To eat clone or to not?

Now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said it’s OK to eat cloned pigs, cattle and goats, what will be the impact on the grand and smoky tradition of the Texas barbecue?

More specifically, how will genetically engineered beef hit McAllen’s Fajita Cookoff each October?

It might not, if the cookoff ‘s founder Christopher Julian and “fajita marshal” Richard Womeldorf have any say about it.

Womeldorf inspects fajita entries for purity and authenticity.

He says he’s leaning toward writing a sentence into the cookoff’s rules that will ban fajitas assembled from meat with artificial origins.

“It’s a little scary insofar as people ingesting cloned meat,” he says. “Chris and I are going to have to sit down and think about it.”

Fajitas were the staple of vaqueros on dusty 19th century cattle drives.

In the name of decency, says Womeldorf, you don’t manufacture fajitas from stuff manipulated by white-coated scientists in some air-conditioned lab.

As he says, “I’ve never seen a bunch of DNA molecules being driven up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene.”

Pablo Martinez, meat department manager of the Junior’s Supermarkets chain that serves Edinburg, Alton, San Juan and Lopezville, guesses 90 percent of meat buyers would reject cuts if they knew the source was cloned.

“Some people morally may not accept it,” he says. “They think things should be natural.”

But any genuine threat from fake fajitas or steaks could be years away.

Cloned beef cattle are few in number (600 out of 65 million head) and shockingly expensive, around $16,000 to $20,000 a head. They’ll be used for breeding — not T-bones, New York strips or filet mignons.

That could change as quantities rise and prices fall, but it still will take a while for genetically engineered animals to become a big part of the U.S. food chain, most industry insiders say.

In the view of Julian and Womeldorf, real fajitas are made only with beef strips from the faja or stomach skirt of the steer; although, to the horror of purists, there are chicken fajitas and vegetable and shrimp ones, too, stuffed in tortillas. The worst yuppie contamination: sirloin fajitas.

So intent are Womeldorf and Julian on fighting fajita corruption that they’ve formed the Coalition Against False Fajitas, which forthrightly stands against fajitas made with anything other than beef. Cloned beef is just another cause for study and alertness.

Enforcing any no-cloned-beef rule might be difficult. It could be impossible to tell the real thing from the cloned product, which is, after all, an exact genetic copy of the real thing.

As of now, the government won’t require an identifying label on cloned meat sold in stores, although pressure from politicians and animal-rights activists could change that.

Some retailers of organic foods, however, might choose labels that say “free of cloned meat” or something close to that.

Jerry Kane, president and CEO of Corpus Christi’s Sam Kane Beef Processors — which slaughters cattle and vacuum packs parts for restaurants and other big customers like

Junior’s Supermarkets — is much more adamant when it comes to his judgment call:

“The cloned meat will never see a building like this, at least while I’m alive.”

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John S. DeMott covers general assignment for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4422.