I'm pretty sure that I've already had some cloned meat since farmers have been "voluntarily" keeping cloned foods out of their products, but I still don't feel good about it. I'm especially wary about the part where it says you basically have to wait 18 months (max) to be completely sure that they're "virtually indistinguishable" from regular animals. I'm not a scientist so I have no clue what the effects of eating a messed up cloned cow would do to my system. Is this a case of the farming industry going overboard to make more money? Or is this no different than the steroids and genetic engineering that they've been doing? Also, would you be more comfortable with a "cloned food" label? http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/12/28/cloned.food.ap/index.html
In case you don't know every apple you have ever eaten is a clone. The same is true for a signficant number of other fruits and vegetables.
Lol. I don't know why people should be nervous about eating a cloned animal. How could it hurt you? You're just eating the flesh of the animal and taking its proteins. You aren't absorbing its DNA information. Steroids are probably a bigger health risk than cloning. I see most of the trouble with cloning to be possible ethical issues and the impact it will have on the farming industry, including possibly unforeseen macreconomic effects.
My guess - the fear is that since cloning is such a new development, there is the possibility that something in the animal/meat's chemistry could be inadvertantly changed, which then could harm humans. In other words, are we actually making a true clone or making something slightly inferior (and potentially harmful)? If I remember correctly, Dolly the sheep had a much shorter lifespan (and aged prematurely) compared to a normal sheep. That would support the fear (whether correctly or not) that we haven't quite gotten the cloning process perfect yet.
