The FDA today in a draft risk assessment found that food from cloned cattle, pigs and goats is as safe to eat as the food we eat every day from conventionally bred animals. This is a big step towards the FDA outright approving the practice and permitting cloned food on the commercial US market without special labeling. For more on the story see this article.

I’ll cut right to the candor. I’m no fan of the FDA. I’m not like most people who think the FDA is some upstanding guardian of our food supply that works day and night to ensure that nothing adverse is permitted for consumption by Americans. Then again, is that really what most people believe? I don’t really know — I’ve never taken a poll and I’ve not really seen the results of any polls that have been taken. But the tendency, at least from my perspective, is that most people trust these governmental oversight bodies virtually without question. The mere thought that the FDA could or would bow to lobbying from multinational corporations insites allegations of conspiratorial thinking and is dismissed without further consideration. We know that the food and drug market is big business (billions and billions of dollars in the U.S. alone). We know there are large multinational corporations in the business of producing food and drugs for sale in the U.S. And we know that lobbying governmental bodies is a daily practice in this country.

Do you suppose that the FDA has never once fallen prey to this type of lobbying? If you believe that you have more faith than I do, but I would suggest that your faith is ill-placed. The love of money is the root of all evil (1Ti.6:10) and there is a lot of money at stake here. Further, if the FDA had never given into lobbying in its history the lobbying would long ago have stopped or taken on a different, more effective form. Lobbying exists because it works. Billions of dollars are spent yearly to lobby the government. You can bet your cloned cattle that lobbying works, which is to say that it impacts the decisions made by the FDA and other governmental oversight bodies.

How does food from cloned animals benefit multinational corporations? Isn’t cloning expensive? No doubt millions have been spent on figuring out how to clone animals and now it can be done. So the money has already been spent and if cloned food is not approved that marks millions of investment and research dollars lost. This alone is a significant driver in ensuring that food from cloned animals is approved.

But what drove the research into cloning? The answer to that is very likely multi-faceted as more than just multinational corporations have an interest in it. But for the multinational corporations in the food and drug business, being able to create your own supply of animals in a lab offers huge ROI. Healthy, well-bred animals are expensive and have significant needs in order to keep them healthy and well-bred (that is to keep breeding well). They need a lot of land to roam and a lot of food to eat. And they take a long time to reproduce. Cloning them in a lab enables you to clone animals quickly and at little cost.

So what’s the big deal? Why not clone animals if food can be produced with less expense? Don’t think for a minute that the cost savings will be passed on to the consumer. What is the quality of that food? Is it healthy? Is it safe? What modifications were made to the genes of the cloned animals? What impact will those modifications have? Has the natural diet of the animals been modified? Do they have a nutritional diet? There’s a multitude of questions to be answered. Do you trust the FDA to answer them all honestly and without bias?

I do not.

Genetically modified food has been on the market for years now with the blessing of the FDA. Are people in this country generally healthy? No sir. Our health is in rapid decline and despite billions of dollars in food and drug research the decline continues. What is the cause of this? One thing is for sure, the recent food and drug advancements haven’t improved matters any, as evidenced by the continued health decline and lack of any upward trend. At best, no link has been provided between recent advancements and health improvements.

So what is the benefit of those millions and millions of R&D dollars? No one has ceased eating, more people are dependent on drugs for all kinds of “benefits” and the profits of multinational corporations are quite healthy. Therein lies the benefit.