People become vegetarians for various reasons. Health. Love of animals. Concern for climate change. Revultion over factory farming and commercial animal "processing" practices. But what if there was a kind of meat that didn't come from a four-legged methane machine. And had never passed through a factory farm or a slaughterhouse, because it had never been part of an actual animal.
This exists. NPR's Terry Gross recently interviewed Michael Specter, author of Denialism, How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, who travelled to labs in the Netherlands and North Carolina, investigating the work of various food scientists who are cultivating meat in petri dishes. Edible meat. Meat made from meat cells that grow to become more meat cells.
Listen to the podcast. Read Michael Specter's article on the subject in the New Yorker.
The goal is to develop this practice to the point where this kind of meat is grown on biodegradable scaffolding platforms. Imagine endless platforms of this kind in large racks. In a meat factory.
Specter brings up the point that people tend to eat "better" - meaning costlier - as they get wealthier. And the world population is growing. From seven billion people now, there are expected to be nine billion of us by 2050. And some developling nations are developing more wealth. And people need to eat. They need protein. And livestock require enormous amounts of land, water, grass and grain. And we're running out of room for all of that. But meat grown in a lab... no grass, no grain, no water (or least nowhere near as much)...
Of course no one (or at least very few) would volunteer to be the first tasters of such a thing. Can you trust a food grown in a lab? But what if the scientists got it exactly right. What if it was absolutely identical to meat you can buy now, right down to the molecule. Tasted the same, same texture, same requirements for cooking, same rate of putrefaction - and the scientists are saying this kind of meat would be all of those things. Would you choose this over something cut from an actual animal? How many vegetarians would accept this cruelty-free meat-stuff as a viable option? How many religions prohibitions against eating any given kind of meat would eventually be relaxed by such a development?
Will meat cut from actual animals be obscure, one hundred years from now? Will livestock diminish the way the world horse population has since the advent of the automobile? And most pertinently of all, will it eventually be discovered that this synthetic meat isn't synthetic at all, but that it's actually MADE OUT OF PEOPLE!!!
