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[RC] Cloning for Food - k s swigart

Sandy said:

I just can't help it - messing with mother Nature in such
a way.....just gives me the heebie jeebies. From a purely
pragmatic standpoint, with so many factors at play in
creating a top competitor, I don't really see the value
related to cost and risk in breeding such an animal,
especially those for cows or sheep or things we actually
use for food.

Many people may not realize this, but I am sure they have been eating
cloned food for their whole lives.  Can you say Granny Smith's apples or
Thompson's seedless grapes (to name but a couple).

Cloning for food purposes actually makes a great deal of sense.  Find
something you like the taste of and/or is easier/cheaper to raise,
making an exact duplicate of it (rather than hoping that your sexual
reproduction will create something better...but 99 times out of 100 it
doesn't) sounds a very good idea to me (which is probably why people
have been doing it with fruits for millenia).

Cloning leaves no opportunity for improvement, but if you like what you
have got, producing and eating exact duplicates makes for better tasting
food or less waste than hoping for improvement and getting something
worse.

And if eating cloned food gives you the heebie jeebies, you had better
give up eating apples...and grapes...and olives...

I suspect that the technology of cloing these things was considered
revolutionary at the time it was invented, but now it is so commonplace
that most people don't even know that all the apples they eat are
clones.

kat
Orange County, Calif.
:)

p.s.  The purpose of cloning Cash was completely different from cloning
food for the best qualities for mass production.  I personally am of the
opinion that from an equine genetics philosophy standpoint that it
wasn't worth the money spent on it as I don't think the horse was
"stallion quality" no matter how good of a performer he was (back to
that question of whether a proven performer will make a proven producer
question), but it will take these experimenters 15 years to find this
out.  Personally, I think they would have done better to clone Rio or
Khalil...from and equine genetics standpoint, but that is just my
personal opinion.

"Le meilleur que je sais les hommes le plus que j'aime mon
cheval."--Catherine the Great



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