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Shirley Trimmer knows her hamburgers. She prepares them with a handful of bread cubes, a little egg, chopped onions and just the right sprinkling of salt and pepper. Trimmer recently served burgers for a lunch meeting of the seven-member team that makes up the biotech company Cyagra, based in Elizabethtown, Pa.
But something was different about these hamburgers: They were made from the meat of cloned cows. Every Friday for the past year or so, Cyagra employees have been eating their way through the thousands of pounds of beef left over from the 11 clones that the company had raised and slaughtered for a cloned-meat study.
"We started with the steaks, which we grilled all summer long, and now we have hamburger meat left over," Trimmer says. Steve Mower, the company's director of marketing, says, "She cooks (the burgers) just right. They're delicious."
Like it or not, Trimmer and her colleagues may be getting a taste of the future. On Dec. 28, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an 800-page report that concluded meat and milk from clones are safe for consumption. The FDA has asked for public comment on the issue over the next couple of months, but it appears likely to give final approval for food from cloned animals.
Until then, the FDA has asked producers of clones and livestock breeders to voluntarily refrain from introducing food products from these animals.
"Based on the FDA's analysis of hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and other studies on the health and food composition of clones and their offspring, the draft risk assessment has determined that meat and milk from clones and their offspring are as safe as food we eat every day," says Stephen F. Sundlof, the director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine. "Cloning poses no unique risks to animal health when compared to other assisted reproductive technologies currently in use in U.S. agriculture."
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Perception may trump science
The FDA's opinions, however, have hardly settled the issue. Consumer activists and others are taking issue with the prospect of cloned foods."The FDA is relying on results from just about 100 animals, which is a very small sample, and safety questions cannot be answered with such a small sample," charges Joseph Mendelson, the legal director at the Center for Food Safety, a consumer and environmental-protection group in Washington, D.C. The group says cloning can result in deformities in animals and should be halted for its cruelty.
Science is only part of the issue with cloned foods, however. Perception may be even more important.
The workers at Cyagra started their Friday lunches out of a simple desire not to let good food go to waste. But what they're doing with their cloned beef may, in its own small way, have an effect on how cloned foods are perceived more broadly.
"It's not a big deal," Mower says. "I've eaten cloned beef for a year and a half. It's scientifically proven to be safe."
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