May 17th 2008
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you already know that meat grown in a lab (and not on an animal) may soon be a reality. PETA has even thrown it’s weight behind the idea by offering $1 Million to the anyone who can bring lab meat to market at a comparable price to factory-farmed chicken.
So here’s the big question, would you eat it?
April 21st 2008
Ingrid Newkirk, the president and a co-founder of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is a big fan of lab-grown meat. She is such a big of a fan of it that she has convinced her organization to pledge one million dollars to the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”
From the New York Times:
The idea of getting the next Chicken McNugget out of a test tube is not new. For several years, scientists have worked to develop technologies to grow tissue cultures that could be consumed like meat without the expense of land or feed and the disease potential of real meat. An international symposium on the topic was held this month in Norway. The tissue, once grown, could be shaped and given texture with the kinds of additives and structural agents that are now used to give products like soy burgers a more meaty texture.
Definitely read the whole New York Times article.
April 17th 2008
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.
