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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?
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?
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Not that any of that explains why I would dislike eating lab-grown meat. It is my general preference for natural things and dislike of synthetics. It is as much an aesthetic as rational preference in many cases. I do agree that it is environmentally sounder to eat vegetable protein rather than meat. But, why lab-grown meat instead of tofu, etc?
Reminds me of a SF story I read once where the characters lived in a poor home and were forced to kill and eat actual animals--which was a very taboo/disgusting thing to the society that had become used to eating "Reel" meat, a synthetic name-brand product. Perhaps that is part of the disgust factor to me...I could see this being yet another part of the McDonald/Disney-fying of our culture. Also reminds me of the short-story on PLIF where the children of whole countries were genetically modified to be dependent on McDonalds food. It's bad enough that many children these days have no sense of where meat (or any other food for that matter) really comes from.
Ugh.