Meat Grown in a lab

I just read an article on cnn about lab grown meat – meat grown in a petri dish. This is something I remember hearing about a long time ago. I don’t know if it was in National Geographic or American scientist or whatever, but growing meat from stem cells I do not think is a new revolutionary concept. Now, finally, someone in Europe is being paid 300 million dollars to create an edible stem-cell burger in a petri dish.

I don’t know how I feel about this. The first thing I think of when I heard this was,….”…mcky D’s is all over this aren’t they” there has got to be a huge corporate push for making more food products  cheaper right…greater population needs more food, means more customers and more money so find an efficient way to quickly grow meat to order and as long as people eat it, it can be very profitable. I bet the FDA would not even demand labeling of products with lab grown meat as an ingredient like they do not demand the labeling of cloned animals or GMOs. So with this track record, maybe people are already eating meat grown in a petri dish and they don’t even know it.

I start to think about sustainability. Would this be sustainable? Where are they getting the stem cells? The article goes on to say that they “harvest” them from slaughter houses. So probably not sustainable.

Can it feed the world? My understanding of the world hunger crisis is not that there is not enough food…it’s that the food management is disgusting, and the more wealthy in impoverished nations horde food and wealth, and use it as leverage to control the rest of population. There are a lot of people…and the projected population growth in the next 20-30 years can result in some major problems.  But right now this is not the solution.

Comments on even mildly controversial topics are full of overly dramatic internet warriors. These were what you would expect them to be. Not very interesting, not very intelligent. Bah