Japan Gets Taste of Cloned Beef
T O K Y O, Sept. 9 -- It looks like beef. It tastes like beef. In fact, it’s nothing less than 100 percent pure beef.
But a batch of the stuff drew nationwide attention in Japan when it went on the market today advertised as the beef of a cloned cow.
“It’s nice and soft,” said Kaori Yoshimura, a 28-year old office worker dining on the cloned meat at a steakhouse. “I’d buy it again because it tastes good.”
But cloned beef has been getting less than rave reviews lately.
Beef Backlash
A government announcement in April that it had been sold unmarked for at least two years triggered threats of a beef boycott. Many retailers stopped selling it because of negative news reports.
The Agriculture Ministry insisted that the beef was safe and there was no need to specify its origin. Consumer demand for an informed choice, however, prompted the ministry to study compulsory labeling.
There is no decision yet. But in the meantime, the ministry provided one cloned cow to be divided among a Tokyo restaurant and several stores around the country. It asked them to label the beef and gauge the reaction.
Pure (pronounced PEW-ah), a Korean barbecue place in Tokyo’s busy Shimbashi district, became the ministry’s Exhibit A tonight.
How Does It Taste?
Inside the packed restaurant, TV crews crowded around the beer-drinking, beef-eating customers, demanding opinions on the taste.
“The word ‘clone’ has a bad image,” said Yoshimura, the happy customer. “It makes you think of someone creating identical human beings in a lab.”
That didn’t stop her and dozens of other diners from wolfing down chopstick-loads of the grilled meat. Pure had notified regular customers of the experiment, and lowered prices for the event, which was to continue as long as the meat holds out.
Customers got pamphlets explaining the cloning process and stressing that beef from cloned cows is no different from regular beef.
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