Daily Discussion: Cultured beef - would you eat it?
Science is figuring out how to grow various parts of living beings, without killing the living being who donated the original cells.
We have means of printing or growing replacement organs from our own stem cells, close to hand. And we also have cultured beef.
Meat, without killing the cow. Or the pig, or the fish, or the chicken... or whatever it is that you might fancy chewing on. A new golden age in food choice, because farming animals will no longer be necessary.
Samples of cultured beef have already been served to interested people. Alas, it is not at the "mass manufacture" stage, so you can stop looking funny at your kids' happy meals. But there will come a time when cultured meat is a thing.
There's already some justifiable furore over GMod crops, but I don't think the same outrage is necessary for cultured meat. For one thing, it's the same meat you'd get from a dead animal, only... there was no animal attached.
We've been culturing tissue for a lot longer than you might think. The cancer that killed Henrietta Lacks has been used for decades in essential medical research to which we owe our lives. (And it's only recently that her family has been compensated for their use. Too little, too late, IMO) And that's research that has been going on since 1951.
But we're not going to be eating cow cancer. Stop panicking.
Stem cells, unlike the more dangerous cancer cells, can be controlled. Science has found a way to start and stop the cultured muscle cells multiplying on cue. The cells are "fed" nutrients and "exercised" with electrical impulses. Muscle is grown with no nerves to feel and no brain to feel it with.
In fact, the donor animal can live a long and peaceful life in the fields of the hobbyist who decides to keep them.
Vegans can celebrate. Many animals kept in captivity for their meat will no longer be kept, if cultured meat is widely adopted. No animals ever need suffer and die for human nutrition. Of course, long term, some species of farm animal will die out... it happened to the Aurochs.
Space travel should theoretically become easier. Once we have cultured meat, protein will no longer be a limiting factor for stays on other planets... but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Then there's the "pink slime" factor. Those of you concerned about processed food will know all about "pink slime". Recovered meat, ground marrow, ammonia, and other nasties all ground up and 'allowed' in 'acceptable amounts' into our food by agencies like the FDA. Which works so long as their not wholly-owned subsidiaries of various pharmacorps [-cough-Rhymes with Ponsanto-cough-].
With cultured meat, there is no pink slime. No chemicals. Just honest, pure, muscle tissue, straight from the lab to you. Which is one of the reasons I look forward to cultured meat, in all its future varieties.
But I want to hear your opinion. What do you think of cultured meat?
