After years of research, meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring are moving toward supermarkets, restaurants and back-yard barbecues. The Food and Drug Administration recently declared the fare safe to eat, although it took scientists 678 pages to make their case. They said the meat was so much like regular beef that special labeling would be unnecessary.
Thousands of consumers have written the agency in opposition. Still, cloned products could become part of the food supply by year's end. The public has been shielded from cloned meat by a voluntary moratorium issued by the FDA in 2001.
But six intrepid diners agreed to participate in cloned beef's debut on the culinary scene in a private dinner convened by the Los Angeles Times. Eric Schlosser, author of "Fast Food Nation" and self-described omnivore, said: "I'd rather eat my running shoes than eat meat from a cloned animal." But USC sociologist Barry Glassner, author of "The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong," was so enthusiastic he asked whether his wife could join the party.
In the kitchen, Peel laid out the porterhouse steaks on his stainless steel worktable, along with packages of ground chuck and sirloin, which he molded into thick patties and sprinkled with salt and pepper. The cloned meat, provided by the Collins Cattle ranch in Frederick, Okla., was accompanied by corresponding cuts of conventional beef, all prepared in identical fashion.
Peel's idea was to conduct a double-blind taste test--a 21st Century version of the Pepsi Challenge. "I'm actively trying not to guess," he said. "My hypothesis is that they will be very close, if not identical.
" As the dinner guests sampled caramelized onion tarts with feta cheese, Peel considered whether cloned beef was the most unusual thing he had prepared since his restaurant opened 18 years ago. "Yes," he said. "I think so.
" UC Davis animal geneticist Alison Van Eenennaam pulled out a photo of a stout, jet-black Chianina bull from Canute, Okla., named Full Flush--one of the most sought-after sires of recent times. She passed around a photo of five identical calves munching hay in a pen.
These clones were created for $50,000 to boost the supply of Full Flush semen. One fathered the steer that Peel was frying up in the kitchen. If cloned meat does enter the food supply, nearly all of it will be like this steak--from the offspring of a clone, not a clone itself.
Everyone calls it "cloned" meat anyway.
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