Count me among those who thinks this is no big deal :

A long-awaited study by US scientists has concluded that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring are safe to eat and drink and should be allowed to enter the food supply without any special labeling.

Seriously. The freaking out over this is just stupid. Human beings have been been “playing God” with our food supply since the dawn of agriculture, so the neo-Luddite crap that accompanies every scientific advancement is getting old. Cloned meat is safe to eat, so calm down..

What’s extra funny about all this is the advocates in these debates who concede that even if cloned meat is safe to eat and is indistinguishable from the standard meat that comes from test tube calves, we should still have strict labeling laws. Now, I’m all for consumer transparency, but let’s not act as if this is happening in a vacuum. Here’s the context :

The FDA sees cloning as a natural extension of the livestock reproductive technologies — such as artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization — that have become routine, said spokesman Doug Arbesfeld.
. . .
But a study released this month by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that 64 percent of Americans are uncomfortable with animal cloning and that 43 percent believe food from clones is unsafe.

Why is that? Because “clone” is a scary word. I’d be more sympathetic to anti-cloning side if somebody could give a legitimate reason to believe that eating meat from cloned animals is worse for you than regular meat. Without that, the whole labeling issue seems like nothing more than an attempt to capitalize on the general public’s unfounded fears.

Before you call me a corporate shill in the comments, however, let me point out that the real reason you should be worried about cloned meat (courtesy of jb at Metafilter) has nothing to do with what you’re serving for dinner.

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.

So please people, if you’re going to go nuts over out-of-control corporate agribusiness, do it for the right reasons.