Reply #33: none of that had ANYTHING to do with what I posted....

[mike_c]

Whoa, cool your jets, Sparky! Where have you EVER heard me advocate government telling people what they can or cannot eat? What I advocate is people making intelligent, educated, and informed choices rather than hysterical, ignorant, and knee-jerk choices. No one has yet shown any reason to think that cloned animals are any less suitable for consumption than any other animals.

Do you know how mammals are presently cloned? The only part of the process that differs from normal sexual reproduction is the insertion of a diploid somatic nucleus into an ovum rather than insertion of a haploid spermatozoan and consequent syngamy. The resultant zygote is then returned to a host mother's uterus for normal development, just as it would have been if it were fertilized normally. Nothing in that process affects food quality one iota. Zip. It most assuredly does not turn calves into rat's asses or anything else but T-bone steaks.

You mentioned that cloned mammals often have shorter lives. So do most food animals, cloned or not. Leaving that aside, it's clear that current clonal technology is flawed in some ways-- not that that has any impact on suitability for consumption at all. There are likely some developmental problems associated with using somatic nuclei as DNA donors, for example, or possibly problems initiated by the enucleation of the egg and subsequent nuclear transfer of somatic cell DNA. I think that dramatically reduces the viability of clonal technology as any kind of replacement for normal sexual reproduction, especially artificial insemination, but as long as the resultant offspring develops desirable body mass and other food characteristics, those problems don't have any impact on its palattability or its wholesomeness, but rather its economic viability.

As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, we've been eating cloned fruits and vegetables for thousands of years, with no apparent harm. Why would cloned animals be any different?