Washington ? Just over a decade after scientists cloned the first animal, the last major barrier to selling meat and milk from clones has fallen: The U.S. government declared this food safe Tuesday.

Now, will people buy it?

Consumer anxiety about cloning is serious enough that several major food companies, including the big dairy producer Dean Foods Co. and Smithfield Foods Inc., say they aren’t planning to sell products from cloned animals.

And the industry says most Americans would never eat a cloned animal for sheer economic reasons: At $10,000 to $20,000 per cloned cow – compared with $1,000 for an ordinary steer – the animals are too valuable. They would be used primarily for breeding, to produce a steady supply of cattle that are particularly tender, for instance, or for prize dairy cows. It would be offspring of clones that consumers would eat.

But it will be hard to tell which foods do contain ingredients originating from cloned animals. The Food and Drug Administration ruled that labels won’t have to reveal whether the food comes from cloned cows, pigs or goats, or the clones’ offspring, because those ingredients would be no different than meat or milk from livestock bred the old-fashioned way.

“We found nothing in the food that could potentially be hazardous,” FDA food safety chief Dr. Stephen Sundlof said. “The food in every respect is indistinguishable from food from any other animal. It is beyond our imagination to even find a theory that would cause the food to be unsafe.”

The government asked producers to continue a voluntary moratorium on sales of meat or milk from clones for a little longer, for marketing reasons.

“This is about market acceptance,” USDA Undersecretary Bruce Knight said, adding that he expected this period to last months.

Two U.S. companies, Viagen Inc. and Trans Ova Genetics, have produced more than 600 cloned animals for U.S. breeders. They agreed to USDA’s call for a continued moratorium Tuesday, but stressed that it applied only to clones themselves, not those animals’ conventionally produced offspring, which can be sold immediately.