It’s been a staple food in science fiction for years, but here at last is the first peer-reviewed research into culturing meat on an industrial scale.
The engineer in me is fascinated by some of the practical challenges. Sure, you can grow muscle cells in a petri dish, but how can it ever acquire the taste and texture of meat if there’s no animal to exercise those muscles? Perhaps you could culture it on a giant taffy-puller? A perfunctory twist for that familiar cage-bound factory taste, or turn it up to maximum for Kobe NuBeef. I have no idea how to replicate foie gras though. Presumably any freshman bio-ag student will be able to grow you a liver, but how do you force-feed a test tube?
It’s the ethical and economic implications that really stretch the mind. No more cattle farms, no more slaughterhouses, no more Meatrix. But that hurts people who work on farms (including organic farms) and who process meat, it doesn’t hurt Big Food. McDonald’s will no longer be associated with the deforestation of Argentina, but instead they might be able to develop their own proprietary strain of beef, guaranteeing the company a global supply at a fixed cost, and at the same time guaranteeing their customers that every patty in the world will taste the same - and different from every patty at Burger King and Wendy’s.
No more BSE or foot-and-mouth, but what new diseases might we accidentally introduce into the genotype? If every customer at KFC is eating the same chicken, over and over again, won’t the lack of biodiversity increase that risk?
A lot of farmers in developing countries are shut out of our markets today because of protectionist trade policies. Will they have to compete in their domestic markets with low-cost, patented, cultured beef?
They have founded a non-profit organization to pursue their research, and chosen to call it New Harvest. Oh dear. Sounds like a bad Margaret Atwood novel. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
