Lab-Grown Meat: Panacea or Pandora’s Box?
by Mat Thomas, In Defense of Animals
Hard as it may be to imagine or believe, some scientists predict that meat grown in laboratories by cloning animal cells will be on supermarket shelves within the next decade. According to researchers, this lab-grown meat would be healthier and more environmentally-friendly than flesh sliced from animals’ bodies. It would also be significantly more humane because theoretically, not a single sentient creature would be harmed or killed to produce it. Ready or not, we may be fast approaching the futuristic next evolution of food with repercussions as potentially world-changing as those wrought by the agricultural revolution itself.
The technology to grow meat in vitro is still in its infancy, having only existed for about five years. Researchers at Australian laboratory SymbioticA first successfully grew small amounts of cultured meat using muscle cells from a frog in 2001, followed closely by a team of NASA scientists seeking to provide meat for astronauts on extended space missions. Using existing techniques and materials, cultured meat currently costs around $5 million per kilogram, so scientists are now trying to devise methods of mass-producing cultured meat economically, hoping that it can someday compete with conventional processed meats (such as burgers, sausage and chicken nuggets) in the marketplace. There are some technological hurdles to overcome, but hopeful scientists believe people could be eating lab-grown meat as soon as 2012.
Researchers claim cultured meat would be healthier than conventionally-grown meat because the nutritional content could be customized by, for example, replacing artery-clogging saturated fat with heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids. Grown in sterile labs, cultured meat would also be free from contamination and meat-borne pathogens such as mad cow disease and avian flu. Environmentally, proponents assert that cultured meat production would require fewer resources than raising animals for their flesh because we wouldn’t have to grow all the “extra” body parts that are considered unfit for human consumption (like bones, organs and fur). It could also generate less pollution, including greenhouse gasses, than factory farming.
The most compelling possibility for animal advocacy is that no animals would have to be killed to produce cultured meat. Cells could be obtained from host animals using a muscle biopsy, and the cell cultures themselves would be utterly insensate – totally lacking a central nervous system, pain receptors or a brain, and therefore incapable of suffering like living creatures. Even the liquid medium used to nourish cells could be made from plants.
At this point, it is impossible to say whether lab-grown meat will fulfill its promise to better the world. Unforeseen health or environmental dangers may crop up during development, or consumers may ultimately reject it. But what if it does do what researchers claim? Only time will tell, but this technology could potentially spare the lives of billions of exploited animals and perhaps eventually make factory farming obsolete.
To learn more about lab-grown meat and its potential implications, visit www.animalrighter.org to read “iMeat: How Lab-Grown Meat Could Revolutionize Vegetarianism and the World,” originally published in the June issue of VegNews magazine.
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