By Keith Stewart

Golly, isn't science clever. In America they have cloned pigs, which they call enviropigs, with modified digestive systems that can cope with the industrial pig food their farmers feed them.

The problem with the grains that are the cheapest form of pig food is that pigs are not designed to eat grain, so their waste is full of environmentally destructive phosphorus which leaches into the environment where its contaminates waterways, amongst other nasty side effects. So science has produced a pig x mouse that delivers less phosphorus to the environment.

Clever, eh? But would you want to eat pig x mouse? This is a fair question because the reason farmers farm pigs is for pork, and the enviropig is likely to be a major part of New Zealand's pork supply as we import a hell of a lot of pork from North America.

Of course, the packages that your bacon, ham and pork come in will not tell you that the pig x mouse is what you will be eating, as Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) believe that consumers should not be told such stuff. They want us to eat up and be quiet.

Now if you are happy to eat pig x mouse bacon and pork, what about pig x human? Unlikely? No. Very likely as transgenic pig x human has already made its way into the human food chain in the United States, where Monsanto has been researching this form of transgenics to deliver organs for human transplants.

If that happens we need to ask ourselves if we are becoming clonal cannibals in the land where human meat was once called long pork. And not so long ago.

FSANZ claims that eating sucg strange meat will not kill us. But nor did eating humans ever do anybody any harm (apart from a few cases of Creutzfeld Jacobs Disease in Papua New Guinea), well, at least no harm to those doing the eating.

So is eating people about the return? Not unless they change the law on murder...unless we could use those who put their hands up for voluntary euthanasia. Now if we made youth suicide legal (suicide is voluntary), is this a new business opportunity?

Seriously folks, are we in danger of losing our moral compass on this clonal matter. They could solve the pig waste problem with intelligent farming. They could solve the transplant problem with stem cell development.

Just because we can, does not mean we should.