Luke Dormehl
...You can thank Winston Churchill. Well, kind of. Back in 1931, before he was British Prime Minister, the famous wartime leader took a turn at culinary prognostication. Within 50 years, he suggested, it would be possible to “escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing.” This could be achieved by growing individual parts separately “under a suitable medium.” Churchill was right. While lab-grown chicken is still far from mainstream, the idea has gained significant momentum in the years since then. A little over a decade ago, in 2008, PETA offered a $1 million prize to the first company that could bring lab-grown chicken meat to market. The prize money coincided with dozens of laboratories around the world taking on the challenge of cultured meat. A few years later, in 2013, a Dutch pharmacologist and Professor of Vascular Physiology at the Netherlands’ Maastricht University, unveiled the world’s first lab-grown burger. Its game-changing “clean meat” was produced using animal cells, but without the requirement of, you know, killing an actual animal as the food source. For many people, this was the first time that they heard about lab-grown meat. Like the PETA announcement, it sparked a wave of interest from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. “When I presented the first cultured hamburger, I wasn’t aware of anyone working on cultured meat,” Post told Digital Trends. “Now, there are over 30 companies working on commercializing this technology. The big meat companies like Tyson, Cargill and Bell Food Group have invested, as well as famous investors like Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, and Richard Branson.” ...As mentioned, there are several reasons why the world might be ready for lab-grown meat. Animal treatment and waste are two prominent explanations. “People don’t eat slaughter meat because of how it is produced; they eat it in spite of how it is produced.” That’s according to Matt Ball, a spokesperson for the Good Food Institute, a company which provides support to startups producing lab-grown food. There is also a surprising environmental impact brought about by large scale cattle farming. Farting cows may not seem like the biggest problem we face as a planet right now, but according to the United Nations, livestock is estimated to contribute approximately 15 percent of global gas emissions. Flatulent bovines aren’t the extent of it, either. Livestock production uses a large amount of water, while the toxins used in farming can run off into natural waterways, destroying habitats and wildlife in the process...Another recent, and extremely troubling development, was a piece of research published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. Carried out by scientists from the University of Oxford, it suggested that lab-grown meat actually has the potential to be worse for the environment than cattle farming. “There are still a lot of uncertainties around what large-scale cultured meat production could look like, and we don’t have any data from real-life production systems yet,” John Lynch, a postdoctoral researcher whose work focuses on the climate impact of livestock production, told us. “We therefore need to consider the range in potential energy requirements and physical inputs that may be required for cultured meat production before we can make a clear comparison with conventional meat.” Lynch continued that the way in which we currently compare the climate impacts of different activities, by looking at their “carbon dioxide equivalent emissions,” can overlook some of the important differences between different greenhouse gases. “In the more energy intensive cultured meat systems that have been speculated, we might essentially be replacing methane emissions from cattle with CO2 from energy generation,” Lynch said. “This would not necessarily be good for the climate.”
1 comment:
More media hype for false, fake and harmful Lab Slime.......like the continuing war on cattle and our lands......it never ends.
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