Unit 93
Send in the Clones, Waiter
It looks life beef. It tastes like beef. In fact, it's nothing less than 100 percent pure beef. But a batch of the beef drew nationwide attention in Japan when it went on the market advertised as the beef of a cloned cow. "It's nice and soft," said an office worker dining on the cloned meat at steakhouse. "I'd buy it again because it tastes good."
A government announcement that cloned beef had been sold unmarked for at least two years resulted in fear across the country. Many retailers stopped selling it because of negative news reports. The Agricultural Ministry insisted that the beef was safe and there was no need to mark its origin. Consumers, however, demanded an informed choice. There is no decision yet. But in the meantime, the ministry provided one cloned cow to be divided among a Tokyo restaurant and several stores around the country. It asked them to label the beef and see the reaction. PURE, a Korean restaurant in Tokyo's busy district, became the ministry's exhibition hall.
Inside the packed restaurant, TV crews crowded around the beer-drinking, beef-eating customers, demanding opinions on the taste. "The word 'clone' has a bad image," said a happy customer. "It makes you think of someone creating human beings in a lab." That didn't stop her and dozens of other diners from wolfing down chopstick-loads of the meat. Te restaurant had informed regular customers of the experiment, and lower prices for the event, which was to continue as long as the meat holds out. Customers got pamphlets explaining the cloning process and that beef from cloned cows is no different from regular beef.
With a domestic cattle industry threatened by imports of cheaper beef, Japanese scientists and agricultural officials see cloning as the way to keep small farms competitive. Cloning, they believe, could make farmers rear genetically superior cattle at a lower cost. Cloned vegetables and fish are widely marketed here, lso unmarked.
PURE's diners were asked to complete a questionnaire for the ministry on what they thought of the cloned beef. "I don't trust scientist," said a diner who works at a company that inspects organic vegetables. "I don't care what happens to me, but I wouldn't feed it to kids," he said. "Who knows what kind of problems this might cause in the future?" |