the Coup

Clone My Fat

After one-hundred years of damaging our health, we are slowly phasing trans fat out of our diets. Unfortunately, just as we’ve cleared our plate, the FDA has added cloned animals to our meal — but without putting it on the menu.

The FDA is set to approve the use of cloned animals in our food. Will they require the food to be labeled? No.

Trans fat is a common ingredient in processed (i.e. manufactured) food. New York City and Universal Studios have banned trans fat, two recent examples of a growing trend.

Pause for a second: An ingredient in our food is so bad that entire cities have decided to ban it. Who allows this poison?

We have been using trans fat since 1909, and began to understand that it kills us in the mid-1970s. It wasn’t until 1993 though, that the FDA even required companies to label their food and let us know that it’s in there.

What about cloned animals? The FDA did a study in 2006 and decided that “the composition of meat and milk from clones is within the compositional ranges of meat and milk consumed in the US.”

Interesting. What do you think happens to someone when their diet has no compositional range? When every hamburger they eat for a year is identical?

There are so many unknowns. We could debate about the value and dangers of cloned food endlessly. But to not require labeling is irresponsible. We have been poisoned before. Each of us should be able to decide what we’re going to eat. But we need the facts on food labels to do it.

Send a note to your local media or enter your zipcode to write your reps in congress: