Why not?
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 ...
Soylent Green comes to mind.
Sounds repulsive to me.
PETA strangely is down with lab meat and even has a million dollar award for the first quack scientist who can make a decent copy of a burger.
No kidding...who wants a rabbit penis? How’s that going to help people?
“It tastes like despair.”
IT’S PEOPLE!
“In principle, we could harvest the meat progenitor cells from fresh human cadavers and grow meat from them,” Post said. “Once taken out of its disease and animalistic, cannibalistic context - you are not killing fellow citizens for it, they are already dead - there is no reason why not.”
Skeletal muscle tissue - heck no - we want brains.
“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....”
Lab meat? LOL, gives a new meaning to ‘nuggets’ doesn’t it. Ummm....no thanx Ill pass on the lab meat stuff.
Why not?
Nothing new. They were growing immitation meat made out of mushrooms grown on cattle blood saturated sawdust thirty years ago.
Tasted just like steak but texture wise it felt like eating mushrooms.
Anyone remember a si fi short story from the 1960s about a South American scientist, in an anti war/anti meat world, who was raising tomatoes that tasted like beef? He called them “Greenbeffos”.
Growing meat without animals.
Next thing you know, they’ll be able to make a baby with a man or a woman.
Oops.
Next thing you know, they’ll be able to make a baby WITHOUT a man or a woman.
Waddayamean you don't like yo cultured yeastchop?!? Yo momma slaved over a reconstituter fo 40 seconds to put dat Not-A-Meat on yo plate! Now shaddap an EAT IT!
Barney Frank wants his lunch back.
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