Cloned beef burgers on the menu

A Pennsylvania company may be serving a taste of the future at regular Friday lunches featuring meat from cloned cows.
By BusinessWeek-MSN Money

Shirley Trimmer knows her hamburgers. She prepares them with a handful of bread cubes, a little egg, chopped onions and just the right sprinkling of salt and pepper. Trimmer recently served burgers for a lunch meeting of the seven-member team that makes up the biotech company Cyagra, based in Elizabethtown, Pa.

But something was different about these hamburgers: They were made from the meat of cloned cows. Every Friday for the past year or so, Cyagra employees have been eating their way through the thousands of pounds of beef left over from the 11 clones that the company had raised and slaughtered for a cloned-meat study.

"We started with the steaks, which we grilled all summer long, and now we have hamburger meat left over," Trimmer says. Steve Mower, the company's director of marketing, says, "She cooks (the burgers) just right. They're delicious."

Like it or not, Trimmer and her colleagues may be getting a taste of the future. On Dec. 28, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an 800-page report that concluded meat and milk from clones are safe for consumption. The FDA has asked for public comment on the issue over the next couple of months, but it appears likely to give final approval for food from cloned animals.

"It's not a big deal," Mower says. "I've eaten cloned beef for a year and a half. It's scientifically proven to be safe." See: Cloned-beef burgers may head onto the menu