Chef Mark Peel prepared two platters each of steaks and hamburgers at his Los Angeles restaurant, Campanile. The medium-rare steaks and perfectly cooked burgers were served without adornment, which makes it sound as though this dinner could have been for a die-hard Atkins fan, when in fact it was a taste test. Six diners, including radio host Evan Kleiman, Gregory Jaffe from the CSPI and USC sociologist Barry Glassner and his wife, had come to the dinner party to experience a side-by-side taste test of conventionally bred and cloned beef.
The meat was all provided by Collins Cattle ranch in Frederick, Oklahoma and was nearly identical in every way, same look, same cuts. The taste of both the hamburger meat and the porterhouse was identical, as well. Along with the reassurances of animal geneticist Alison Van Eenennaam, from UC Davis, that the meat was entirely safe to eat, the diners seemed satisfied that cloned meat was not necessarily a bad idea when it came to flavor. Even so, that won't be enough to sway public opinion in favor of cloned meat by the time it (probably) hits the market later this year.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-12-2007 @ 3:10PM
eva said...
What kills me is the perception that cloned things are different . . . the THINGS are the same. A cow is a cow, still. It's the method of getting that cow that's different. Of course it's going to taste the same! Ethical implications aside, you still end up with a critter with the same body parts
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3-12-2007 @ 5:16PM
Harlan said...
Eva, you're totally right. A clone is basically a time-shifted identical twin. Why wouldn't a time-shifted identical twin cow taste the same as the original cow?
Also, it's extremely unlikely that you'd ever eat an actual cloned cow. They're extremely expensive and complicated to produce. What you might eat, when cloning gets approved, would be a distant descendant of a cloned cow.
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3-12-2007 @ 5:37PM
Dmnkly said...
Eva...
Exactly. I have to wonder what percentage of the people who are uncomfortable with cloned meat don't understand that scientists aren't artificially growing ground beef in a lab. It isn't being synthesized out of thin air or formed from powders and chemicals. It's still the meat of a cow that's born and grows up like any other cow... or, more specifically, the offspring of that cow.
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3-12-2007 @ 9:35PM
Sean said...
While I'm a vegan and won't be eating cloned, synthetic or "cruelty-free" meat any time soon, I think there is rational argument against eating cloned meat products or at the very least requiring it to be labeled. Cloned animals are not 100% genetic copies because there is more to the development of the embroyo than its creation. Small differences emerge during gestation (likewise for human "identitical" twins).
More importantly there is a history of problems with cloned animals that still puzzle scientists. Why do these animals have shortened life spans and in some cases suffer from rare nervous system disorders? Before we introduce a potentially harmful product (to say nothing of the ethical implications for cloned animals that suffer these complications) into the food supply, we should have a better idea of the processes at work.
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3-12-2007 @ 11:40PM
Dmnkly said...
Sean...
To be clear, I don't mean to suggest that there's anything wrong with healthy skepticism, nor do I have any problem with labeling. I do, however, think that cloned meats are being greeted with a hugely disproportionate amount of fear relative to other foods, and that much if not most of this hysteria is driven by people's fears of the IDEA of cloning and a lack of understanding of the process rather than any evidence that's it's harmful or even theories about the manner in which it could be harmful... because there aren't any, as far as I've read. Just the open-ended, unsupported, impossible to disprove "well, it COULD be".
Again, if people want to be that conservative and want labeling and want to avoid cloned meats until they've been widely eaten for many years and there's a huge body of evidence, hey, that's great. But relative to other risks we take every day, yeah, I think that's pretty irrational given the available science.
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3-13-2007 @ 10:18AM
Bob said...
Sean,
I'd love to see your biographical sources.
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