re: What Does Europe's Ban of U.S. Meats Mean to You?

Don Fletcher — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:05:10 GMT

Perhaps we should also get along with the task of banning cloned potatoes too. It would appear that close to 100% of potatoes going to market have been cloned within the last generation, and often for every generation in the past 50 generations.

This is actually a problem. Whole fields, even whole farms will be growing potatoes that are genetically identical so that any disease that is able to attack one will rapidly spread through the whole farm, kill every last potato. (recall Irish Potato famine).

The same principle would apply to animal husbandry. However, with say a cattle herd, one generation can be all clones, and another generation be naturally bred from the cloned offspring. Will we expect the second generation to be labelled as cloned? Will we even have a case for causing them to be treated differently? After all, this second or subsequent generation will not actually have been the result of cloning.