Meat from Clones or Not?

Posted by Shirley Siluk Gregory Jan 22, 2008

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's recent announcement that meat from cloned animals was safe to eat launched an avalanche of commentary from foodies, consumer advocates, environmentalists and others, both online and off. If you really want to be green, though, the prospect of cloned meat needn't be an issue: you're better off leaving meat out of your diet entirely anyway.

That's because meat production in general is an environmentally costly business. For example, it takes five pounds of grain to produce a single pound of beef. And producing just a quarter-pound of beef requires 4,500 gallons of water, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The livestock business also uses up billions of pounds of fertilizer (to grow feed grain), produces trillions of pounds of manure and generates almost one-fifth of the world's methane emissions.

So leave it to others to worry about whether it makes sense to eat cloned animals. From an eco-standpoint, it really doesn't make sense to eat any animals at all.