So much of the uproar following the FDA’s announcement is over the possibility of eating cloned meat, or more correctly, meat from cloned animals. The USDA today issued a request that producers continue to withhold their cloned animals (but not offspring) from the food supply in order to buy time for ‘an acceptance process’ consumers in the United States and abroad will need, “given the emotional nature of this issue.”

In reality, it is the genetics, not the meat that will reach the consumer. Clones themselves will be used for breeding, so the impact on the food chain will be essentially the same as other breeding technologies, such as artificial insemination and embryo transfer. I have read the FDA’s report . The genetics of the cloned animals remain unchanged so there is no reason to expect, nor evidence to support that offspring of cloned animals are in any way different than offspring of the original animal. Read the rest of this entry »