Cloned meat is quietly getting closer to being sold in Canada — but people may not know they're buying it
Cloned meat could be coming to a grocery store near you. Whether you’re receptive to the technology or not, you may be none the wiser from looking at the package. Health Canada has made moves to lift restrictions on meat from cloned cattle and pigs, no longer considering it a “ novel food ,” meaning it could be commercialized without notification or labelling.
Novel foods are “products that are new or changed compared to existing foods,” such as the first Health Canada-approved genetically modified animal (and now defunct ), AquAdvantage salmon , which hit the shelves in the late 2010s — with no special labelling required.
Health Canada assesses the safety of all novel foods before they can be brought to market. Based on the scientific opinions published by international bodies, including the European Food Safety Authority and Japan Food Safety Commission , the department concluded “that foods derived from healthy cattle and swine clones and their offspring are as safe as foods from traditionally bred animals.”
According to Health Canada’s policy update , the department’s Food Directorate decided that there should be no difference between the regulation of cloned and conventional meat products. Foods derived from clones of other animals, such as goat and sheep, however, are still considered novel foods.
As The Winnipeg Sun reports, Health Canada’s 2024 consultation on foods derived from cloned cattle and swine involved feedback from scientists, food policy organizations and agricultural representatives. “Fewer than 1,200 individuals and organizations were directly notified, and the results were not widely publicized.”
According to Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, “The problem isn’t the science — it’s the silence.”
Charlebois wrote in the Agri-Food Analytics Lab newsletter , “Canadians are not being told that the rules governing a deeply controversial technology are about to change. No press release, no public statement, just a quiet update on a government website most citizens will never read.”
Since the days of Dolly the sheep , the first mammal to be cloned using an adult cell, in 1996, the technology has been highly contentious. There are ethical issues, including animal welfare , and, similar to cultured meat , there’s an ick factor to food from cloned animals.
The United States Food and Drug Administration determined that meat from cloned cows, goats and pigs is safe to eat in January 2008. Three years later, a study published in Appetite found that consumers considered farm animal cloning “unnatural” and were concerned that it would pave the way to human cloning.
Charlebois underscores that a lack of transparency could hurt the industry’s image. Without clear labelling, some people could stop buying meat altogether or shop only at places where they can be assured of its origins. “Transparency, I think, is key, and it’s often underappreciated,” Charlebois said on The Food Professor podcast .
While controversial among consumers, cloning is attractive to some farmers and ranchers because it enables them to breed beneficial traits into their herds more quickly. The industry may experience increased productivity and quality, as well as reduced production costs, but technological advances don’t always translate to lower prices at checkout.
“If you start labelling, you completely change the rules, because if, all of a sudden, you have, you know, cloned meat at $10 and regular meat at $10, most people will take the regular meat. But if your cloned meat, because it costs less, is $7 or $6, my bet is that a lot of people would consider it,” Charlebois added, concluding, “Let the people decide.”
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Unpublished Newswire
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