This article from CNN today talks about the future of the meat production industry: meat coming straight from the lab, rather than the slaughterhouse. Imagine a factory/lab where vaults of beef tenderloin are "cultivated" by the mile, rather than cut from a semi-conscious/dead cow. I'm not sure which option is more unethical, to clone and genetically-alter animal tissue for food, or to maintain current meat-production means.

Meat coming from a lab rather than your slaughter house means...

1. Less animal cruelty: you kill 1 pig, and you can have a potentially endless supply of pork. Technically, you wouldn't even have to kill that one pig, just collect samples of its meat. You wouldn't have to pack that 1 pig with 200 other pigs in a space that can only hold 80 pigs, force it to eat garbage and pump it full of antibiotics, and eventually lead it to a gruesome death in filthy conditions.

2. Less likelihood of disease and contamination: Less inhumane living conditions equal less disease for livestock, which means we'll be less likely to get swine flu, avian disease, and other livestock-related illnesses that could potentially infect humans and fan mass hysteria. Lab meat would guarantee that your meat did not sit in a rat-infested warehouse before being packed, and would be as clean and germless as it can be.



3. Less consumption of natural resources: Feeding livestock can seriously wreck our ecosystem. Forests are being cleared to grow crop to feed an increasing demand for livestock, which really doesn't help with GHG emissions.



Lab-meat begs a few questions though. One thing, what would a medium-rare steak taste like without blood? What would meat that was grown in a lab taste like if their nutrients weren't delivered by blood? What would the meat look like? Right now I'm imagining the the taste and texture to resemble the kind of food they serve on airline flights, and that's not very appetizing. Another question raised is, what happens to the livestock once we don't have to raise them? I'm sure mom-and-pop slaughterhouses will still exist, but are the livestock allowed to just roam free? How will our ecosystem adapt to us reintroducing domestic livestock into the wild? If there is some giant natural disaster that destroys science as we know it, who will remember how to raise livestock if all our meat came from labs? And finally, what's to stop people from genetically altering meat to serve more sinister purposes [e.g, facilitate the ruling class by providing less nutrient-rich meat to the lower classes at a cheaper price, and allowing the nutrient-rich meat to those who can afford it, eventually causing the lower classes to be physically weaker than the ruling class, and therefore eliminating the threat of violent revolution]? BRAVE NEW WORLD, people.

The argument for test-tube meat or slaughtered meat would be solved for me if I became a vegetarian. Alas, I love my carnivorous ways too much to give them up.