Yes. There are no reasons to believe that meat or milk from cloned animals are unsafe to eat. Studies have shown no meaningful differences except, perhaps, in the right direction. Beef from cloned cattle, for example, shows better marbling of fat and lean — a desirable feature — because the clones were made from prize animals that themselves had this quality.

Why should anyone want to do it?

Cloning is a way of duplicating the best animals. It is expensive, so meat or milk from these animals will not be sold as food. But they will be used as parents of the next generation, improving the quality of herds.

Isn’t there a risk of deformities in cloning?

There is. Cloned animals tend to be large at birth, and some suffer genetic changes. But those that are fit and normal do not appear to differ in any important way from conventional animals.

So what’s the problem?

Food safety scares are often a proxy for other, less easily voiced, concerns. Many people find the idea of cloning distasteful, and worry about animal welfare implications. To them these products are distasteful on moral rather than food safety grounds.

Isn’t the answer simply to label such food?

That’s probably a sound idea, even if hard to implement in practice. What happens five generations down the line, when the clone is a distant ancestor of the beef we are eating or the milk we are drinking? Is it still cloned? And how could the system be policed, given that there are no identifiable differences that could be used to check suppliers’ claims?

How soon will cloned food come our way?

Novel foods — of which this would be one — have to get EU approval before they can be marketed. In the UK, the Advisory Committee for Novel Foods would also have an opinion. No applications for marketing cloned foods have been made, so for the moment they could not be sold.

But if it’s identical, how would we know we aren’t already eating it?

Good question. Some websites in the US already offer semen from cloned bulls, so presumably cloned bulls have already sired offspring that have sold for beef in the US — and maybe over here too.

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