Cultured Meat: Cruelty free AND healthier meat?
Written by Laila Mottaweh
When we face problems, ecological, medical or industrial for instance, we turn to science and technology because we know that they can provide us with the tools necessary to counter these problems. The way we produce meat, I speak of the mass production of livestock, the millions of cows and chickens that we cram together in extremely tight enclosures under torturous conditions is barbarous, in addition to being unsustainable.
Have you ever stopped and wondered at what the impacts of meat consumption had on our planet?
Meat production produces 18 % of our greenhouse emission, which exacerbates the already urgent phenomenon of global warming. This phenomenon is the same one- which causes the melting of icebergs, which threatens to engulf coasts underwater. In addition, a lot of resources that we could be benefitting from( and feeding the hungry, for example) are allocated towards raising, feeding, abusing and butchering livestock. It doesn’ t end here, did you know that the meat industry takes up 70 % of our lands? If we use this space to plant more vegetables and plants, we’ d be able to feed a lot more people, a lot healthier and affordable diets.
It is no surprise that meat consumption has become part of a system that threatens our species. We can no longer ignore this problem. Researchers have been working hard to actually find sustainable solutions, and they are doing so through scientific breakthroughs, one of them being the main topic of this article: Meat Culture.
Scientists are using the potential of cells to produce tissue, to produce muscle, to produce food – and they are doing so through the process of In Vitro cultivation of muscular fibers. Time magazine even declared cultured meat production to be one of the 50 breakthrough ideas of 2009.
Fact: Did you know that In Vitro cultivation of muscular fibers was performed as early as 1971 by Russell Ross?
The procedure is relatively straightforward. You take a biopsy from a cow with a little piece of muscle which already has stem cells, and from just once cell we can make 10 000Kg of meat if we just change the technology!!! We lay them around in a petri dish, harvest them, then we assemble together the sheets created, until we have a hamburger. This is what happened in August 2013, when the world’ s first laboratory grown burger is cooked and eaten in London!
There are multiple benefits to this technology: It is a much more human production of meat, but is also environmentally friendly. It could be made healthier by manipulating the composition of the culture medium, the fat content and fatty acid, and by replacing harmful saturated fats with healthy fats, like omega-3. This meat would have no Xenoviruses, no bacteria, no antibiotics or hormones which we pump our livestock with. It would also allow us to actually use the resources we would waste on maintaining livestock.
Would you be Willing to try
Culture Meat?
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