Lab-Grown Meat

[gfish]

This article was linked from Slashdot today. It talks about various efforts to artificially grow meat in a lab. Hydroponic beef!

I'm a confirmed omnivore, but I recognize that there are several problems with eating meat. Most pragmatically, meat is enormously inefficient. For every pound of beef you have to feed the cow 40 pounds of grain. Pretty silly on a planet quickly approaching its carrying capacity. There are also some vaguely uncomfortable ethical issues. Not enough to make me go veggie, but I certainly wouldn't mind them going away. What surprised me, though, was the reaction in the Slashdot comments. A very high percentage of posters were disgusted by the concept. Even factoring in the slashdot-twerp effect it seems like an unusual response.

So, what does the audience at home think? Which is worse: a slab of meat growing in a harshly lit laboratory, pulsing slowly to the rythm of electrical impulses, or carving a steak out of a big dumb dirty cow, with all its parasites and bacteria and waste products?

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you remember that post I did about the people slaughtering a sheep (on a public street) to consecrate a new Mercedes, and onlookers were horrified and very upset? I think that's part of what is affecting people -- they don't actually want to think about where meat comes from, generally. They know it's disgusting. This alternative, a new way of doing things, is also disgusting, but given that it's not the old type of disgusting, they can point all their loathing at it instead.

I don't eat beef and pork (for ... well, since 1986, however long that is) because of the synthetic hormones and antibodies and other really nasty stuff they load into cattle and pigs, and also because of concerns about other chemical and biochemical concentrations (like, say, prions.) As such, lab meat *might* be better, but I'd want to know a lot about what they were feeding into it before I'd touch it. There is extensive evidence of widespread toxic effects on people from chemical contamination (not, by any means, only via food) and lab steak might well have even MORE of these nasties. We've lived with bacteria for thousands of years; nearly every adult on the planet is carrying at least a kilogram of bacteria (and has more bacterial cells than body cells in eir body) but we have not been living with fluorinated anabolic steroids for thousands of years. We know a fair bit about how bacteria can kill us; we know a lot less about the long-term effects of food that is steeped in tons of exotic, non-human-rated antibiotics, or, for that matter, growth hormones and cell adhesion molecule stimulators that might be involved in vat steaks.