After years of back and forth, the FDA announced last week 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, the cloned foods will not have to carry labels to inform the consumer.
State Senator Carole Migden, whose San Francisco and Marin district also includes areas on the west side of Sonoma Valley, thinks that is wrong. “California consumers want to know what they’re eating and what we’re feeding our children,” said Migden. “People have the right to know if food is organic, if it contains pesticides or growth-promoting hormones, or if it’s from cloned or naturally bred animals.” Accordingly, she has reintroduced legislation (SB 1121) that she carried last year that would require labels on all cloned food products sold in California. She said her new legislation will be jointly sponsored by Consumers Union and the National Center for Food Safety.
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. In 2007 the Center for Food Safety released a critique of the FDA’s review of food from animal clones, purporting to demonstrate that the FDA’s safety claims were based on virtually no food-safety studies.
You are what you eat, but just what is that?
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