ViaGen

If you were eating the spawn of a clone, would you want to know? Actually, you probably have already. As Ben Paynter pointed out in his lovely story for Wired last year, ranchers have been asked by the FDA to voluntarily keep clones and their offspring out of the food supply, but there’s no enforcement. And it’s not like they taste any different.

This week, livestock cloning companies ViaGen, Inc. and Trans Ova Genetics introduced a supply chain management program to identify cloned animals as they enter the food chain. The program acts as a marketing claim, similar to other process-based programs in ag such as USDA's Certified Organic Program or Halal Meat Certification, but its aim is to allow companies in the food chain to identify and possibly exclude cloned animals.