Washington Post blows story on cloned vs. organic

I usually love the Washington Post — great reporting, good writing, in-depth investigations, and so on. But the paper really blew it with it story on January 29, “Can Food From Cloned Animals Be Called Organic?”

First and most blatantly, it gets a basic fact wrong in the headline and the very first paragraph — the lede.

There’s nothing like a tender steak from a free-range, grass-fed, hormone-free, antibiotic-free, organic and — oh, yes — cloned cow.

Stop right there. The discussion is not about selling meat from cloned animals. It’s about selling meat from the children of cloned animals. That’s a major difference; those animals would be born naturally, not built.

It’s just much more sensational to talk about meat from “cloned animals.”

Second problem: The article is incredibly lopsided — it’s full of comments from people against the idea of calling the meat from the children of cloned animals “organic,” even if those animals are raised completely naturally. But it has precious few comments from people pointing out things like I did above.

It is, in fact, all about the unfounded fears of people with a vested interest in the most narrow possible interpretation of the “organic” label.

And some of those comments are off the wall. Take this one:

“It’s like putting artificial apples in an apple pie,” said Joseph Mendelson III, legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a consumer group in Washington that has petitioned the government to more strictly regulate the sale of clone products for human consumption. “People would consider that a downright violation of the American way.”

Er, no. It makes for a good scare tactic, but it’s nonsense.

Ever take a cutting from a plant — cut off a branch and plant it separately? If it grew into a tree, would its fruit be somehow “artificial”?

Now, what if you took a fruit from that tree, planted a seed from it, and grew a new tree? Would fruit from that tree be “artificial”?

Not a chance. It’s a full generation removed from the cutting stage, just as the meat we’re talking about would come from animals a full generation removed from the cloning process.

Ever eat a seedless orange?

If you want to label the children of cloned animals as somehow “non-organic” (which is nonsense, if you ask me), then the children of any animals that were genetically tweaked would also have to be labeled that way — and that includes selective breeding, which has been practiced for millennia.

If you want to say that meat from cloned animals should be kept out of the food supply, fine. But no one is talking about that. You cannot equate that with putting the meat from their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in the supply… unless you’re more interested in scaring people than in educating them.