One more post on this topic and then I'll let it drop. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) just announced an "X-Prize," in which they will give a million dollars to the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”
Like the Asnari X-Prize for human spaceflight, the prize is meant to stimulate competition and encourage research. The New York Times article claims the prize is a million dollars for fake meat, but the object is actually to grow real meat in nutrient vats from in vitro cell cultures, then grind that meat up and use it in hamburgers or fast food or whatever. It sounds disgusting at first but bear with me here - there are so many great things about this technology that I think we're going to need to start using it in the very near future whether we want to or not.
First, growing a whole cow, pig, chicken or sheep, and then slaughtering that animal and sending the pieces of it to the market, is incredibly wasteful of water & grain, and while the animal is growing it is vulnerable to diseases and needs to be pumped full of hormones and antibiotics. We can get much more yield from the same amount of resources using a process where usable meat - and only the meat - is grown under controlled conditions and then harvested.
By getting rid of the huge herds of cows in Brazil that are used to make McDonalds hamburgers, we can save the Brazilian rain forest, or at least reduce the rate of its destruction. Animal and chicken farms are big polluters as well, so by reducing the resources used in animal husbandry, we can reduce the pollution. And if you're into karma, we can still eat high-protein meats without having to grow and kill all those animals under horrific conditions. Wouldn't it be nice to have a good pastrami sandwich on rye without having to feel guilty for eating it?
And real meat won't go away. Just as cheap steel from Asia forced European steelmakers to focus on high-quality steel products, competition from cheap in-vitro meat producers will encourage organic farming and a focus on high-quality meat for specialty markets.
There are a lot of unpleasant things we're going to have to contemplate in order to deal with what's coming our way in the next fifty years. In-vitro meat is probably one of the more logical and less unpleasant things among them.
Posted by case at April 27, 2008 08:35 PM