"Brown’s long-term goal is to offer a product that can satisfy the world’s growing, and largely unsustainable, demand for meat, especially in ballooning markets like India and China."
"Meat is environmentally toxic and colossally inefficient, ethically dubious (even if you’re OK with killing animals, raising and slaughtering animals in factory farms is hard to defend), and it’s unhealthy (that’s even true if you don’t eat it—there’s good evidence that the rampant use of antibiotics in livestock production has given rise to drug-resistant infections)."
The amount of resources required to raise an animal to the age at which it can be slaughtered for use as food is a very real problem as the natural resources of the world are strained by population growth.
Ok, so rather than feeding people the genuine article let's feed them some laboratory created faux-meat. That sounds like a great way to be healthy.
I don't disagree that we need to find more sustainable ways to feed ourselves, but we also need to be feeding ourselves quality food that matches our biological needs. Not whatever is most conveniently and cheaply produced.
There is not enough farm land to provide 7 billion people a western diet including 1500+ calories from beef every day. The only way to get close to that is to replace most farm land with solar panels supplement that with a lot of nuclear and wind energy and then factory farm plant matter using LED lighting in buildings and feed that to cows in another building.
Is it possible, sure but economics just a question of what your willing to sacrifice for what you want. And significant quantities of fake meat is probably a much better option for everyone involved.
You're making the assumption that the laboratory meet will somehow automatically be worse, and that it is whatever "is most conveniently and cheaply produced".
I eat a lot of meat. I could not conceive of giving up meat. Not going to happen. I don't care if I have to slaughter the animals myself to get it.
But if there was a high enough quality "laboratory meat"? I'd try it. I'd even be willing to pay more for it in certain circumstances:
- Consider custom-adapted marbling.
- Arbitrary sized cuts. Want a fillet larger than any real animal?
- New types of "meat"? Yes please.
- Healthier versions? If they can come up with variations that taste as nice while being better for me, sure, I'll pay a premium for that.
While there undoubtably will also be attempts to make cheap replacements, there's no reason to automatically assume that the fact it is "faux-meat" means it can't be just as healthy - or better - than the real thing.
> The amount of resources required to raise an animal to the age at which it can be slaughtered for use as food is a very real problem as the natural resources of the world are strained by population growth.
For beef, sure. But chickens are very quick to produce (2 months).
I couldn't read the article because the font size is too small and the left "share bar" gets over the text when magnified.
Anyway, to reply to the "statisfy China" thing, let me tell to the author of this "invention" that he is solving a solved problem: China has a long track record of feeding its numerous populace with doufu (tofu) instead of meat. I was very impressed the first time I saw a countryside market. They were selling big doufu pieces in different street shops, and only one butcher was selling a few pieces of hanging meat.
The trick is to actually use little pieces of pork in a doufu-based dish, and many spices, like the delicious Mapo doufu.
Even when eating meat-based Chinese dishes, like Huiguorou, you will eat much less meat than in a classic Western course.
So, in fact, the solution to the possible future problem of Chinese people eating too much meat is not to feed them with that chicken ersatz, it is to avoid Westernization to go that far.
I have a few proposals in this direction that should be common sense:
- Stop using hamburgers as the logo for food in games, apps and other places. Only a very tiny part of the world regularly eat these nocive things.
- Stop displaying actors eating snacks in movies. (We already stopped showing them smoking, except for the villains). Going at any time to the fridge and eating something out of it is a very recent and nocive habit that should not be shown as the normal "American Dream" life in successful mainstream movies.
- Stop this cliché about disgusting intestine-based dishes or other "un-noble" parts. I am no vegetarian, but I think animal we kill for food should be eaten to the last piece of eatable tissue. In China, we (yes, me too) eat tendon, kidneys, fish tripes and heads, duck tongues, pig feet, everything, and cooked in hundres of different manners. It is healthy: eating meat or fish becomes a pleasure by its diversity, not by its volume.
"Brown’s long-term goal is to offer a product that can satisfy the world’s growing, and largely unsustainable, demand for meat, especially in ballooning markets like India and China."
"Meat is environmentally toxic and colossally inefficient, ethically dubious (even if you’re OK with killing animals, raising and slaughtering animals in factory farms is hard to defend), and it’s unhealthy (that’s even true if you don’t eat it—there’s good evidence that the rampant use of antibiotics in livestock production has given rise to drug-resistant infections)."
The amount of resources required to raise an animal to the age at which it can be slaughtered for use as food is a very real problem as the natural resources of the world are strained by population growth.