If the science of cloning can take stem cells and regrow organs and tissues such as stomachs, skin, and muscle then here’s a creepily not too distant question: Will you one day purchase meat which is grown in a vat rather than slaughtered from an animal?

Says Jason Matheny, the leader of a team to do just that, “With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world’s annual meat supply. And you could do it in a way that’s better for the environment and human health. In the long term, this is a very feasible idea.”

The first question “will it taste as good?” is quickly supplanted by feelings of icky discomfort and a series of thorny questions: If no animal has been killed to harvest it, does that make it vegetarian-friendly? Can cloned pork be kosher — if it never came from a pig? For that matter is cloned cow kosher — if that steak never possessed a cleft foot or chewed it’s own cud?

According to my home-town paper The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 64 percent of consumers uncomfortable with animal cloning but the op-ed points out (via Michel Pollens who has become the Moses or perhaps the Ezra the Scribe of the new food movement) that Americans already put up with a great deal that is ugly in our food chains already. The op-ed concludes,

In saying that it is safe for this country to become the first to allow cloned products, FDA scientists speak of cloned livestock as “virtually indistinguishable” from other animals. If the administration sticks to its plans, consumers will face new dilemmas about their food system, their government’s inaction and their own eating choices.

Thus exacerbates my greatest tension as a participant in the new food movement — whether we can sustainably grow enough local food for all 9 billion people on the globe without the highly risky but highly lucrative innovations of genetic science? I wonder if the OU would accept cloned pork, but regardless, I will hesitantly eat grown meat — but I believe the denizens of Africa and Asia will complain much less.