Is your coffee fair-trade? Is your spinach organic? As healthy-eating options expand, so do the challenges of making choices at the store. But there's one decision looming that you may or may not get to make: Do you buy meat and milk from cloned animals?

In the latest volley in the food wars, the FDA determined in January that meat from cloned cows, pigs, and goats (and their offspring) is safe to eat -- and therefore there's no need to label it. That argument hasn't convinced some consumer advocates and members of Congress. It hasn't swayed many Americans, either: Two-thirds don't like the whole idea of animal cloning, while more than 40 percent believe that serving the results at the dinner table is a bad idea, according to a 2006 survey released by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology.

"There are concerns about safety, but it's also a question of moral discomfort," says Michael Fernandez, who was in charge of the Pew Initiative at the time of the survey. The skeptics are pushing lawmakers to force meat producers to label cloned meat and dairy products as such. "Consumers should have the right to refuse, whether it's justified by the science or not," insists Marion Nestle, Ph.D., a nutrition professor at New York University.

If the term "cloned meat" makes you wince, take a deep breath. Cloning is expensive -- costing upward of $30,000 per animal -- so it's limited mainly to prize cattle and horses. No one thinks meat from clones will arrive in any quantity for years. "For now, it's extremely cost-prohibitive, with technology still in the research phase," explains Karen Batra, director of public affairs for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. The breather will give consumers a chance to get up to speed on what's at stake. As it turns out, the fight over cloning goes beyond human-health issues, to the ethics of how we produce our food.