The Food Standards Authority (FSA) has claimed that there are no food safety grounds to allow companies to regulate cooking products from the descendants of cloned animals.

FSA claimed that the marketing of foods obtained from cloned animals should be subjected to authorisation as novel foods and will confer with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) over the issue.

As well as this, FSA claimed that it will ask Defra and other food safety organisations about the ethics of welfare of animal cloning and how it should be provided to the nation's public.

This news comes after the organisation launched a new food hygiene rating scheme, which will help consumers to select the safest places to eat and shop for home cooking items.

A hygiene rating from zero to five will be handed to restaurants and food stores in the UK, in an attempt to combat the nation's number of annual food poisoning cases.

Jeff Rooker, chair of the FSA, said: "In developing this scheme, we wanted to give people the ability to judge for themselves whether they considered the hygiene standards of a food outlet to be good enough."