid cloned food
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/18/MN2EUSFR0.DTL

Bernadette Tansey, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, February 18, 2008
Alison Van Eenennaam of UC Davis shows off a Holstein cow... Albert Straus
of the Straus Family Creamery wants disclos... Alison Van Eenennaam of UC
Davis shows off a Holstein cow...

Less than a dozen years after Dolly the sheep became the world's first
cloned mammal, grocers and restaurateurs are digesting the fact that milk
and meat from cloned animals could soon filter into their supply chains.

The government took major steps toward easing cloned livestock and their
offspring into the food supply in mid-January, when the Food and Drug
Administration concluded they're safe to eat.

The question is, will consumers swallow the new technology? And how will
food businesses cope if their customers balk?

Many food merchants are still framing their policies while they warily
monitor public opinion. The historic commercial debut of cloning comes in
an era when a significant segment of consumers have rejected other foods
the FDA deemed safe, such as milk from hormone-treated cows and genetically
modified corn.

Cloning is an attempt to create a new animal using the DNA from an existing
adult animal. The FDA, while noting that livestock cloning produces many
malformed or ill newborn animals, said cloned animals that survive for
several months after birth can be healthy. They can reproduce normally and
produce healthy young, the FDA said. The agency said it found no signs that
food from healthy clones is harmful to humans, and predicted that sickly
clones would be excluded from the food supply.

Consumer groups, however, have called FDA's positive safety assessment
hasty and ill-founded. The Center for Food Safety said the FDA based many
conclusions on small or limited studies, many of them financed by cloning
companies. Clones that appear healthy can have infections, or abnormalities
that could affect food quality such as unusual proteins or imbalances
between protein and fats, the group said. Further studies should be done to
evaluate clones and their offspring, the organization said.

Such groups are urging consumers to press their supermarkets and
restaurants to refuse food from clones. And those businesses are being
peppered with inquiries like "Will my hamburger meat come from a cloned
cow?" and "Are clones kosher?"

Independent grocer Sam Mogannam said he didn't need any calls from his
customers to know if they'd accept food from cloned lineages. He's sure
they won't. And he has no intention of stocking any at Bi-Rite Market,
which he bills as a mecca for organic, sustainable and non-artificial foods
in San Francisco's Mission District.

"We believe in allowing nature to take its due course," he said. "I know
our customers wouldn't support us if they knew we were knowingly accepting
products from clones or their offspring."

But food merchants, from small shop owners to national supermarket chains,
could face formidable challenges if they want to guarantee customers the
option of avoiding all products linked to cloning.

No public system is in place to alert food sellers when products from
animal lines that include clones could reach their shelves - whether in the
form of a rib-eye steak, a quart of low-fat milk, a can of beef minestrone
or a wedge of sharp cheddar.

Consumer groups such as the Center for Food Safety and Consumers Union
support mandatory labeling of all products linked to cloning, from raw meat
to meatball sandwiches. They're backing bills proposed in Congress and by a
few state legislators, including state Sen. Carole Migden, D-San Francisco.
Without labeling, they argue, any food safety problems that did arise from
cloning would never be linked to the technology.

Some retailers, after hearing from customers, are also calling for some
form of government action. Two supermarket chains with a significant
presence in Northern California, Safeway and Whole Foods Market, say the
government should oversee a system to track clones through the food supply.
It should also consider other means, such as food labeling, to ensure that
consumers can make informed choices about products of cloning, the
companies said.

"The lack of effective governmental oversight and tracking could mean
consumers will lose the ability to choose clone-free products," Whole Foods
spokeswoman Margaret Wittenberg said.

The FDA maintains that no labeling or disclosure requirements are necessary
to protect public health. The agency, after years of study, issued a
lengthy report Jan. 15 concluding that milk and meat from cloned cattle,
pigs and goats are safe for consumption. The FDA said it had too little
information to assess cloned sheep, but it found no food safety problems
connected with the progeny of clones.

The offspring of all cloned livestock were immediately cleared as food
sources by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, based on the FDA's findings.
Clones themselves - cattle, pigs and goats - will also enter the food
supply. But when, and under what regulatory scheme, if any, has not yet
been decided.

The USDA is inviting industry input as it develops a plan to usher cloned
animals into the market. In the meantime, the agency is asking companies
that have created or purchased clones to honor a voluntary ban on selling
their meat or milk for food.

This means that Ditto, a cloned cow created by a UC Davis researcher, can't
be a food source just yet because the university honors the temporary ban.
But UC Davis is now free to sell milk or meat from Ditto's daughter, an
unnamed Holstein cow conceived by sexual reproduction.

Even before the FDA's favorable report, a few clone owners admitted in
various news reports that they had already sold milk or meat from the
animals as food.

As the rules stand now, livestock breeders and milk or meat suppliers have
no legal obligation to disclose to either food manufacturers or consumers
that a product came from a cloned animal line. Some vendors plan to keep
their products clear of cloned lineages, but the FDA may not permit
packages to bear a voluntary label such as "clone free."

Safeway Inc. of Pleasanton, one of the nation's largest food retailers,
said its customers are demanding more information. The company acknowledged
that the government conducted important studies on food from clones. But to
help shoppers make informed choices about products tied to cloning, Safeway
supports additional studies "that would help ensure changes to federal
policy are done in a manner that maintains consumer confidence and informed
decision making."

The Pleasanton chain, which has 269 stores in Northern California, is
asking its suppliers to deliver no products from cloned animals while the
government mulls its options. "Meanwhile, the federal government should
exercise its authority and expertise to determine an appropriate regulatory
framework, including traceability and labeling," Safeway said in response
to a Chronicle inquiry. Safeway declined to say whether it will accept
foods from the offspring of clones.

Trader Joe's, a Monrovia (Los Angeles County) grocery chain that carries
many organic product lines, did not respond to The Chronicle's query.

Bruce Knight, USDA undersecretary for marketing, said the agency is willing
to help industry members create a tracking and certification program if
they request it. The USDA already administers standards and certification
of organic products. Knight said the USDA would work with companies that
want to set up voluntary labeling of food from clones.

Few food businesses have actively sought to sell products from cloned
animal lines, but all could be affected by the few U.S. cloning companies
in business. Their customers are farmers who want replicas of valuable
breeding animals - clones of a prize bull, for example, whose semen fetches
high prices for artificial insemination. As breeders, cloned animals could
quickly influence the gene pool of U.S. livestock. The preserved semen of
one bull can be sent throughout the country to produce thousands of
descendants.

One healthy cloned calf can cost as much as $20,000. But these expensive
animals may enter the meat supply when their reproductive lives wane. Their
milk will also be sold for dairy products.

At this point, retailers that want to avoid food from clones are relying on
private agreements with their suppliers, who in turn have to trust their
own sources. Meat packers may be able to exclude some clones by consulting
an industry database of cloned animals whose owners volunteer to register
them. The two major livestock cloning companies, ViaGen Inc. and Trans Ova
Genetics, are developing the registry with the certification company
AgInfoLink. Meatpackers would be able to scan or read an animal's ear tag
to identify clones, said AgInfoLink executive Glenn Smith.

At this point, AgInfoLink doesn't plan to track the milk, semen or
offspring of clones. But Smith said that could change if retailers request
such services.

Most food outlets that have taken a stand on cloning have said they will
exclude clones themselves, but not necessarily food from their progeny.

Natural foods retailer Whole Foods Market of Austin, Texas, which has 24
stores in Northern California, said its products will remain free of both
clones and their descendants.

"We are working with our supplier community to develop a chain of custody
records that trace product breeding stock through multiple generations,"
said Edmund LaMacchia, vice president of purchasing for perishables.

It's not clear, however, that all USDA-certified organic operations will be
completely "clone free." Some organic producers say they're not sure yet
how they can guarantee that their animals have no ties to cloning. That
includes Albert Straus, president of Straus Family Creamery in Marin
County, which supplies all the dairy products for Sam Mogannam's Mission
District market and nearby ice cream store.

Like most dairy operators, Straus relies on artificial insemination to
reproduce his herd. Straus wants the government to require semen suppliers
to reveal whether their products come from a cloned bull or its young.
Without such certainty, Straus said, dairies might lose their organic
certification from the USDA.

USDA's organic standards do rule out clones, but the agency may permit the
use of a clone's descendants, Knight said. Therefore, consumers who want to
avoid food from both clones and their offspring may not be able to rely
solely on the organic label.

Buying only kosher foods won't insulate consumers from products of cloning
at all. Rabbi Menachem Genack of the Orthodox Union, which certifies food
items as kosher, said cloned animals would qualify as long as they belong
to a single kosher species, such as cattle, sheep and goats.

At this point, consumer choice rests on a patchwork chain of voluntary
agreements among suppliers and retailers.

The first time many Americans take a bite of food from a cloned animal or
its offspring, they may never know it.
Cloning's imperfections at center of debate

Twenty years from now, the eating public may blithely accept food from
cloned animals. But at this point, consumer groups are aghast at government
actions to usher cloned livestock and their offspring into the U.S. food
supply. To a large extent, the resistance stems from the fact that
livestock cloning is still an imperfect art.

The Food and Drug Administration found in January that food from healthy
clones and their progeny is safe. But in the same lengthy report, the FDA
also detailed snags in the current art of animal cloning that reduce its
rate of producing healthy clones to less than 10 percent. Many cloned
embryos die or develop into sickly newborns.

Among consumer groups, those technical snags have raised questions not only
about food safety, but also about animal welfare and ethics. They contend
that further study may reveal health dangers the FDA didn't discover, as
new testing methods emerge. In the FDA's view, future research will not
only confirm the safety of food from clones, but will also improve methods
of creating them.

Clones are made by coaxing a single adult cell from the original animal -
call it a bull named George - to form an embryo that will become George2.
The nucleus containing George's DNA is swapped into an egg cell from a cow,
after the egg's nucleus is removed. The hope is that the resulting embryo,
implanted in a surrogate mother, will be an exact copy of George. But about
90 percent of the time, that doesn't happen.

Clones can be born grossly malformed, and many die within six months. The
fetuses can grow too large, causing difficult, extended pregnancies ending
with delivery by cesarean section, the FDA found in a review of scientific
studies.

But the FDA said clones that survive past six months are often healthy and
fertile. Their offspring have even fewer health problems, the agency said.
No significant differences appeared in milk or meat from cloned animal
lines and their non-cloned counterparts, FDA reported.

The FDA acknowledged that newborn clones are often sick or dying, but said
those animals would never pass inspection for entry into the food supply.

Consumer groups aren't convinced that cloning raises no safety concerns.
For example, they suspect that many young clones will survive only through
treatment with antibiotics and other drugs. Such animals could enter the
food supply and affect human health, they contend.

An ethics board advising the European Food Safety Authority concluded in
January that cloning for food production cannot be justified at this point
because of the suffering of both deformed clones and their surrogate
mothers, or dams, in animal breeding terms.

On the question of food safety, however, the European Food Safety Authority
agreed with the FDA. The FDA, whose purview is limited to food safety, did
not evaluate the ethics of cloning.
Online resources

Read the FDA's risk

assessment of cloning: www.fda.gov/cvm/

cloning.htm

Read the Center for Food Safety's critique of FDA's report:
www.centerforfood safety.org/Policy.cfm