Photo: Peta Poster.Peta's perspective on lab-meat.
Next up? Meat from a lab. Just get a test tube, some animal stem cells and "nutrient broth-filled petri dishes." Add some stimulation of the electric variety and you've got muscle tissue ... and the fixings for your next quarter pounder. It's not quite as simple as that, but that's the experimental gist of the latest foray into feeding the world.
Test-tube meat. Bio-medical tissue engineering. Designed for us to eat.
The motivation is that it would help nourish an overpopulated planet with less environmental impact from factory farms and agri-business. It also reduces animal cruelty. Some pitch it as healthier since it's grown in a controlled environment with precision. Exact control of the omega 3 to omega 6 fatty acids. Your ground beef could have the nutritional profile of salmon. There's also less waste. PETA fully endorses this since it's cruelty-free.
The freaky factor? It's manufactured meat in a petri dish. American scientists are hard at work perfecting the growth. Holland's making a test-tube hamburger. Projections hint at a five-year grocery store launch.
We deserve it, right? We already eat processed meats like hot dogs and nitrate-laden bologna. Afterall, as the truism goes, no one wants to know what goes in to sausage making. We're supposed to be so divorced from food origin and growing practices that this is just the next step in the American culinary continuum.
Jason Matheny, a University of Maryland grad student and an author of a paper on in-vitro meat production in the journal Tissue Engineering, says, "Consumers don't really have a sense of how meat is produced. They see the end product, which often bears no resemblance to the animal. What they care about is how the product tastes and whether it's affordable. When people ask me if consumers will accept this kind of meat, I think, ‘yes, look at what they already accept.’”
I'm for reducing greenhouse gases and animal cruelty, but I am also not going to blindly accept this as meat. It's not all about the buck and the bite. We've added a lot of unhealthy ingredients to our food in the interest of taste and cheap "product." Think MSG, dye, chemicals, preservatives. It may be cheaper, but it isn't better.
Not to mention, this will completely topple the family-owned cattle farm. Think it's hard to keep up with the bureaucracy of USDA organic standards for the average farmer? Try competing with test-tube agribusiness giants in a marketplace where they can mass-produce meat loaf.
There will be changes in how we "raise" meat, label its nutritional info, market, prepare and digest it. Impact will be felt on our farmers and our bodies. The pros and cons are already strongly aligned. Here we go ... this is the seed, or cell in this case, of a new American food movement. I'm ready to have a sense about this one.
Must Reads:
NPR: Burgers From A Lab: The World Of In Vitro Meat
Good.is: The Environmental Benefits of Test-Tube Meat
Beef Magazine: Test-tube Meat
Nugget o' the Moment:
"This isn't synthetic. It's organic. It's meat. It's two meat cells growing to become more meat cells. And depending on what your definition of any sort of life is, this is as fundamental as any animal is." - A scientist interviewed by writer Michael Specter in his piece about test-tube meat
