It seems to me that cloning animals to duplicate the finest qualities of a particular beast,would certainly allow for predictable meat and dairy products. Of course eliminating the random nature of animals fornicating and procreating is a concern, for the animals.
Labeling, I bet, would benefit the cloner/supplier,a guarantee of the products quality and consistency and justify the higher price. Cloning must be more expensive than the free aspects of animals reproducing naturally, though few of our food producing animals live any kind of natural life these days...no wonder everything tastes like its packaging.
I suppose its coming, that one day soon, the best steak you ever tasted can be saved to your cellphone memory and reproduced at home, in your KITCHEN CLONER.

Let the members of the FDA use this cloned meat and milk for ten years and if they are still alive and health only then should they even think about feeding the rest of us Americans using cloned food.
Barbara

I don't think in my lifetime, but cloning is here like it or not. Not yet but some day out of necessity, therefore I would not mind buying cloned milk or other products. JDL

There's one thing about cloning which is fundamentally wrong. It hijacks genetic progression.

Let's say that cloning is accepted as the norm and it even produces food products which are superior to and cheaper than what we have right now. Sounds good right?

BUT, What has happened is that the progression of the genetic pool has been frozen in one "ultimate" state.

Now, suppose that some bovine virus emerged from the depths of the soil which was unrecognized and untreatable and resulted in the unpreventable death of the infected animal.

What we didn't realize when we finalized our "clone pool" was that those animals which were rejected for cloning because they tended to be underweight, carried the genetic markers which rendered them immune to the newly discovered bovine killer virus. Do you see the danger here?

Cloning will limit the gene pool. A cloned animal will only be pretty until you need it to be something else.

Michael, clearly this issue freaks out a lot of people. I don't know if it's due to sci fi movies or what. People may not like assisted reproductive technologies in general or cloning in particular, but there's no evidence that any of them result in food safety hazards so it's no surprise the FDA approves.

But let's say someone wants to avoid buying meat or milk that comes from a cow that was born through cloning. You say consumers will have no choice to avoid them unless the FDA requires that they be labeled. That is definitely not true. Food marketers can and do label their food to appeal to a variety of consumer preferences for such things as kosher food, or organic food, etc. Government rules require such labels to be truthful (for example food producers have to comply with a long list of rules before they can slap the "organic" label on their products) and not misleading (food producers can't write the label in a way that implies that the product is safer than other products), and this seems to work out fine for everybody.

What the government will NOT do is require food producers to label their foods "non-kosher" or "non-organic" or "not from animals born through cloning," because absent a food safety issue there's no legal justification to do so (see the First Amendment).

The National Organic Program has already announced that cloned animals will be excluded from the organic label, and as you pointed out several major food companies have already said they won't sell food from cloned animals, so consumers clearly have choices.

Why do you say "will the stores be able to keep the products off their shelves?" That's not how it works. Your local supermarket stocks organic AND nonorganic food, kosher AND nonkosher food, and eventually it will stock meat and milk that came from cattle that were not born through cloning AND from cattle that were born though cloning, and shoppers will buy what they want just like they do now. Food producers aren't powerless to control how their animals are bred and raised (just ask the organic food industry) and cloning isn't going to change that.

So by all means let's talk about what food labels we want, but let's not make the mistake of thinking that this is about mandatory labels.

Note to Gary Sattler: Sounds like a good idea for a novel, but in reality farmers and ranchers have been using selective breeding to manipulate the bovine gene pool since way before your granddaddy's granddaddy was born. They certainly have a strong incentive to maintain enough diversity in the gene pool to produce healthy animals. They also have a strong incentive to continue to improve the genetics of their stock. Cloning doesn't improve genetics (it just reproduces them), so the farmers and ranchers who have expressed interest in cloning talk about using it in conjunction with (not instead of) their current breeding practices.

But let's say Bill Gates were to go insane and decide to try to eliminate diversity from the bovine gene pool. Let's say he got a volume discount on cloning, at $1000 per cow. With $50 billion he could afford to clone the same cow 50 million times. The global cow population is over 1 billion. So assuming Gates could find anyone willing and able to fill an order for 50 million cow clones, he could succeed in reducing the diversity of the cow population by almost 5%. This would be bizarre and dastardly, but hardly the end of cowdom.