meat without animals

This just in: Researchers are developing ways to grow meat without actually raising livestock.

Writing for Slate, William Saletan describes the push for meat grown in vitro. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is offering $1 million to anyone who develops a process whereby scientists can grow meat from embryonic cells rather than harvesting it from an animal.

I'm sure it will happen one day, but I'll give it a pass. I have no trouble with animals dying to provide us with meat, though we have reduced our meat to one or two servings per week.

My problems with the frankenfood solution described here are twofold: one, it's surely going to be more expensive than conventional meat; and two, it's unnatural and surely will generate unpredicted complications for us to eat meat grown and harvested this way when our design is for naturally grown meat.

I give it 20 years after its debut, and there'll be all sorts of shocking exposes on the diseases that artifically grown meat causes or makes us susceptible to.