Cultured meat at your store?
Gee, we humans overall really like meat. We evolved as omnivores, eating both plants and animals, and we’re not slowing down on the animal part. The animal industry provides us with (for most of us) tasty products of cattle, pigs, chickens, and a few more species.
There are many reasons presented in many venues for cutting back or even cutting out. Red meat consumption has a strong correlation with cardiovascular disease. Raising animals uses a big fraction of our land and water for pasturage and for feed crops. Conditions of animals are often considered cruel. So, there are veggie burgers and the like to alleviate the problems. There’s also an industry starting to grow real meat from cultures of animal cells – no animals, no sentient beings, just cells growing into what looks like meat.
Cultured meat has its challenges and limitations, however. Aside from the emotional reaction to deem it Franken-meat, it’s expensive. Producers want to avoid using classic fetal calf serum as a growth factor, instead using synthesized factors costing as much as millions of dollars per gram. Maintaining precise growth conditions in elaborate culture facilities uses huge amounts of electrical power per kilo of meat. The market cost, at the end, is currently hundreds of times more than conventional meat. Developing practical processes will be a long and interesting process.
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org
