A recent CNN article states that a company called “New Harvest” plans to take eggs harvested from animals killed in slaughterhouses, fertilize them, place them in test tubes with nutrient solution and grow “meat” in huge steel vats from the embryos.
“Cultured meat would have a lot of advantages,” said Jason Matheny of New Harvest. “We could precisely control the amount of fat in meat. We could make ground beef with an ideal fatty acid ratio — a hamburger that prevents heart attacks instead of causing them.”
So, instead of raising chickens, pigs and cattle in a conventional way, this company recommends using test tubes for a more “controlled environment”.
Environmentalists are happy, thinking that there would be no need to rip out rain forest to grow more food, and no more chickens in pens and the elimination of inhumane conditions for all animals – but one environmental scientist is looking at it a bit more critically – he says “”Animal cells do not manufacture protein out of wishes and moonbeams. There will be a feedstock, likely based mostly on soy and corn to balance the protein content just like animal feed today. It will be heavily chemically processed to break it down into a form muscle cells can use. There will be waste from this process which will be chemically similar to the waste produced by animal digestion. The metabolic processes of the tank meat will also produce waste which will be essentially identical to the waste produced by metabolism in an intact animal.”
So, there will still need to be food grown, waste to deal with, and the whole “laboratory-sterile” concept goes out the window! And don’t think they will use organic feed – the chemical revolution made grain production so much easier, so science will continue to use science as opposed to a natural solution.
Should we really be messing with the way the natural system works? Isn’t that how we got the tainted food system that is killing people in the first place?
– Pat