20 years after Dolly the sheep: are you eating cloned meat?

Two decades after Scotland’s Dolly the sheep became the first cloned mammal, consumers may well wonder whether they are drinking milk or eating meat from cookie-cutter cows or their offspring. The simple answer: “probably”. The fact is, there is no way to know for sure, say the experts, even in Europe, which has come closer to banning livestock cloning than anywhere else in the world. “The most dramatic impact of the cloning of Dolly has been on animal cloning in the United States,” said Aaron Levine, an expert in bioethics and cloning at Georgia Tech.

It’s fairly widespread in US to use cloning to produce breeding stock. Cloned animals are not intended to enter the food supply directly. I suspect some may have.

Aaron Levine

In 2008, the US Food and Drug Administration concluded that “food from cattle, swine and goat clones is as safe to eat as food from any other cattle, swine or goat”. Not even scientists can distinguish a healthy clone from a conventionally bred animal, the regulatory agency said. US companies typically produce hundreds or a few thousand clones per year. The Boyalife Group’s cloning new factory near the northern coastal city of Tianjin in China, however, is aiming for an annual output of 100,000 cows this year, scaling up to a million by 2020.

Without knowing it, Europeans are probably eating meat from the descendants of clones that cannot be traced.

Pauline Constant, spokeswoman for the European Office of Consumer Associations

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