The first beef from cloned cattle will be hitting supermarket shelves in the U.S.A within the next few months according to today's news.
Inevitably the arrival of clone tissue in the food chain with spark ethical protests and we will be asked by organisations of the right and left, “would you eat mean from a cloned cow?”
Personally, I would not give a hoot, a steak is a steak and we should remember the first animals ever farmed for food were snails and as they are hermaphrodites they clone themselves in a manner of speaking.
Archaeological evidence traces snail farming back to 10,500BC and in all that time the question of whether it is ethical to eat animals that have shagged themselves has never arisen. Whatever snails get up to in the privacy of their shells is their own business.
I would not eat snails but for aesthetic rather than ethical reasons. If I don’t like the look of something there is no way it is going in my mouth. This probably goes a long way towards explaining why I’m 100% straight.

Having said all that, it is unlikely I shall ever eat cloned beef, though not in my view unethical, it is bad for the planet.
Prime quality beef from grain fed cattle has an enormous carbon footprint and is a huge drain on food stocks. About seven pounds of grain is needed to produce one pound of edible meat. With a global food crunch lurking in the shadow of the credit crunch, meat eating is economic madness.
In the case of cloned beef the adverse energy balance is even worse. I recently read a description of how many scientists are involved in producing beef this way. Add up the cost of feeding them, keeping them in warm, comfortable sheds and providing enough electronic gadgets to keep them amused and cloning is totally unfeasible.
The question we must ask then is how much arm are we willing to do to the planet just so scientists can prove their ability to do in the laboratory what animals have been doing in the wild for millions of years without any fuss.

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