Laboratory grown meat could be just around the corner
BBC: An international research team has proposed new techniques that may lead to the mass production of meat reared not on the farm, but in the laboratory.
Developments in tissue engineering mean that cells taken from animals could be grown directly into meat in a laboratory, the researchers say. Scientists believe the technology already exists to directly grow processed meat like a chicken nugget. The technology could benefit both humans and the environment.
“With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world’s annual meat supply. And you could do it in a way that’s better for the environment and human health. “In the long term, this is a very feasible idea,” said Jason Matheny of the University of Maryland, part of the team whose research has been published in the Tissue Engineering journal.
Growing the meat without the animal could reduce the need to keep millions of animals in cramped conditions and would lessen the damage caused by the meat production to the environment. Laboratory-grown meat could also be healthier, proponents say.
Eating ‘mush’
Tissue engineering techniques were first developed for medical use and small amounts of edible fish tissue have been grown in research conducted by Nasa. To industrialise the process, researchers suggest the cells could be grown on large sheets that would need to be stretched to provide the ‘exercise’ for the growing muscles. “If you didn’t stretch them, it would be like eating mush,” said Mr Methany.
Whilst the technology to produce processed meat is here now, producing a steak or chicken breast is still quite a way off, the researchers say.
Questions
The new techniques could also provide a dilemma for vegetarians. Some may feel able to eat meat that has been grown without an animal being harmed. Others feel that question marks remain about the way the cells would be taken from animals. “It won’t appeal to someone who gave up meat because they think it’s morally wrong to eat flesh or someone who doesn’t want to eat anything unnatural,” Kerry Bennett of the UK Vegetarian Society told the Guardian newspaper.
How regulators might react is also unclear. The US Food and Drug Administration has asked companies not to market any products that involve cloned animals until their safety has been evaluated.
fly*
suddenly peas never looked so good….. :o)
Jam
I’m becoming confused about what is alive and what is dead…and what is not quite alive and not quite dead. For some reason, this starts to remind me of the Matrix…I think I’d rather stick to my real green things grown in good old fashioned soil.
Jenster
I’m reading Margaret Atwood’s ‘Oryx & Crake‘ at the moment – and there was a horrible synergy between this news article and one of the ideas contained within the book.
The book details a world in which progress has marched from here to a world in which all genetic material is mouldable – where chickens are no longer sentient beings but lumps of protein growing in a laboratory – to be made into ‘ChickieNobs’ and sold as a ‘Bucket O’Nubbins’.
It also seems obvious that artificially growing protein isn’t a way of solving world hunger – but supporting local farming communities to enable them to grow produce with which they can feed themselves.
Quiddity
I find this concept utterly repulsive but find it hard to justify why. I just feel that all the money spent on such products should be spent developing more efficient and humane farming techniques. we need to be getting our food from natural sources not fucking it up more than we already have done. I’m even squeamish about synthetic veggie products like quorn.
nathan
i prefer to chase my food down and, in as bloody and stabbing a rage as possible, snap its little body in two before sinking my sawing teeth through feather, fur and flesh.
if you didn’t taste the heart while it was still beating, you haven’t lived.
no but even more seriously, this is not good news. this is disturbing. if you’re veggie, be veggie, don’t look for alternatives to natural products in a test tube.
sauceruney
vat grown meat distributed in tubes of ground chuck, or blocks to be sawed off into slabs of steak… cube steak was never so accurate a description
the same can be said for our milk supply… synthetic processes simulate the enzymes and digestion, the processing of grasses into the milk so many consume at the expense of these poor creatures
and chicken… oh we could have vat grown white meat, dark meat, custom pressed into mcnuggets or formed around sticks of simulated bone… but the breaded skin, oh so delicious yet oh so bad for you… it shall wither away in forgotten memories of salty, crunchy, greasy goodness…
vat grown fish and crab and clams and oysters and shrimp… oh the oceans could re-balance themselves and these creatures of nature could be unencumbered by man’s invasive food habits
to be truly environmentally conscious, we should disperse to the moon, leaving this world as a nature preserve… totally divorce ourselves from the environment and influence on Earth’s nature. Is that where veganism and environmentalism are going?