Obviously there's a very long way to go to make this commercially viable (if ever) but without the concern of the humanitarian aspects of raising/slaughtering animals and the fact that this meat never 'had eyes', feelings and what-not, I wonder if vegetarians would eat this stuff?
I'm sure a few would. A few interesting bits from the article:
At a major science meeting in Canada, Prof Mark Post said synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%.
Last week, I attended a pizza party hosted by Vegan Omaha, got a chance to meet a few dozen or so vegans, including
one well-known cookbook author. When you put a lot of vegans in one space, the only thing they can talk about is, errmmm, being vegan.
I met several people who jumped on the vegan train for environmental reasons. The most interesting person was a body builder who happened to be an environmental studies major, another person was a geologist, both felt a vegan diet is less demanding on the environment.
Its too soon to tell whether lab-grown meat will have an appeal to environmental vegans and vegetarians.
They are off-white and resemble strips of calamari in appearance. These strips will be mixed with blood and artificially grown fat to produce a hamburger by the autumn.
Animal rights activists will, of course, be concerned about the origin of blood used to mix with meat, as well as the origin of tissue used to grow the meat. Odds are, ethical vegans will not use a product which has to be mixed with animal blood to be consumable.
Presumably if donor tissue and blood is obtained from consenting humans, perhaps ethical vegans might find it less objectionable.
Dr Steele, who is also a molecular biologist, said he was also concerned that unhealthily high levels of antibiotics and antifungal chemicals would be needed to stop the synthetic meat from rotting.
Health and organic foodies will object to the use of antibiotics, antifungals, and other chemicals in the manufacture of lab-grown meat as well.
