SAGE ADVICE: Got cloned?  SAGE ADVICE: Got cloned?  SAGE ADVICE: Got cloned?  SAGE ADVICE: Got clone

The Food and Drug Administration said this week it’s OK to go around eating cloned meat and milk. That’s what all the television stations, newspapers and Web sites were saying Wednesday.

Most explained that the expensive process of cloning could come in handy for a dairy farmer who wanted to clone a cow known for her milk-producing prowess. I don’t understand fully how that would work, but I bet there’s something about sticking it to the consumer and the small farmer somewhere in that logic.

Various groups with fancy alphabet-soupy names are all saying it’s just going to take time for all us Luddites to get with the program and start exclaiming “mmm, mmm good” as we lick a cloned mustache off our upper lips. They point out that technological advances have always been seen as wasteful, scary and unworthy of human consumption. No one I’ve heard talking about such things has mentioned Velcro, but I would like to. I think Velcro is wasteful, scary and terribly unworthy of human consumption, especially when it’s fashioned to make laceless shoes. One of the things, one of the only things, that separates us from the chimpanzees, far as I can tell, is that we know how to operate our opposable thumbs to tie our shoes. If we suddenly give that up because of some new-fangled technology then we’re no better than our banana-eating, feces-throwing, sign-language-communicating cousins.

Yet the FDA says it’s safe. Scientists there said the chemical makeup of cloned and uncloned milk and meat are the same. No one could tell the difference, they said. Think of them, if you will, as the three-piece suited version of your uncle Larry who swears that you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between chicken and dumplings and opossum and dumplings if he hadn’t let you in on the secret.

Anyway, because the meat is chemically identical the FDA scientists deduced, to oversimplify only slightly, that it must be safe. This, remember, is the same white-jacket wearing, pocket-protector sporting, wedgie-receiving bunch that in 1999 gave its full approval to a painkiller called Vioxx. The same group that kind of formed its collective mouth into an “o” in 2004 when the drug’s maker, Merck, voluntarily pulled the painkiller from the market because it was linked to a risk of heart attacks and strokes. “Oh yeah,” they might have said, even as they were busily studying the safety of cloned milk in the marketplace. “Didn’t see that one. Our bad.”

I’m no scientist – you can tell by my lack of a white lab coat, pocket protector and the fact that I’ve never to my recollection received a wedgie – but I am a father of 4-year-old who could, if left on his own, guzzle a gallon of milk a day. Because I don’t know exactly what cloned milk could do to him, and neither does the Vioxx-approving, Canola-oil endorsing, Duract-championing FDA, I am, as my late grandfather would say, again it.

Mark Sage is group editor of the Southwest Virginia weekly newspapers.