Here in Europe there’s a big fuss going on right now about a pair of cloned cows in the UK whose meat and perhaps even milk may have ended up in the food chain.
Apparently that’s a big no-no, as people here are afraid they might catch weird diseases from cloned meat. It’s straight in line with the irrational fear of genetically modified food.
Somehow people have got it in to their heads, probably courtesy of ill-informed environmentalist propaganda groups, that eating GM food is dangerous and can cause you to grow a second head or some such nonsense.
The argument goes that GM food and cloned meat is ‘unnatural’ and therefore dangerous.
The fact is that as long as agriculture has existed, our food has been grown ‘unnaturally’. There’s nothing natural about modern farms, even the so-called ‘organic’ ones.
Humans have always used tricks and technology to increase their crop yields and produce better livestock. From cloning plants (did you know bananas are clones?) to selective breeding, everything produced by modern agricultue is modified in some way, and has been for millennia.
GM and cloning are merely the latest technological advancements that enable us to produce more food while using less natural resources. There is no scientific evidence that GM foods and cloned meat are dangerous in any way.
The utterly irrational fear and paranoia that is restricting the use of GM and cloning technologies has no basis in scientific reality, but is instead fueled by ignorance, Luddism, and in some cases religious fanaticism.
Of course this resistance against what are probably the only means we have of ensuring our food production keeps up with the exponential growth of global demand helps accelerate the rise of famine and mass-starvation in many under-developed areas of the world.
It’s typical how only those who live in luxury can afford to be opposed to GM and cloning.