Anyone for cloned beef? Rib-eye would be my preferred cut; but that’s because it’s my usual choice at the local butcher’s. Why should a cloned version taste any less delicious or be any less nutritious? In reality, that is not going to be a choice available to the general public. The Food Standards Agency won’t authorise it.

This puzzles Professor Grahame Bulfield, former director of the Roslin Institute, where Dolly the sheep was cloned back in 1996. As he pointed out last week: “The FSA cannot produce any evidence that meat from clones or their offspring ... is any different to other meat. There is none, because it must be exactly the same.”

Precisely so: the cloned animal is genetically identical to the one from which it has been cloned. It is, in fact, the precise opposite of a mutation and an extension of the idea behind artificial insemination, which consumers seem happy to accept.

The FSA’s decision is not based on science, or even morality, but politics. It knows the majority of the public is spooked by the idea of anything remotely to do with animal clones in the food chain and that is that. There is not the same public terror of clone-derived foods outside the animal world and thus the FSA does not ban the sale of bananas. Come to think of it, a tabloid paper could probably mount an effective campaign against bananas on the precautionary principle that even though trillions upon trillions have been eaten safely so far, you never know…

It is the Daily Mail that has been attempting to terrify the nation over the past few days with its revelations about farms selling meat from two bulls, Parable and Dundee Paratrooper, which were the (completely healthy) offspring of a cloned animal.

The paper’s long-running campaign against so-called Frankenfoods is one of the reasons why genetically modified crops are not grown in this Britain.
 
In fact, common wheat is itself an unnatural man-made “polyploid” merger of three different species of plant: the whole of agriculture, from its earliest beginnings, is the history of man perverting nature for his own ends.

In the days when all farming was what we now call organic — before pesticides and artificial fertiliser — eating food really did carry constant risk of serious contamination. Such lethal sources of infection as E coli and salmonella were regular killers, as they still are in some developing countries where the population would regard the arrival of the hygienic standardisation of supermarket chains as a miracle, not a curse.

On the face of it, there is something absurd about the food consumers of the industrialised world seeming to panic as much about completely safe technologies, such as GM, as their ancestors would have done about genuinely risky sources of food for their families.

The answer to this apparent paradox seems to lie in basic human psychology. We have an eternal, existential level of anxiety, which remains constant regardless of the transformation of our material circumstances, either in our own lifetimes or over the millennia.

This has an evolutionary purpose, which is why it persists. Anxiety is necessary to alert us to danger — the “fight or flight” mechanism. Sigmund Freud saw it slightly differently to the Darwinians. He proposed that mankind had a kind of perennial concern about death — reasonably enough, you might think — but this could easily turn into a neurosis.

In the modern world, cancer is the big killer, which is why the more unscrupulous elements within the organic movement have used it as the great bogey, first as the allegedly inevitable consequence of the use of pesticides — Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring forecast that man-made chemicals in the food chain would cause “practically 100% of the human population to be wiped out from a cancer epidemic in one generation” — and more recently as the crudely hinted hazard of GM crops.

There is a class-based angle in the appeal of this scare tactic. So-called yummy mummies are especially vulnerable, whereas much poorer families seem less prone to anxiety about the perils of mass-produced foods.

This, too, may be partially explained by a form of evolutionary psychology: members of the former group are sufficiently affluent no longer to have the slightest economic problem in being able to provide their children with nutritious food — so they latch on to an invented problem and, in addressing it (by buying organic at twice the price), make themselves feel satisfyingly nurturing as mothers.

The symbiotic role of the media and politicians in pandering to our primordial terror has been all too evident in the wake of the explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico. It was certainly a tragedy, killing 11 rig workers; but it was not “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced” that Barack Obama declared in his first broadcast as president from the Oval Office.

It was this approach, combined with the headlines prophesying ecological holocaust, that began to drive those dependent on tourism revenues into despair and even bankruptcy.

Thus, two months ago the governor of Mississippi protested that the “biggest negative impact for us has been the news coverage” and complained that media reports and footage gave the completely misleading impression that the entire coast from Texas to Florida was “knee-deep in oil”.

Last week the White House revealed to a presumably startled nation that threequarters of the spilt oil had ... disappeared. That was principally due not to the government-led clearing operation, but to the natural forces of evaporation and microbes that for millennia have devoured the oil constantly springing from the floor of an intensely petroliferous region.

This is roughly what Tony Hayward, BP’s benighted chief executive, had been trying to suggest when at the outset he referred to the amount of oil being “tiny in relation to the total water volume”; but he was the last man to be able to get away with such a statement, regardless of whether it was true.

It came much better from Michael Grunwald, author of The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise, when he pointed out a week ago that “assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year”, and compared its impact on the local ecology to “sunburn on a cancer patient”.

Grunwald is a serious environmentalist who has long-standing concerns about America’s Gulf coast. This is why his criticism of politicians for ramping up the language of the spill into a kind of ecological version of the 9/11 attacks — as Obama explicitly did in that presidential broadcast — is so telling: he knows that such tactics eventually have the effect of convincing the public that the environmental lobbyists are as unscrupulous and even dishonest in their pronouncements as the most duplicitous oil giant.

Such scare tactics have the further drawback of communicating a fundamental lack of seriousness, a sense that sentiment, rather than reason, is at the heart of the campaign. This seems clearly true of the techniques used to chill the British public about the possibilities arising from the consumption of meat or milk from the offspring of the offspring of a cloned cow or bull. Yet, as we know, sentimentality is what occurs when no real tragedy is involved.
 
Perhaps we should be encouraged by such an absence of seriousness. If we have to exaggerate the risks — of what we put in our cars or in our mouths — then we are luckier people than we realise.


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This article was first published by The Sunday Times online on 8 August 2010.

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