Today's "Perspectives" section of the West County Times, our local newspaper, contains both an op-ed and a pair of letters on the cloning of animals for food. The op-ed, of course, supports the process; the letter-writers fear it.
I wouldn't hesitate to eat a steak from a cloned animal; I doubt that the taste would be any different, and I suspect that the contents wouldn't be, either. After all, a clone is, for all intents and purposes, nothing but an identical twin of its progenitor, and we've been dealing with identical twins in both the human and the animal worlds for a long time, now. I might have some pretty severe doubts about the way a farm of cloned animals would be treated, but I doubt whether they'd be any worse off than the uncloned animals now relegated to factory farms.
My problem with the whole process is a bit longer range. Consider Beefsteak the Steer, whose prime rib turns out to be better than that produced by any other animal. Can you see a time in the future when all our fields are covered by simple, and genetically identical, copies of Beefsteak? Seems to me that this would only be Good Business. And then there's that outbreak of cattle dengue, the disease to which most cows were more or less immune but to which something in Beefsteak's makeup made him just that little bit more susceptible — boom! our cattle industry is decimated!
What worries me about the whole cloning process in the food industry is not the possibility that there will be something bad for us in the product, but the potential loss of genetic diversity. Is this something we want to take a chance on, simply for the good of the Bottom Line?
Incidentally, this is not a problem we can expect to have with human cloning, where the motivations (short of the potential reestablishment of the slave trade) are considerably different. I have no problem with human cloning whatsoever, given the proper circumstances, and I have no understanding of those people who would ban human cloning "for ethical reasons" but are quite ready to adopt the cloning of animals "for business reasons."