CyClone Dairy: Ben & Jerry’s April Fool’s!
So it’s April Fool’s Day. And it looks like Ben & Jerry’s pulled off quite the virtual April Fool’s Day joke. From Ben & Jerry’s:
“The truth is that Cyclone Dairy is a project of Ben & Jerry’s. We wanted to find a way to increase Americans’ awareness that the FDA has cleared the way for cloned foods to enter the food supply Cyclone Dairy seemed to be the perfect vehicle. It could be real!” While CyClone Dairy is a fictional creation, the potential for a company like this to emerge is dangerously real. The only thing that stands in the way of the livestock industry putting meat and milk from cloned animals or their offspring into the food supply is a voluntary moratorium. In other words, a supplier could easily go against the moratorium and put these products out into the marketplace, and FDA would not even require it to be labeled.
Just last week Members of the European Parliament voted against authorizing the sale of food from cloned products and their offspring, calling instead on regulators to ban these products. Why? Because of ethical concerns, lack of scientific information regarding the safety of these products and the negative effects on animal welfare.
The amount of discussion generated by our original CyClone Dairy blog showed that were not the only ones worried about cloned meat and milk reaching store shelves.
So keep talking! You can also take action to tell Congress that we need a system in place to track clones and their offspring, and it needs to track the DNA of clones, so meat and milk can be tested to see if they came from cloned animals. Without such a system in place, companies will be hard-pressed to guarantee that their products even the organic ones, are clone-free.
I don’t understand what all the fuss over cloning animals is. They’re not transgenic. There’s nothing new in their DNA that wasn’t there in the original animal, they’re just making twins, right? I know you said there’s a lack of safety testing, but I still don’t understand why it might be unsafe. I’m not asking you to prove anything, I just want a good reason to be suspicious. So far, I haven’t seen even that.
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a report in 2002 on the safety of cloned animals, which noted that they often experience complicated births and harm the surrogate animals. The report also noted that some clones have health problems like heart and lung disease, and other developmental problems, while some cloned mice have behavioral abnormalities.
Cloned sheep, cows, and mice have been born with malformed brains, livers, spleens, lymph nodes and urogenital tracts. Internal hemorrhaging, digestive problems, hydrocephalus, and multiple organ failure are some of the most common causes of death among cloned animals in the first week of life. A 2005 USDA study revealed that cloned pigs had weakened immune systems compared to normal pigs.
To learn more or for sources, read our factsheet on cloning: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/clones-factsheet
On the surface I suppose there is no reason to question safety. If we presume to understand fully how life works. But the fact is that we only know what we think we know. We are not all knowing. If we presume to understand what we are fooling with than we presume to understand all aspects of creation. Which we do not. The risk is unknown because we are not Creators we are merely play acting. Cloning could conceivable downgrade the Gene Pool. But let’s me honest. This is about profit. This is about more ways to feed an abundance of people on the planet. With all the increase in Cancer, diabetes..etc. With all the health concerns with our present food suppply, chemicals and new growing rates of mysterious diseases do we really need another unknown factor to add to the mix of what we still don’t understand? We still can’t cure cancer or stop heart disease or even ban cigarettes. But we want to now manipulate the earth’s gene pool. Are technology is way ahead of our understanding….and it is all for greed and to feed an overpopulated planet struggling to fill our endless needs. We need to give back to the earth and stop taking and manipulating that which was perfect to begin with.
NOONE stated it simply, but eloquently. It was summed up in the last sentence, “We need to give back to the earth and stop taking and manipulating that which was perfect to begin with”.
I agree. We need to figure out how chemicals, EMFs, pollution, pesticides, solvents, plastics, nuclear waste etc. all play into our (and our planet’s) health problems. It seems for every problem we can solve, more arise. We need to look harder for answers on land, on sea and in space. There must be a way we can all exist without creating new life for the purpose of harvesting that life for others’ benefit. That is a slippery slope we don’t want to go down. It appeals to those who want easy access to everything without having to sacrifice anything of themselves. There is a cost to everything.
Our lives were turned into a 7 year nightmare when our daughter developed severe chemical sensitivity due to exposure to pesticides and later also developed electrical sensitivity. With allergy and cancer rates soaring we know that all these problems increased in direct relationship to the proliferation of toxic chemicals. Our daughter;s journey back to wellness was paved with staying away from everything artificial (toxic detergents, personal care products, toxic construction materials, “conventionally” grown fruits and vegetables. So the last thing I want is to bring cloned animals into my families diet. We already don’t know what is being done to our meat. It’s very scary!
yup! ask them not to use for food chain……………like they can’t get anything right that is easy, and here to fore been done right, what makes you think any of them have the smarts to do this today? He-he! But really, they are smart like a fox, the aim is to fool you, actually you are nothing more than a science experiment to them anyway, same as I. They are watching us in the test tube and saying, hey, that one is about to croke bring in another….lets try a fatter one this time………..see if it limits weight gain……Sinister……….????? look deep, think hard, been going on for a very long time, only we have our head in the sand.