Pass notes No 2,883: Cloned milk

Age: Unclear. But keep refrigerated and drink within four days.

Appearance: Like milk, but sinister.

Cloned milk? Cloned milk? Do you mean milk that has been made from genetically identical milk? How is that possible? Are there little milk pods in the bowels of the Pentagon? Scientists nurturing the stuff in giant petri dishes and splicing nuclei with gay abandon? No, I mean milk that comes from cloned cows.

Ah. That makes more sense. It does, doesn’t it?

So – why is it in the news? Has Big Lacto announced its first laboratory tasting of the stuff? Not exactly. There may have been a sort of inadvertent experiment on the public.

That can’t happen. We have the Food Standards Agency – which requires that all “novel” foods are approved before they find their way to our supermarket shelves and from thence to our tender stomachs. You’re right.

And furthermore, the FSA classifies all meat and products from clones and their offspring as said novel foods, yes? Yes.

And milk is a product. So – quid hoc propto ergo propter hoc thing, innit? What can I tell you? Sometimes dairy farmers may not tell everybody everything. And then, before you know it, there’s bottles of extremely homogeneous homogenised everywhere. The FSA is investigating.

Do we even have any cloned cows? I remember Dolly the Sheep. Did somebody breed Daisy 2.0? The milk-producers in question are the product of eggs from cloned prizewinning Holstein cows and sperm from normal bulls in the US. The resulting embryos were apparently implanted into British bovines. It’s udderly ingenious, really.

We could all be days away from sprouting horns and fly-swatter tails! I’m sort of hoping for three extra stomachs, myself. Think of the Tunnocks tea cakes I could get through then.

Seriously, what are the risks? Nobody knows. We’ll just have to wait and see. You know, like we did with CJD.

Do say: “I’ll take mine black.”

Don’t say: “Well, I think it’s moo-vellous!”