Eh, clones are only a half-step towards the ideal. Bring on the vats of cultured flesh, I say. Bring them on!

Well. Once we’ve got an appropriate alternative to bovine serum albumin, anyway. Feeding vats of cultured meat with ground-up baby cows isn’t particularly cost-effective.

Excellent article.

Where do the Greens stand on this?!

They don’t really talk about cloned food, per se – http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/mfss/mfssfd.html

It’s one policy area that the greens really fall down on. I suspect the cribbed it directly from Greenpeace.

You missed out carrots Unity. Originally they were a fetching shade of purple and were genetically modified and cloned to become orange in honour of William of Orange.
The only problem with cloned cows in the greenhouse gases they emit.

Interesting post.

One issue I should point out, however, is the drastic and lamentable loss of plant species as a result of increased homogenisation of product – a function of the industrialisation of food production.

Whilst I’m no biologist and a pretty lame gardener (although the plums were good this year), I imagine that homogenisation increases vulnerability to pests and diseases. In fact, I know this is the case.

Quite aside from the economic arguments, by promoting a single product, you threaten other species reliant on the wider ecosystem. You lose taste – variety, as they say, is the spice of life. There is even a cultural impact.

Should your example – cloned meat products – be pursued to its logical conclusion, I suspect the result would be the virtual extinction of “less competitive” breeds such as the English Longhorn.

Originally [carrots] were a fetching shade of purple

Ah, this reminds me of when ‘experts’ were complaining that depleted uranium ammunition had made carrots purple in Southern Iraq. They hadn’t heard of purple carrots, you see, and hadn’t bothered to find out if they were naturally occurring.

Well, the issue with bananas currently demonstrates the various present issues with cloning and propagation. Long story short – bananas will taste like apples in 10 years time.

For meat, at least in part because of public reaction to cloned/cultured meat, I expect things to be quite different though. Basically, cloned/cultured meat wins on cost grounds – so all the giant, poorly-treated herds of livestock, battery-farmed chickens, etc, get competed out on price (which is probably a net good for animal welfare). Most people don’t actually care too much, once the tabloids stop whipping up fear – they just buy the cheapest.

People who do care, and people who want premium product, are already willing to pay extra for, say, organic chicken or aberdeen angus beef or whatever. Since the cloned cheap meat will be more objectional to more people than the non-cloned cheap meat (for whatever reasons), that market will grow somewhat, leading to more of these animals – rare breeds, well-treated, etc – being produced. Another net win for animal welfare.

It’s also worth noticing that ‘conventional’ intensive livestock-rearing has done enough damage to the genetic heritage of our livestock, anyway – you’d be amazed (or perhaps not) by just how few ‘stud boars’ there are, for instance.

Mind you, there are some pretty serious concerns, with cloned animals, about the treatment required to actually produce them – alright, so the current fertilisation procedures aren’t exactly “as nature intended”, but they’re a damned sight less intrusive than the extremely crude methods used in clone production. That’s something this article doesn’t touch on at all, and one of the reasons why I don’t really see cloned animal meat & milk really taking off (they’re not really cheaper to maintain than conventional intensively-farmed animals either, of course, and the setup costs are pretty huge).

J – indeed, homogenisation is the risk.

From the gardening side you should consider supporting this charity:

http://www.nccpg.com/

(Try to ignore the picture of Titchmarsh!)

@7 – I am well aware that current agricultural practice is far from ‘enlightened’ when it comes to assessing the overall environmental impact! I am not some weirdy-beardy return to nature dude either – I’m not an agricultural Luddite seeking to return to some golden age of yore.

Actually, I think people were starving hungry most of the time and diseased and plagued the rest.

But I disagree that cloned meat will represent a net plus for animal welfare – I imagine it is the case that current practice will be replicated, such that you have “giant, poorly-treated herds of livestock [and] battery-farmed chickens” which have been cloned.

That is surely the most economically efficient method of producing meat; else, why would anyone bother?

I also disagree that introducing cloning will result in growth in the more ‘ethical’ practices (and increased numbers of rare breeds, etc.). Consumers consistently express a preference for ethical products (free range over battery), but consistently divert funds t’other way.

Plant varieties have experienced a constant decline, despite the apparent interest and concern of ‘new foodies’.

What I would like to see (and yes, I know it is naively idealistic) is some wider appreciation of the total cost of industrialised food production – including the impact on biodiversity; considering culture, social factors, etc. – rather than a crude profit-driven approach, where the major players shirk responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

@8 – thank you for the link. Funnily enough, I’ve come across these guys before – when I was searching for a heritage seed catalogue.

According to some estimates, Britain has lost over 98% of its vegetable varieties over the past 100 years – and overly-restrictive EU laws threaten many other species, some of which have a rich cultural or social history.

And most of which simply taste delicious!

Good to see the issue debated sensibly for a change, though I’m with J here.

Cloning is neither more nor less ‘natural’ or ‘humane’ than any other form of farming, but diversity is an issue both as a defense against disease and for variety’s sake.

J – apologies, I guess I was conflating cloned and cultured meat to quite an extent there, which is extremely bad of me.

Cloned meat is fine, but it doesn’t offer much above and beyond current intensive farming, and there’s no particular reason to take it up large-scale. Cultured meat is where it’s at.

There is a market for ‘prestige’ meat, I guess you could call it – I never said it was big (although it’s not small – free-range egg shelf space at my local supermarket now outweighs battery egg shelf space, for instance); but every customer who is turned off the cheapest meat for whatever reason must, by necessity, either buy the more expensive (and almost certainly more-ethical) meat, or go vegetarian. Cloned animals are public-consciousness-objectionable enough, I think, to have some effect there.

The issue of GM and cloning has, as usual, been hijacked by romantic nutters who haven’t a clue about what they’re talking about. If we should be concerned about anything its what is actually being cloned or engineered, not the technology itself.

I would not like to see more extreme cattle than those we have made by simple breeding. Have you seen the size of a modern Holstein cow? They need huge feed supplements to produce vast amounts of watery milk. Some agronomists might advocate selecting for those that manage the stress better but I prefer grass-fed channel island cow milk anyway. Happier cattle, lower inputs and a better product. Try it if you can find it!

Problem is, if we want to keep up our current levels of meat and meat-product consumption, we more or less /have/ to increasingly intensify production.

I’m all for the argument that people should eat meat less often, but as a nation we seem to be fairly allergic to lifestyle changes for the sake of sustainability.

@12 – sorry, I misunderstood (not intentionally).

Cultured meat is an interesting one. I haven’t yet read widely enough to have formed a coherent opinion, but I can’t see any major objection.

It’s interesting to hear your anecdotal evidence of the success of free range eggs (shelf space seems a reasonable indicator). However, I would point out that this is only the retail purchase of actual eggs – products containing egg (and chicken, for that matter) very rarely use free range birds, and make up a far larger percentage of the total market.

In Liverpool, of the seven major supermarket stores I can reasonably access (without a car), only one sells free range chicken – and they get four “facings”. Still, the eggs counter is much more balanced. I suppose that’s progress!

(Needless to say, there’s no grass-fed Channel Island cow’s milk – at least, not to my knowledge – which is a pity…)

Isn’t it the case that cloned animals have significantly higher birth defects and a significantly lower life span than conventionally reared animals?

The reluctance to embrace GM covered a spectrum of views including the perception that the consumer was covering the risk whilst industry gained the financial benefit. I suspect the same will be true for cloning.

The main problems with cultured meat really are scientific & technological at the moment – it’s all quite exciting. Since you can (in theory) culture any flesh, in the future we might be able to make the high-quality milk you love so much from a flesh vat, too .

Eggs – http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/may/15/free-range-egg-sales-increase is reasonably worth reading – I can’t find anything more recent in a quick search. Notable is the large list of people who are using free-range eggs when they need egg in another product. Wonder if quorn use free-range egg… *emails them*

Ethical chicken – http://www.rspca.org.uk/getinvolved/campaigns/chickens/consumerdemand for chickens more generally – the RSPCA’s being misleading with their figures there, reporting deltas rather than actual numbers (we spend > £900m on chicken every year, I think, so we’re still looking at < 10% being woodvale). Still, it's an encouraging trend.

For what it's worth, I always buy free range eggs, and free-range chicken about half the time. Aside from "aberdeen angus" there doesn't really seem to be a similar drive for "free-range beef" in the shops… which is unfortunate.

Having worked with cell cultures for a few years some time ago I must admit some scepticism at the idea of vat-grown meat. The nature and cost of culture media would have to change considerably. If the point is to make something that tastes good and is a reasonable, nutritious substitute for meat then the technology already exists.

Here’s another thought: We can spin proteins from fungi or soybeans into all sorts of meat-like foods. Why not insects or slugs and snails even? When I cultured moths I can confirm that the larvae were prolific, rich in fats and needed very simple culture media.

Slugburger, anyone?

Cor, there’s a whole foundation – http://www.invitromeatfoundation.eu/

Loving the Churchill quote. Quote me happy, indeed!

So, in a brief summary, whilst cloning may be a bad idea for sustaining foodstuffs (especially because, as no-one seems to have mentioned, clones are not identical to their DNA source) no-one here has a particular concern about eating the meat.

Come on, there’s normally one person around who can be relied on to object to anything. Where are our Daily Mail reading idiots when we need them?

Er, cloning animals is not the same as cloning plants (or rather, modern laboratory cloning is not the same as taking cuttings). For one thing most scientific talk of cloning is not focussed on the making of an identical ‘clone’ (i.e. splitting an embryo), but on the process of cloning DNA. We talk about cloning when we insert new segments of DNA into existing DNA. Or at least I used to when I was working towards my BSc in Human Genetics.

I’ve not got the background on this particular cow, whether it was in any way genetically modified. That’s the bigger question here.

I worry that there’s a push here to replace one type of anti-scientific bullshit with another.

Great to see the so called free market , customer is always right, pro capitalist, pro choice for the consumer trolls supporting the idea of devious farmers pushing stuff onto their customers without telling them the truth.

Who needs Chairman Mao when you can have dishonest corporate scum telling us what to eat.

Unless transcription errors arise then clones are genetically identical to their DNA sources but can, and do, exhibit minor phenotypic variations in development much as identical twins are not absolutely identical if you look closely enough.

Of course, the animals that have come into the UK are not actually clones, they’re the naturally born offspring of clones. At the present time, cloning remains a hugely expensive technology to the extent that direct meat and milk production from cloned animals would not be economically viable.

What cloning is being used for is as an adjunct to conventional selective breeding, in order to speed up the fixing of commercially desirable characteristics. Within that practice, a little judicious care and attention should be sufficient to maintain enough genetic diversity in key breeds to avoid the potential problems of over homogenisation.

If anyone’s really keen to try and unpick some of the more complex ethical questions here, try this one for sized.

After how many generations of naturally born offspring do the offspring of cloned cattle become natural cattle?

Gordon:

According the FDA, none of three species of domesticated livestock that that have been successfully and reliably cloned (cattle, pigs and goats) have been subjected to any genetic modifications during the cloning process.

As far as cattle go, most of the existing clones are bulls cloned from the very best breeding stock.

Is there such a thing as ‘natural cattle’?

‘Slugburger, anyone?’

Or indeed, pub grub.

Shatterface:

That depends largely on whether and to what extent you buy in the naturalistic fallacy which lies behind much of the woolier, over romanticised strands of ‘green’ thinking.

As a bit of an aside, there was local news report last night about a legal case in which residents in Herefordshire have resorted to the courts in an effort to force a local fruit farmer to get rid of the polytunnels he used to extend his soft fruit season from five weeks to five months.

The only argument that the two residents who were backing the law suit, one of whom of was a local artist (FFS!) had to deploy was that the polytunnels spolied the ‘natural beauty’ of the area, to which the farmer responded by pointing out, quite correctly, that there was nothing at all natural about the local landscape as it was entirely the result of farming activity.

Sally,

Great to see the so called free market , customer is always right, pro capitalist, pro choice for the consumer trolls supporting the idea of devious farmers pushing stuff onto their customers without telling them the truth.

Who needs Chairman Mao when you can have dishonest corporate scum telling us what to eat.

So you want people to be told that the mince they are eating may once have come from an animal that was 100% cow? Because that is what you are asking?

And I note that you have not really read the thread (where both ‘trolls’ and whatever you call those who you do not disagree with accept cloned animals are still the same animals). Instead, J (isn’t he normally a troll?) questioned whether cloning was a sensible way forward for agriculture, which is a fair point. The debate was centred round this issue, with no evidence of political allegiances affecting anything.

Still, nothing like blind partisan hatred to allow you to ignore a reasonable and sensible debate and assume (you can’t have actually read the thread) that the ‘trolls’ are acting to protect ‘devious farmers’. I assume you think that all farmers can clone and do so to make profits at our expense. Otherwise, what the hell are you going on about?

I agree with the overall tone of the article.
As long as strict rules and regulations are followed by the GE companies.

@23 – “… a little judicious care and attention should be sufficient to maintain enough genetic diversity in key breeds to avoid the potential problems of over homogenisation.”

I would agree, except for the fact that the opposite has been witnessed in the industrialisation of agriculture. No-one has a financial incentive to maintain genetic diversity when the economic rewards for not doing so are so much higher.

It is left to a small army of volunteers to maintain the heritage seed bank, for instance, thus ensuring that large numbers of vegetable varities are not lost forever – farmers certainly aren’t growing them.

@26 – “That depends largely on whether and to what extent you buy in the naturalistic fallacy which lies behind much of the woolier, over romanticised strands of ‘green’ thinking.”

Well, quite – there is no ‘natural’ and never was. I wrote a half-decent essay on conceptions and visions of ‘wilderness’ whilst at university; a new ideal appears to crop up (excuse the pun) about once or twice a century.

This is, in my view, part of the problem with ‘conservation’. The whole point about the natural world is that it changes; else, we’d not have gotten past the primordial soup stage – and yet, some ‘environmentalists’ actually talk of “restoring” nature, as if there were a fixed ideal.

Anyway.

@27 – “J (isn’t he normally a troll?) questioned whether cloning was a sensible way forward for agriculture, which is a fair point.”

Eh? How are you defining troll, exactly?

21 – you get a nucleus from a somatic cell, and a fertilised zygote, remove the nucleus from the zygote and pop the somatic cell’s in its place, IIRC.

There’s no modification of the DNA in the somatic cell’s nucleus. The mitochondrial DNA is from the oocyte that formed the zygote, rather than from the animal you got the somatic nucleus from, of course (not generally seen to be much point selfing animals), but that tends to make no real difference.

Getting a mammal clone is quite difficult and very expensive – typically, you’re looking at success rates below 1%.

For the welfare benefits I so believe in to occur, of course, everything needs to be marked for what it is very clearly.

Also, got a very rapid response from quorn (go them!) – they do use free-range eggs. Win. Now if only their food tasted nice

@29 J. : “It is left to a small army of volunteers to maintain the heritage seed bank…”

Plus the Svalbard Global Seed Vault which hosts surplus from seed banks across the world as well as its own stock. SGSV is about as far from a small scale voluntary collective as you can get. And we should be grateful to the Norwegian government for kicking it off.

Note also that tomatoes would be much more expensive were it not for a form of cloning. The tomatoes that taste nice or travel well are the ones that are vulnerable to disease. Commercial tomatoes are often grown from tasty varieties grafted onto the root stock of one that is less likely to succumb. Thus a UK glasshouse can be packed with hundreds of plants that originate from two or three sources.

I don’t know whether mass produced milk is more watery than 50 years ago. There are minimum standards for butter fat content in milk supplied to dairies, but there is also a bizarre (to me) desire to consume semi-skimmed milk. The fat that is skimmed off has to go somewhere, so the healthy dairy food argument has a few holes in it. Unless we are exporting milk fat and not eating cheese and cream cakes.

Regarding organic production, some supermarket organic milk is wonderfully tasty, especially in summer. But only the full fat stuff.

Overall I tend to agree with the majority opinion here in the genetically enhanced versus conventional versus organic farming argument. In favour of organic, I would argue that it is a useful learning exercise. If it is possible to economically grow organic food with less fertiliser and pesticide, that is a great lesson. In the UK, fertiliser leakage to water courses is a cost to everyone.

But homeopathic treatment of farm stock? Is that ethical?

Nick – Quorn tastes great – you can’t be cooking it right )

Personally prefer Bambi to Daisy any day…not that I can afford it.

@31 – yes, indeed, SGSV is a fantastic resource – but there is a big difference between a seed vault buried under the ice and people (literally) keeping alive the tastes and traditions of rare breeds…

The fact that some strange variety of tomato is kept technically extant does not help when I want to make a tasty salad, for instance.

I grow grafted plants myself so am well aware of the benefits which cloning brings. It frustrates me that seed catalogues only seem to offer F1 hybrids, but I realise that I can grow little else (tiny back yard).

Still on tomatoes, it is precisely a function of the intense industrialisation of food production that gives us such bland, tasteless muck on our supermarket shelves. Tomatoes are bred to be disease-resistant and travel well – because your average vine is mass-produced in scary quantities and will probably travel thousands of miles before it actually gets anywhere.

In the Mediterranean (Greece in particular, I’ve found), the tomatoes are fabulous. They tend to be grown locally and travel just a few miles. We seem incapable of doing this in the UK because of the model of distribution and consumption – hence, we get a load of old shite.

To return to the original point – I am not convinced that pursuing the same model for meat production is at all worthwhile.

(We already have the quite ludicrous situation whereby consumers in the UK can buy New Zealand lamb at lower cost than, say, Welsh lamb; and where a large quantity of the latter is exported…)

Maybe we could cut off Gideon’s little finger, stick it in some John Innes and grow him a brain. That still leaves the problem of what to do with the remaining useless carcass?