Artificial Meat

Pink Slime and meat glue were just the start. All that will be unnecessary when we have artificial meat. Yes, that's what I said. It will no longer be necessary to execute barnyard fowl or the prize Angus because just a few scrapings from the muscle tissue of the creature will soon grow the meat of your choice right in the lab. So can your kitchen be far behind? That remains to be seen. This article from the Financial Times by William Little explores the possibilities.

You wouldn’t normally expect to find a thick red steak quietly pulsating in an oversized Petri dish inside a laboratory. But such is the hype around the team scheduled to produce the world’s first lab-grown cut of meat this October that I can’t help but imagine it. The research being done by bioengineer Dr Mark Post at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has provoked global headlines about “test tube meat” and fierce ethical and scientific debate. Getting access to his laboratory is about as exciting as it gets in the world of food engineering.

But when I arrive, the home of in vitro meat is quiet – no research assistants racing to turn out joints of beef, chicken or lamb. Instead, Post slowly opens the door to what looks like a large fridge, or a bioreactor. Within lie row upon row of tiny Petri dishes in which float minute fibres of almost transparent meat. I find it rather deflating but Post is excited. “I’ll need about 3,000 pellets of meat to make a hamburger,” he says.

The idea of creating our own meat has a long history. In 1931, Winston Churchill wrote in the Strand Magazine that separate parts of an animal would be grown in a lab in the future to “escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing”. And when it started experiments in the 1990s, Nasa became preoccupied with producing a non-perishable meat for its astronauts – it managed to grow goldfish cells in 2002.

Well, I think I'll wait awhile to do a taste test. I want to see how it works out for everyone else. I'm also wondering if it will spawn a new meat industry or if they will come up with a small kitchen appliance that only requires a "starter" to begin  producing chops, fillets and tenderloins. The possibilities are endless. They could include a smoker to do hams and bacon. There could be corn fed and grass fed varieties. Every chicken breast could be free range.

This might be just the thing to make PETA shut the heck up too. No animal harvesting and so nothing to cry about. We can only hope.

Even so, will it be the same as eating something that was once a living, breathing creature? I'm thinking not. We will see.