I’m with Greg at The Talent Show.  I don’t see anything wrong with cloned meat. 

Yes, I realize that the FDA has a history of approving things, and then we find out ten years later that the product approved was not really all that safe.  But meat and milk from cloned cows?  No big deal.

The truth is that we have been playing God with animals for years.  Our meat products already derived from engineered animals — animals created with in vitro fertilization and pumped with steroids.  Cloning is just another step.

But (as Greg points out) it’s the word "cloning" itself that gives people the heebee jeebees.  It has the science fictiony feel to it, creating the sense that it is something bad and sinister to be avoided — even though we cannot articulate the danger.

Yet, nobody can identify the danger of eating a hamburger made from a cloned cow (other than, of course, the regular dangers that come from eating meat).  So what are we scared of?

However, Greg also points to something to think about — not in terms of health, but in terms of agro-economic policy:

The cloned meat is just fine to eat, but that doesn’t mean cloning isn’t a danger. What happens when 90% of the animals in North American are only 5 genotypes? They might all be susceptible to the same disease, and then all will die. Whereas now, some are susceptible, but others (maybe not such good milkers) are immune.

We’ve already seen this in corn – the obsession with having uniform farming meant that som 70% or more of American corn was destroyed by the same disease in the 1970s, and the American corn industry had to be bailed out by Mexican corn, because they believe in having more variety in maize there.

If we start cloning animals, we have so much to lose in terms of genetic diversity. We’ll also lose traits that might not seem important now, but might be important in the future. Right now, we want maximum milk or maximum meat production in cattle, but what if in 100 years we want hardiness to drought? We will have bred all the variety right out of the cattle, which will make it so much harder to change our breeding programs.

We need to protect diversity in our farm products – everyone loves to talk about biodiversity in the Amazon, but it’s all the more important to us and our immediate survival that we have biodiversity in our agricultural plants and animals, because that is what keeps us alive. We can’t afford to let the quick buck now destroy the wealth of genetic diversity which we have, and which we have bred into our plants and animals.

Something to think about.  Maybe it’s not necessary to worry about — or even label — cloned food, but we should think about setting limits on the number of cloned animals to make sure we have sufficient biodiversity.