Hightower Lowdown

Got milk? This advertising slogan has taken on a new meaning since biotech profiteers started messing with the very nature of milk.

Bioengineering industrialists are attempting to fill our cereal bowls with milk from cloned cows.And they want to label the cloned stuff "organic milk"! Hey--"organic clone" is an Orwellian oxymoron.

Yet a USDA advisory panel, toadying to agribusiness, is reviewing the agency's definition of "organic" to determine if cloned milk fits.

The USDA definition clearly states that no genetically engineered food can be labeled organic. It's hard to think of an animal that's more engineered than a cow that's conceived in a laboratory dish and has only one parent. The very essence of "organic" is that it denotes a product from nature, not one made by humans.

The good news is that several organic milk sellers--including Organic Valley, Ben & Jerry's, Land O'Lakes, and Horizon--say they will not use milk from cloned animals because consumers don't want it. When consumers learn that cloned animals suffer major levels of genetic abnormalities and that there have been very few food-safety studies done on the consumption of cloned food, they'll want it even less.