The cloned steak was served medium rare.
Inside the unusually hushed atrium of Campanile restaurant in Los Angeles, the guests lifted slices of beef onto their plates. Executive chef Mark Peel had prepared the porterhouse with fleur de sel and cracked black pepper before pan-searing it with a little canola oil–a simple preparation to highlight the meat’s natural flavor.
It was the centerpiece of a dinner party convened to taste the future of food.
After years of research, meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring are moving toward supermarkets, restaurants and back-yard barbecues. The Food and Drug Administration recently declared the fare safe to eat, although it took scientists 678 pages to make their case. They said the meat was so much like regular beef that special labeling would be unnecessary.
Thousands of consumers have written the agency in opposition. Still, cloned products could become part of the food supply by year’s end.
The public has been shielded from cloned meat by a voluntary moratorium issued by the FDA in 2001. But six intrepid diners agreed to participate in cloned beef’s debut on the culinary scene in a private dinner convened by the Los Angeles Times.
Several prospective diners declined the invitation.
Eric Schlosser, author of “Fast Food Nation” and self-described omnivore, said: “I’d rather eat my running shoes than eat meat from a cloned animal.”
But USC sociologist Barry Glassner, author of “The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong,” was so enthusiastic he asked whether his wife could join the party.
In the kitchen, Peel laid out the porterhouse steaks on his stainless steel worktable, along with packages of ground chuck and sirloin, which he molded into thick patties and sprinkled with salt and pepper.
The cloned meat, provided by the Collins Cattle ranch in Frederick, Okla., was accompanied by corresponding cuts of conventional beef, all prepared in identical fashion. Peel’s idea was to conduct a double-blind taste test–a 21st Century version of the Pepsi Challenge.
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“I’m actively trying not to guess,” he said. “My hypothesis is that they will be very close, if not identical.”
As the dinner guests sampled caramelized onion tarts with feta cheese, Peel considered whether cloned beef was the most unusual thing he had prepared since his restaurant opened 18 years ago.
“Yes,” he said. “I think so.”
The guests took their seats and began munching on grissini and sipping wine.
UC Davis animal geneticist Alison Van Eenennaam pulled out a photo of a stout, jet-black Chianina bull from Canute, Okla., named Full Flush–one of the most sought-after sires of recent times.
She passed around a photo of five identical calves munching hay in a pen. These clones were created for $50,000 to boost the supply of Full Flush semen. One fathered the steer that Peel was frying up in the kitchen.
If cloned meat does enter the food supply, nearly all of it will be like this steak–from the offspring of a clone, not a clone itself. Everyone calls it “cloned” meat anyway.
How it works
Van Eenennaam explained the cloning process:
Eggs are culled from slaughtered cows and matured in lab dishes. “Then you can take the DNA from the slaughtered animal out of there and put in the DNA of whatever animal you want to clone,” she said. “You tell that egg to start producing an embryo, and so it does.”
The process, known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, is merely the latest version of cloning to be embraced by ranchers.
Identical twins are clones of each other, and scientists have been fertilizing eggs in test tubes and splitting them manually to make twins, triplets and quadruplets for more than 20 years. They also have been making clones of embryos created through in-vitro fertilization for nearly as long.
“They are in the food supply, and no one’s worried at all about them,” Van Eenennaam said.
“Cloning means you’re genetically identical to the thing next to you,” Van Eenennaam said. “Somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning from an adult animal is one little branch of cloning, and it is the one that everyone’s upset about.”
The first batch of steaks was brought to the table. Then came the burgers, without buns and condiments.
Nothing about the meat’s appearance hinted at which beef was cloned. All that distinguished it was the “A” and “B” labels on the serving platters.
Not wanting to detract from the main course, Peel chose mild side dishes–potatoes, carrots, mushrooms and peas.
Would Peel put cloned beef on his menu?
Yes, if the beef is safe and tasty, Peel said. Then again, “If I put `porterhouse from the progeny of cloned beef’ on the menu, I would think that would be a problem,” he said.
The meal was half over before anyone asked the central question that had occupied FDA scientists for six years: What about health issues?
Van Eenennaam said about 100 cloned cattle have been studied in great detail, with scientists scrutinizing the vitamins, minerals, proteins, amino acids and other essential nutrients in their meat and milk.
“It was in the bounds of regularly produced cattle,” she said.
But the technology is far from perfect. Most attempts at cloning fail, leading to death in utero or shortly after birth. Those flawed cattle are never eligible to enter the food supply. Animals that are old enough to produce milk or be slaughtered, however, are “not distinguishable from other animals that aren’t cloned,” she said.
Those conclusions haven’t swayed consumers.
Uncomfortable with cloning
A survey last year by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that 64 percent of Americans were uncomfortable with animal cloning.
“Even though there’s a big gulf between cloning Full Flush and cloning you, there is that fear in the back of people’s minds that we’re going to cross that bridge,” Peel said.
After the plates were cleared, the guests rendered their verdicts on cloned beef.
“I didn’t taste a difference,” said Gregory Jaffe, director of the project on biotechnology at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
“None whatsoever,” public television personality Huell Howser said.
“I liked B better,” Peel said, “but I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to which was cloned.”
“I thought they tasted identical,” Glassner said.
“I couldn’t taste any difference,” Van Eenennaam said.
It turned out the “A” burgers and the “B” steaks were cloned. But by the time the triple-sealed envelopes were opened to reveal which were which, the taste test had lost its urgency.
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As the last of the ice cream melted over remnants of chocolate tart, the conversation had shifted to the prospect of a trade war with Europe.
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The menu
Caramelized onion tart
Steaks and burgers fromcloned and conventional beef
Roasted fingerling potatoes
Sauteed blue-footedand hedgehog mushrooms
Roasted carrots
Early spring English peas
Chocolate tart with chocolate-cocoa-nib ice cream and chocolate sauce
The guests
Barry Glassner, USC sociologist and author
Huell Howser, host of “California’s Gold” on public television
Gregory Jaffe, director of the project on biotechnology at the Center for Science in the Public Interest
Evan Kleiman, host of “Good Food” on KCRW and executive chef of Angeli Caffe in Los Angeles
Mark Peel, executive chef of Campanile
Alison Van Eenennaam, UC Davis animal geneticist