I Pity the Fools Posted by Tim at 04/01/09 05:29 PM

I pity the Fools

Ben and Jerry’s, that lovable Vermonter ice cream company has had some great ideas in the past. Such as, New York Super Fudge and being among the first to ban the use of synthetic growth hormones in cows that produce milk for their ice cream. Today they unveiled a great April Fool’s Day prank called CyClone Dairy. A fake company whose motto is “Perfect Cows. Perfect Milk”. The Stepford Wives-esque feel to the whole site is pretty creepy. Our favorite example is

"CyClone is first major dairy to raise a herd of clones and clone offspring. You could say cloning is our passion – where we combine DNA with TLC.
As the leaders in dairy innovation, we believe that science can make food better, your family happier, and the world a more perfect place."

The prank has garnered some pretty funny media attention as well. Diane Tucker at HuffPost did not find it funny. She thinks the internet should only be full of things we can trust whole-heartedly and believe in like print and the teevee media. They would never lie to us.

Forbes has a more rational piece on the whole prank.

As for us, we thought it was a pretty provocative way to bring the issue to light. The fact is you may already be eating and drinking cloned meat and milk. Our take on cloning has been:

There is insufficient data on composition of milk and meat from cloned animals and their offspring. That the USDA declared cloning safe based on milk from 43 cow clones, and data on beef from 16 cow clones, and 5 pigs. There is no data at all from other species.

That regulators need to consider effects of poor health of clones on food safety and public health.

The USDA has to consider the possibility that sick and/or unsafe animals may not always be removed from the food supply during inspection.

That cloning technology is unsafe for animals; extensive data has shown very high rates of illness, death and deformities in clones. A vast majority of clones die shortly after birth.

For a more in depth read on our comments about cloning read this pdf.

Alright, off to enjoy my pint of Phish Phood. Clone free = Calorie free right?

comments (1)

1 Posted by Anna Banana at 04/14/09 05:35 PM

Well said! I read that vapid article in the Huffington post, and a couple others that were equally cranky without content... and I'm astonished about how some people could so completely miss the point. The assumption seems to be either that cloned products could never really be in our food ("that's a scifi distraction") or that clones have been proven to be just fine in our food ("the FDA is infallible so people shouldn't suggest otherwise") - both without even a small amount of research to reveal that there's more controversy. Clearly this is a sign of an issue that needs more attention, so good for an ice cream company to give us some food for thought, since journalists are clearly dropping the ball.

Anna S