never eating meat again?

[coco_b]

F.D.A. Says Food From Cloned Animals Is Safe. I could pretty easily give up meat, but I'm not sure I could live without cheese. There are no labeling requirements for products from cloned animals, as if it will even be possible to track them through generations of livestock. I'm scared.

Comments

[cjmr]

As far as I can see, the danger of cloned meat is not in the immediate eating of it. It should be functionally indistinguishable from meat that was bred in the normal way, and will be metabolized normally.

The danger is in the homogenization of livestock. Naturally bred livestock, even with the most controlled circumstances (prize-winning sperm used on a whole herd, for instance), has genetic variations that gives the animals some hybrid vigor. A herd of cattle that is genetically identical will be more susceptible to being wiped out by a new virus or bacteria that evolves. In the long run, it is really stupid, IMO, to clone or inbreed a herd.

What I don't understand about the push for cloned meat is that they're still experiencing a 2/3 attrition rate on the cloning--50% of the clones die in utero and a third of the survivors die in infancy. Compared to the 75-80% survival rate of naturally bred cattle, it just seems like a waste.

(I'll jump off my soapbox now.)