Lab beef?

Or is it?

Well, not right now – since it is prohibitively expensive to produce even a small piece of this lab meat. A cell is taken from a meat animal, chicken and cattle have both been used successfully so far. It is cloned, grown in a nutritional soup, and stretched to mimic the exercize a real meat animal would get that gives the meat it’s texture. All this is expensive.

My initial reaction is…yuk. However, after giving it some thought, I have to admit it has possibilities. I don’t eat meat largely because I never really cared that much for the flavor of it.

But for those who really, truly, deeply miss having meat at every meal, this could be an interesting solution. No more animals would have to be slaughtered to feed their appetite. It seems possible that if this process could be made into a mass process, it might save much of the feed and water and other resources that are currently used to raise meat animals. In addition, it seems to me that this would be healthier meat, in that you are no longer eating an animal that might have been fed slaughterhouse by products, or pumped full of antibiotics or hormones to increase production. So there is that to consider.

Speaking for myself, the only meat eaten around my house is eaten by my own pet dogs and cats. I don’t feel it is fair or healthy for them to be fed an unnatural (for them) vegetarian diet. It would be nice if I could feed them lab meat based pet food for all the same reasons stated above.

I don’t really expect to see this process perfected in my lifetime. I’m not sure there are enough people with enough invested in creating this. But you never know.

It is an interesting idea though.