Right now CNN.com is running a poll asking people whether or not they would eat meat from a cloned animal. Currently the results are 30% Yes, and over 45% No. I am confused by this. The meat of the animal is the same, regardless of the fact that the animal is cloned. They aren't proposing genetically altered animals (which people are usually averse to), but animals that are exactly the same as the original animal.

Perhaps most people don't realize that many plant materials such as some species of grapes, oranges, apples, watermelon, and many others cannot be bred via normal fertilization. By default, the only way to generate these delicious items is to clone the parent plant material.

Almost every single fruit that claims to be "seedless" is created by breeding two plants that result in a seedless variety and then cloning the plant each season to produe that same high quality. They certainly cannot collect the seeds from these plants, since they have few if any that are viable. Even if they could, due to genetic variation, these seeds would almost never produce the same plant.

Corn is one of the greatest offenders of this issue. Have you ever passed by a corn field and seen diamond shaped signs along side of the rows? Often, this is a marker put out by the farmer advertising the cloned or genetically altered corn seed/plants that they are using. Has this slowed our consumption of corn products?

Taking this information and moving to animals, what is the difference between cloned plant flesh and cloned animal flesh? I am not arguing whether people should eat meat or not. I would in many ways agree that we should skip eating animals, but I like a burger just like the next Joe. But if you are a meat eater, what difference is there for you with cloned meat?

If there is a certain type of meat that you enjoy but is expensive due to low availability, cloned animals can increase the available product while driving down the cost of the exact same meat. Cloned animals don't suffer from the difficulty of breeding for farmers, leaving a difficult part of the process to the test tube, allowing them to spend more time on other tasks.

Thoughts?