By Keith Stewart

Is it possible that New Zealander's may have resumed a moderated cannibalism, with human genes have been found in pork sausage in the United States. The US and Canada are major sources of imported pork in New Zealand, and there are no barriers to transgenic pork ending up in locally sold pork, ham and bacon.

The issue has been raised by recent news of cloned beef entering the British food chain. The initial news in Britain revolved around meat from a cloned beef animal that was from a farm in Scotland. It transpired that a bull that was the son of a cloned cow had been slaughtered and its meat sold for human consumption.

While this happened in 2009 it has caused a storm of protest in the United Kingdom over cloned meat being sold without consumer knowledge. The UK Food Standards Authority has begun an investigation, but on the matter of cloned meat that investigation has become irrelevant as The Scotsman newspaper yesterday (Thursday 5th) divulged that, "Supermarket shelves could have already been flooded with imported meat from cloned animals because of loopholes in food-labelling regulations..."

The fact is that large quantities of meat are imported into the United Kingdom with no controls as to its transgenic origins, and the same situation applies to New Zealand. Quite we simply we have no way of knowing what is in our meat, especially in the pork we eat.

As over 50% of pork in New Zealand is imported, most of it from Canada and the United States where transgenic development of pigs is well advanced, there is a possibility that New Zealand consumers are similarly exposed to eating transgenic meat.

The Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) has refused to make labelling of such meat compulsory (Australia is one of the largest markets for Canadian pork) in spite of the risk of exposure. Canada has already legislated for transgenic pigs (modified with mouse DNA) to be farmed openly, and this meat will be passed into the Canadian and US food chain, as has already happened through a mistake.

In the United States researchers have been cloning pigs with human DNA to develop organs for human transplants. Meat from these pigs has already been discovered in sausages on general sale, and may have already been exported to New Zealand.

So those days when human flesh was known colloquially in this country as "long pork" may not be too far from the present situation. Pakeha and puha might be closer to our pork and puha national dish than we ever imagined.