Is meat from cloned animals safe to eat?
Picture the perfect steak. The first bite melts in your mouth, tender and dripping with flavor. You can barely keep chewing as your mind goes slack with joy. Yes, you could spend the rest of your life eating this same steak, over and over, with no complaint whatsoever. The technology exists to create exact reproductions of genetically superior cows—those that have the most tender flesh or are the best milk-producers, says Ed Mills. But don’t expect cloned steaks to hit the market in the near future. Mills, associate professor of dairy and animal science at Penn State, notes that although U.S. companies have already produced over 600 cloned animals, most were copies of prize-winning cows or bulls, destined for stud farms, not the dinner table. Since 2001, the industry has had a self-imposed moratorium preventing cloned meat from entering the food supply. This gave the Food and Drug Administration time to conduct a risk assessment on the safety of eating meat from cloned animals. The age
