Will consumers go for cloned meat?

Very soon now, probably before the end of the year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will give its final decision as to whether the consumption of meat from cloned animals is safe. It is widely accepted by most pundits that the decision will allow the sale of these products to consumers.

Scientifically speaking, cloning animals should not make a difference as to whether their meat is safe or not as long as the original animal itself is safe to eat. And although it would certainly make sense to clone an animal with excellent meat quality, we’re not quite there yet, technologically speaking. Even though it is possible, the technique remains too expensive to be used widely. But once these technological and legal hurdles are out of the way (I won’t go into the ethics of the matter), there still remains the most important question, at least in the case of poultry processors… will consumers go for it?

Two interesting pieces of information came to light recently. First, the California Senate “passed a bill that would require all packages containing product from a cloned animal to be labelled as such,” according to Meatingplace.com (membership required). Although the bill has yet to be signed by the state governor, it does imply that California’s legislature considers it a given that the FDA will consider cloned meat safe. Furthermore, by acting pre-emptively, the bill’s creators believe that consumers will want to be informed of what they’re buying.

That is one crystal ball that is very hard to peer into, which leads us to that second piece of information: the results of an assessment of consumer attitudes toward food biotechnology commissioned by the International Food Information Council (IFIC). Their numbers show that 22% of respondents held a favourable view of the use of “animal cloning”, and that the percentage jumps to 46% if the FDA determines that foods from cloned animals are safe.

The implication of these results is that consumers, in the US at least, have a lot of faith in their government and their food supply and would be very likely to accept cloned meat.

A good marketing strategy could help, but might be tricky as it could easily backfire, with consumer-citizens making the meat industry, as a whole, a very easy target. Another way out would be to enlist the government for help in supporting the consumption of cloned meat, probably a safer route.

It remains to be seen what exactly will happen, but it will all certainly make for interesting outcomes.

Related blogs:
Safety of Cloned Animals