Winston Churchill:
Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.
One of the 50 Best Inventions of 2009, says TIME, in vitro meat is the brainchild of Willem van Eelen, a Dutch businessman who nearly starved to death in a Japanese prison camp and became convinced that artificial meat would solve world hunger.
Pajamas Media dispels any notions that this is some sort of hoax, citing the very real and very sincere In Vitro Meat Consortium and the Orwellianly-named ‘New Harvest’.
‘Arguably, the production of cultured meat is less unnatural than raising farm animals in intensive confinement systems, injecting them with synthetic hormones, and feeding them artificial diets made up of antibiotics and animal wastes.’
Never part of a living animal, Wiki implies cultured meat could be much cheaper than conventional meat.
Scientists have succeeded in creating 1 cm long strips of meat thus a small pork chop would take 30 days of cell replication in the lab.
If industrial facilities prove possible, experts say growing meat in trays instead of raising animals would do wonders for the environment.
Hanna Tuomisto, who studies the environmental impact of food production at Oxford University said the new meat could theoretically lower greenhouse gas emissions by up to 95 percent and reduce land and water use by about 95 percent.