Sonoma bucks FDA on cloned foods

After years of back and forth, the FDA has announced that meat and milk from cloned animals are safe for people to eat. The products are not on the shelves yet, but when they are, unless the FDA is forced to change its stance that it is unnecessary that cloned products should be labeled, shoppers will never know if the food they is eating is from clones. In Sonoma, however, Sonoma Market and Whole Foods will not be offering cloned foods at all.
A nationwide poll conducted in 2007 by Consumers Union found that 89 percent of Americans want cloned foods to be labeled and that 69 percent have concerns about food derived from clones and their offspring. Marc Gore, manager of Sonoma Market, was surprised at the concept. “Personally, I don’t really believe in cloning things,” he said, “So I probably wouldn’t want to have anything to do with that. I find it hard to believe they’re not going to have some kind of label on it. If we make something in the kitchen, we have to list on the label everything in there. Say there’s peanuts in something and someone’s allergic, and we haven’t labeled it, we’re liable.”
Margaret Wittenberg, a corporate official for Whole Foods Market, said in a statement, “Whole Foods Market knows our customers are not interested in animal products from cloned animals or their progeny, so the products in our stores will remain clone-free.” Failing to allow or require labels on products could mean, she wrote, “that customers will lose the ability to choose clone-free products.”
State Senator Carole Migden, whose San Francisco and Marin district also includes areas on the west side of Sonoma Valley, said, “California consumers want to know what they’re eating and what we’re feeding our children.” She has introduced legislation (SB 1121) that would require labels on all cloned food products sold in California.