Beware the "ick factor". It's irrational and unscientific. It's how things like stem cell research and late-term abortion and same sex marriage get banned. You must at all times reject arguments based purely on "Ick Factor" reasoning. Otherwise you set a bad precedent which will lend ammo to bad people who have a much larger list of icky things than you do. You say cloned burgers are icky, other people say teaching kids how to use condoms is icky. I say you both need to come up with better reasons before you get a shot at setting public policy.

I know. I can't summon any rational grounds for not wanting to eat cloned meat (particularly since I've done virtually zero research on the subject), but I sure don't want to. I do strenuously object to the idea that food products from cloned animals shouldn't be labeled

Ah, yes, but the "ick factor" is what stops the cloning companies making billions of dollars a year of their new technology, and lobbying the government to change the laws to allow cloned food.

ICK ICK ICK, I say. And what's wrong with the way things are, now? By the way, that sheep looks delicious.

Cloned animals have real and specific genetic defects that influence the quality of their meat and the quality of their lives. They are born with shortened telemeres (base pairs on the ends of their chromosomes), which causes premature aging. It's as if they are born at whatever age their clone host was. For example, Dolly the cloned sheep was cloned from a 6-yr old sheep, and her age at birth was essentially 6 years old. This lead to premature arthritis, among other things (such as obesity).

Cloning is not good for animals, most of which already lead horrible factory-farmed lives.

OK, here is a concern that goes beyond Ick Factor and is a great reason for waiting to find out more about food from cloned animals, or not using it at all: Unintended Consequences. People have gotten very sick and if I recall correctly some have died from GMO food, because for example a spliced-in gene made the food too similar to something the person was allergic to but it was not labeled this way. An example of something like this would be a grain or fruit with fish genes. Also, GMO crops that contaminate non-GMO crops, then reproduce dominantly until the entire crop is GMO. Stuff like that. It rarely pays to mess with nature.