From The Ground Up

April Fools food fight

Ben & Jerry's, of natural ice cream with nutty names fame, is letting people in on the joke it created to criticize cloning cows.

The company put up a Web site for CyClone Dairy (motto: Perfect Cows Perfect Milk) last month. Today it posted a video on the site telling the rest of the story.

On the site, there are some pretty funny lines like "old-fashioned dairy the new-fashioned way" and a testimonial from a satisfied-looking woman who says knowing CyClone milk "only comes from perfect cows makes me feel good."

Here's another: "Cows are way cool and so is cloning. Check out these fun facts to find out why." One of the "facts" is that cows can walk up steps but not down because their knees bend a certain way.

I don't know about that, but the fight over cloning is real. The FDA in January 2008 said food from cloned animals is safe, and since then, vendors of bovine semen claim to have sold some of their product from cloned dairy bulls. That means there could be calves out there that would fit right in at the CyClone Dairy.

Cloners say beef or milk from their animals is no different from the standard fare, but the cost of doing the cloning is so great, a cloned animal is not likely to get into the food chain any time soon. Just it's offspring.

Ben & Jerry's wants Congress to institute DNA tracking so consumers will know when someone has been messing with Mother Nature.

Gourmet cuts of beef. Coming Soon!?