Things that taste good affecting the world

I have created this blog as a project for a writing seminar that i am currently enrolled in at Cornell University. The writing seminar is called Having a Lot on Our Plates: an introduction to the Sociology of Food and Nutrition, and this blog will therefore be updates with posts that summarize and reflect on readings that we will be doing for the class. Each post will somehow connect food and nutrition to the world on either a political, social, financial, or even physcological aspect. By reading through the blog you will learn about why different cultures eat the way they do. Hopefully the things that are addressed on this site concoct a delicious meal for your mind. Comment on anything and everything. I am by no means a master on this topic and any thoughts are appreciated and actually beneficial to the blog...so here it is...some food for thought....

Monday, March 1, 2010

Meat That Isn't Meat

Ben Paytner's work "The Other Other White Meat", opens the readers mind to the reality of cloned meat potentially being in the supermarket. Some farmers seek to maintain the current productive and beneficial state of their animals and so for that reason they clone them, to create exact replicas with the same beneficial and productive attributes. The meat from these clones is then circulated into the supermarkets, and it has become possible that whoever is reading this may have eaten cloned meat...how does that make you feel?

The FDA, although always imposing extremely strict regulations on the food industry in general, has not made a very difinitive judgment when it comes to cloned meat in the supermarket. in 2002 they declared that cloned meat was perfectly fine to eat because it was conventionally bred from animals. However, they asked that cloned meat was not to be sold. An interesting and confusing decision considering their opinion that the meat is safe. However, it is very difficult for the FDA to enforce their ruling because, as Paytner even observed, it impossibe to tell the difference between cloned and traditionally raised meat.

Why does the FDA care to make regulations when they deemed that the meat was safe to eat?

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