Posted on 11/19/2009 9:20:24 AM PST by presidio9
Winston Churchill once predicted that it would be possible to grow chicken breasts and wings more efficiently without having to keep an actual chicken. And in fact scientists have since figured out how to grow tiny nuggets of lab meat and say it will one day be possible to produce steaks in vats, sans any livestock.
Pork chops or burgers cultivated in labs could eliminate contamination problems that regularly generate headlines these days, as well as address environmental concerns that come with industrial livestock farms.
However, such research opens up strange and perhaps even disturbing possibilities once considered only the realm of science fiction. After all, who knows what kind of meat people might want to grow to eat?
Advantages touted
Increasingly, bioengineers are growing nerve, heart and other tissues in labs. Recently, scientists even reported developing artificial penis tissue in rabbits. Although such research is meant to help treat patients, biomedical engineer Mark Post at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and his colleagues suggest it could also help feed the rising demand for meat worldwide.
The researchers noted that growing skeletal muscle in labs - the kind people typically think of as the meat they eat - could help tackle a number of problems:
Avoiding animal suffering by reducing the farming and killing of livestock. Dramatically cutting down on food-borne ailments such as mad cow disease and salmonella or germs such as swine flu, by monitoring the growth of meat in labs. Livestock currently take up 70 percent of all agricultural land, corresponding to 30 percent of the world's land surface, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Labs would presumably require much less space. Livestock generate 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than all of the vehicles on Earth,
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
If it doesn’t have a face, I don’t want to eat it.
Mmmmmmmm. Lab meat.
They’ve been trying to do this for years with soybeans. SOME of it actually tastes like a decent imitation, but the vast majority doesn’t even come close.
I can’t wait for the moronic convergence when the PETA people battle the Frankenfood people.
Penis meat??? These two sentences do not belong in the same paragraph.
First meat. Then they’ll figure out how to grow organ replacements without bodies (no nasty cloning issues).
I can envision custom meat textures and tastes being engineered into the vat-meat. Tasty
it’s called White Castle
Right, we can’t even get people to eat irradiated meat. Where do these people come from? Just wait, this is going to relate back to embryonic stem cells. [Soylent Green]
Vat protein will come in very handy on colony starships, but last time I checked, those weren’t quite ready yet.
I thought that was what tofu was. I don’t want processed foodstuffs, including tofu.
The good news is that if unexpected guests show up, and you're worried that you might not have enough, all you need to do is excite your roast somehow.
As someone who likes both meat and hates for animals to suffer, I find this potentially very good news.
“Avoiding animal suffering by reducing the farming and killing of livestock.”
The animals will also have avoided ever being born, in the first place.
Hold muh lunch, PING
Newsflash, Jan 1, 2011, Netherlands: Maastricht University licenses their meat production patents to The Soylent Corporation.
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