In Saturday’s New York Times there was a very startling article that will affect everyone’s health, not just people who consider healthy eating a way to a slimmer waistline. The European Food Safety Agency has deemed meat and milk from cloned animals as safe to eat, and if approved by the European Group on Ethics in Science and Technologies advisory panel, such products will soon be arriving on supermarket shelves around Europe. Public opinion throughout Europe is against genetically modified foods, as people prefer natural products. But the people do not really have a fair say in what happens. Furthermore, countries that ban the sale of such products (and there are many who want to) put the entire European Commission at risk of penalized by the World Trade Organization for unfair trade barriers. This is not just a European issue. The United States FDA will also rule on the same issue next month, and we are likely to also see these products approved. With the state that our meat and dairy industries are in now, the last thing we need is to legalize cloned meat and dairy.

The problems with meat and dairy coming from cloned animals are many. One issue is that the report says it is “unlikely” that there is any difference between conventional products and genetically modified products. This is an answer based on short-term observation, who knows what health issues will arise twenty years from now? Another issue is that the Agency’s report admitted to the fact that cloned animals are more prone to diseases than conventionally bred animals. They claim that unhealthy animals will not be used, but who is to know for sure? And what about all of the animals that are cloned, and then die because they have weakened immune systems or are highly deformed? This does not seem humane or ethical to me at all. If these animals have a high chance of being deformed and weak, then why do we want to perfect science to get around it? In my opinion, the answer is not in cloning meat, but making people eat less of it. If everyone ate meat only once or twice a week, not only would their health greatly improve, but so would the environment. Meeting demand for people’s desire for meat is the opposite of what we should be doing; we should be meeting nature’s demand for sustainable living.