Lab-grown Meat May Soon Be A Reality
Posted by Drew.
Wired Magazine published an article on the possibility of growing meat in a lab. I’m skeptical that technology is going to solve all the social problems created by meat production. But lab-meat is an interesting idea.
Here’s an excerpt from Wired’s story:
In five to 10 years, supermarkets might have some new products in the meat counter: packs of vat-grown meat that are cheaper to produce than livestock and have less impact on the environment.
….
“To produce the meat we eat now, 75 to 95 percent of what we feed an animal is lost because of metabolism and inedible structures like skeleton or neurological tissue,” Jason Matheny, a researcher at Johns Hopkins and co-founder of New Harvest, a nonprofit that promotes research on in vitro meat, told Wired.com. “With cultured meat, there’s no body to support; you’re only building the meat that eventually gets eaten.”
While lab-meat addresses some of the ethical and environmental issues related to meat production, it does not address the health issues. The US has obesity epidemic, a problem that affects young people more than anyone else. Eating meat is terrible for you and growing it in a lab won’t fix that.
We’ll just have to see where this story goes. Maybe by 2030 we’ll have a new kind of faux meat.
April 17, 2008
Tags: lab meat, science Posted in: News
3 Responses
Talk about gross. I place that alongside ‘recycling urine’ in ugh factor.
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