Against cloned beef

I'm with Verlyn Klinkenborg: who, exactly, benefits from screwing around with livestock genetics like this? Is the further industrialization of our food production really the way we ought to be going? Klinkenborg says:

To me, this striving for uniformity is the driving and destructive force of modern agriculture. You begin with a wide array of breeds, a truly diverse pool of genes. As time passes, you impose stricter and stricter economic constraints upon those breeds and on the men and women who raise them. One by one, the breeds that don’t meet the prevailing economic model are weeded out. By the beginning of the 21st century, you’ve moved from the broad base of a genetic pyramid to its nearly vanishing peak, which is to say that the genetic diversity present in the economically acceptable breeds of modern livestock is minute. Then comes cloning, and we leave behind all variation.

Cloning is not unnatural. It is natural for humans to experiment, to try anything and everything. Nor is cloning that different from anything else we’ve seen in modern agriculture. It is another way of shifting genetic ownership from farmers to corporations. It is another way of creating still greater economic and genetic concentration in an industry that has already pushed concentration past the limits of ethical and environmental acceptability.

I just started Michael Pollan's terrific "The Omnivore's Dilemma" the other day, and he seems to be making the same point about corn and other crops. We have engineered astonishing, miraculous crop yields that feed mouths that would have gone hungry otherwise. But at what profound cost? We have not thought, or thought enough, about the hidden consequences of altering nature's fundaments. Just like us, innit?