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

[callmem.livejournal.com]

Vat meat? Fun! I don't think it will be a real vegetarian option any time soon, since most cell culture media contains horse serum, fetal bovine serum, and the like; the vat meat they mentioned in the article would be a highly processed meat product more akin to spam than faux-meat GimmeLean-type products. I'd imagine they actually end up killing more animals per food calorie produced this way than the old fashioned slaughterhouse way. If they find a way to produce this with a vegetable based feedstock I think I'd jump right on the pro-vatmeat bandwagon, though.