Web Note: Actually there is a way to avoid cloned meat. Buy organic. Cloning is prohibited by organic production standards. For more information on cloning, please visit OCA's Cloning and Patenting Page.

Less than a dozen years after Dolly the sheep became the world's first cloned mammal, grocers and restaurateurs are digesting the fact that milk and meat from cloned animals could soon filter into their supply chains.

The government took major steps toward easing cloned livestock and their offspring into the food supply in mid-January, when the Food and Drug Administration concluded they're safe to eat.

The question is, will consumers swallow the new technology? And how will food businesses cope if their customers balk?

Many food merchants are still framing their policies while they warily monitor public opinion. The historic commercial debut of cloning comes in an era when a significant segment of consumers have rejected other foods the FDA deemed safe, such as milk from hormone-treated cows and genetically modified corn.

Cloning is an attempt to create a new animal using the DNA from an existing adult animal. The FDA, while noting that livestock cloning produces many malformed or ill newborn animals, said cloned animals that survive for several months after birth can be healthy. They can reproduce normally and produce healthy young, the FDA said. The agency said it found no signs that food from healthy clones is harmful to humans, and predicted that sickly clones would be excluded from the food supply.

Consumer groups, however, have called FDA's positive safety assessment hasty and ill-founded. The Center for Food Safety said the FDA based many conclusions on small or limited studies, many of them financed by cloning companies. Clones that appear healthy can have infections, or abnormalities that could affect food quality such as unusual proteins or imbalances between protein and fats, the group said. Further studies should be done to evaluate clones and their offspring, the organization said.

Such groups are urging consumers to press their supermarkets and restaurants to refuse food from clones. And those businesses are being peppered with inquiries like "Will my hamburger meat come from a cloned cow?" and "Are clones kosher?"

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