- Joined
- Jul 20, 2005
- Messages
- 20,688
- Reaction score
- 7,320
- Location
- Washington, DC
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Liberal
In-vitro meat: Would lab-burgers be better for us and the planet? - CNN.com
I found this article fascinating. With the way biotechnology is progressing, it seems very likely that by the end of the decade, we'll be able to grow meat in laboratories at a price that is competitive with meat grown in ranches. The benefits of this are hard to overstate.
1. The environmental impacts will be HUGE. Every pound of beef requires 30 or more pounds of crops to feed the cow. Pork and chicken don't require quite as much feed per pound, but still a huge amount. This is a huge drain on our water supplies and farmland. If our meat was grown in a lab, it could completely eliminate these problems, freeing up our land and water supplies to be used for other productive things or returned to nature.
2. The health impacts could be very large too. As it stands now, red meat is extremely unhealthy. It has been linked to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer. Growing our meat in the laboratory would enable us to tinker with the genes to make it more nutritious. Imagine eating something that tastes like a cow, with the nutritional content of a fish.
3. Those with moral or religious qualms about eating meat could sleep easily at night, knowing that no animal was killed so that they could eat dinner.
I think that right now, the "yuck" factor might dissuade people from trying it. But I think this is really just a matter of how the lab-grown meat was marketed. If it had the same taste and texture of actual meat, I definitely could see this becoming very popular. And after it became commonplace, the "yuck" factor would disappear on its own. What do you think? Would you eat lab-grown meat, assuming it had the same taste and texture of regular meat, at a reasonable price?
I found this article fascinating. With the way biotechnology is progressing, it seems very likely that by the end of the decade, we'll be able to grow meat in laboratories at a price that is competitive with meat grown in ranches. The benefits of this are hard to overstate.
1. The environmental impacts will be HUGE. Every pound of beef requires 30 or more pounds of crops to feed the cow. Pork and chicken don't require quite as much feed per pound, but still a huge amount. This is a huge drain on our water supplies and farmland. If our meat was grown in a lab, it could completely eliminate these problems, freeing up our land and water supplies to be used for other productive things or returned to nature.
2. The health impacts could be very large too. As it stands now, red meat is extremely unhealthy. It has been linked to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer. Growing our meat in the laboratory would enable us to tinker with the genes to make it more nutritious. Imagine eating something that tastes like a cow, with the nutritional content of a fish.
3. Those with moral or religious qualms about eating meat could sleep easily at night, knowing that no animal was killed so that they could eat dinner.
I think that right now, the "yuck" factor might dissuade people from trying it. But I think this is really just a matter of how the lab-grown meat was marketed. If it had the same taste and texture of actual meat, I definitely could see this becoming very popular. And after it became commonplace, the "yuck" factor would disappear on its own. What do you think? Would you eat lab-grown meat, assuming it had the same taste and texture of regular meat, at a reasonable price?
Last edited: