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WP: Lab-grown meat is in your future, and it may be healthier than the real stuff


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Lab-grown meat is in your future, and it may be healthier than the real stuff

 

Scientists and businesses working full steam to produce lab-created meat claim it will be healthier than conventional meat and more environmentally friendly. But how much can they improve on old-school pork or beef?

 

In August 2013, a team of Dutch scientists showed off their lab-grown burger (cost: $330,000) and even provided a taste test. Two months ago, the American company Memphis Meats fried the first-ever lab meatball (cost: $18,000 per pound). Those who have tasted these items say they barely differ from the real deal.

 

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The Dutch and the Americans claim that within a few years lab-produced meats will start appearing in supermarkets and restaurants. And these are not the only teams working on cultured meat (as they prefer to call it). Another company, Modern Meadow, promises that lab-grown “steak chips” — something between a potato chip and beef jerky — will hit the stores in the near future, too.

 

For some people there’s an ick factor to the idea of lab-grown meat, but its backers say that cultured meat may help alleviate the environmental and health challenges posed by the world’s growing appetite for conventional meats. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that the demand for meat in North America will increase by 8 percent between 2011 and 2020, in Europe by 7 percent and in Asia by 56 percent.

 

Meanwhile, a 2011 study calculated that growing meat in labs would cut down on the land required to produce steaks, sausages and baconby 99 percent and reduce the associated need for water by 90 percent. What’s more, it found that a pound of lab-created meat would produce much less polluting greenhouse-gas emissions than is produced by cows and pigs, even poultry.

 

Yeta 2015 life-cycle analysis of potential cultured meat production in the United States painted a less rosy picture if one includes the generation of electricity and heat required to grow the cells in a lab.

 

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In some aspects, researchers say, lab-grown meat might be better for us. Because cultured meats would be produced in sterile environments, they would be free of such dangerous bacteria. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that pathogens in conventional meat are the most common sources of fatal food-related infections.

 

And the use of antibiotics in food-producing animals — to fight disease and help the animals grow faster — has been identified as a source of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that is dangerous to humans. The Food and Drug Administration estimates that the sales of antibiotics for such usage has been going up — by about 23 percent between 2009 and 2014.

 

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People will complain until one day someone grows a beef tenderloin that tastes like it's supposed to.  As soon as that happens, we'll see a proliferation of steak growers that will adopt fancy names and pretentious attitudes so common in high end foods.  Before you know it you'll come home from the store with a delightful Chateau Beaumont Mignon that was crafted in some quaint village by master artisans. 

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Somewhere in Texas a rancher is crying.

What does this do to the people who won't eat meat because of animal cruelty?

I would be one of those enlightened folks and the answer is that most of us are in favor of this.

 

This is the future and like it or not, this will be the norm within our lifetimes. This will accelerate the end to the awful and frankly immoral practice of treating other living beings so horribly and then killing them just because people still choose to eat flesh.

 

This certainly will be in place alot sooner than a civilized society finally going full Vegan.

 

But if the question originally posed is will a Vegan eat this? The answer is no. This isn't for Vegans. We have moved on from flesh but this is intended for those who still eat flesh but feel guilty about it (and how can't you if you actually watch how these poor living beings "live" and are murdered) in the short term.

 

In the long term this will be the new way meat will be created. It has to be. There is no other sustainable way. My preference is no meat, but that is just not realistic. At least not for quite a while yet.

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