Would You Eat Lab-Grown Meat?
Over the past few years we've seen several attempts to "grow" meat in laboratories. Scientists in the Netherlands have just announced a new attempt, creating a version of pork.
No-one's tasted it yet!
However, this has opened up the debate about lab-grown meat, which looks like being a very real possibility within the next few years.
One of the scientists involved, Mark Post (professor of physiology at Eindhoven University) explained that:
This product will be good for the environment and will reduce animal suffering. If it feels and tastes like meat, people will buy it. ... You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals.
There's a long way to go yet, and scientists still need to solve the problem of "exercising" meat that's grown from cells in petri dishes, turning it into muscle-like tissue with the texture and taste of meat.
Animal rights campaigners and vegetarian groups have greeted the news positively, with a spokesperson for PETA saying, "As far as we're concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there's no ethical objection."
But, how will consumers feel about buying and eating meat that's been grown in a lab? The Guardian's Leo Hickman wrote that:
I for one don't see a problem with placing a forkful of the stuff in my mouth. OK, it's never going to be a gourmet experience, but as a substitute for real meat - one that could boast environmental and animal-welfare positives - it seems too good to leave off the menu.
What do you think? Would you eat lab-grown meat? Or does the idea make you go "eew"? How about the potential health benefits of growing meat that has just muscle and no fat?
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Created / Updated: December 11, 2009
I'm afraid that something inside me whells up against this, so for me it would be a no-go.
ReplyThe key problem I see with this is the nutritional aspect. What kind of nutritional profile is this meat going to carry? Animals who are grass-fed all their lives have a far superior nutritional profile to those that end up in feed lots. How will lab meat compare? Will it be worse that the commercial feed lots? On part with the commercial feed lots? Better?
Can something out the lab really compete on the nutritional level? My instinct says no.
Plus there's an unnatural factor here that repel's me. Don't think I can bring myself to consume lab-grown meat.
ReplyI don't see how anyone could possibly be repelled by the idea of eating meat grown in a lab, but not be utterly repulsed by the idea of eating meat that was once alive. There is absolutely no contest here. I would absolutely eat this as long as it is deemed safe for consumption and it is something I think is tasty. Otherwise, I'll stick with Boca and Morningstar Farms. And given that pigs are smarter than dogs and most toddlers, making it particularly ghastly that we eat them, I think pork is a great place to start.
ReplyI probably wouldn't eat it but impoverished people who can't afford live meat would eat it.
Furthermore, by increasing the "meat supply" in this way the price of live meats would necessarily drop as the demand for meat over all was spread to the new influx of supply.
This can do nothing but good things for the world, especially those in poverty around the world.
Replyi thought that this was very interesting. It really makes you wonder and think. Did you ever get a chance to see that movie, food, inc.? i would like your take on that. thanks,
ReplyI haven't seen it, I'm afraid!
ReplyI read about this on another blog and from what I read, the texture of this "meat" was incredibly mealy and squishy because it was just random muscle tissue that never got exercised to form actual muscles. I think I'll pass on that, thank you very much. Give me a good grass-fed cow any day.
Also, as a side note, I don't know how they consider this to be more ethical than eating conventionally grown meat...the growth media that they use in tissue culture applications usually contains trypsin from calf pancreas and/or other animal tissues. So an animal still dies for your meat, but hey, I'll take the one that was raised in a field and got to walk around first.
ReplyYes, the texture was "squishy" because it hadn't been exercised ... yet. They aren't planning to market it in that form. They would market it once it had a consistency equivalent to the meat people are comfortable with now. And the incredibly vast majority of cows are not grass fed and don't get to walk around in a field. While they do start with A FEW CELLS from a live animal - which doesn't mean they have to kill it to harvest the cells - they can grow literally thousands of times the amount of meat that that one animal would have produced. Even if they killed the animal to harvest the cells, I'd still say that's better than killing thousands or millions - but hey, you could just go without meat altogether.
ReplyI'm not even considering the few cells they need to start the culture with; I'm talking about the growth media for the cells. They would need quite a bit of it if they want to grow a substantial amount of "meat" for production. And as I said before, the growth media is usually enriched with animal byproducts (certain media contains sheep's blood, trypsin, etc.), so it's not like this is a "vegan" product. If you're a vegetarian, stick with tofu and lentils and forget the frankenmeat.
ReplyEven as a vegetarian, I would want to do everything possible to support this industry, and hopefully put the traditional meat producers out of business. While this might not be totally without harm to animals, it is a huge step in the right direction. Not to mention the environmental and economic benefits, which everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten in their comments. And I'm sure everyone who is afraid of "artificially produced food" also stays away from cookies, candy bars, etc. produced in factories - all made with a lot of compounds we wouldn't traditionally consider "food."
ReplyI'm torn on this whole thing, but yes- I stay away from all processed foods.
Even newer methods of meat production have a worse nutritional profile than wild caught or traditionally farmed meats. That is what concerns me. If it avoided the follies of.. well, most times man has tried to "help" food production/diet, I have no issue against the premise.
ReplyMy understanding was that only one animal was required to start off the lab-growing production ... so it's not perfectly animal-cruetly-free, but you'd get far more meat from just one animal.
ReplyI doubt I'd want to consume a "cloned" animal unless it's good for me I suppose.
ReplyIf it is was feed with some DNA mutated feeds then I definitely wont want to eat it!
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