100% Certified Lab-Grown

As the population continues to increase exponentially, world hunger is becoming a much more widespread and serious issue, and more extreme measures are being taken to solve it. One of those ways is growing meat in petri dishes.

This August, a completely lab-grown burger was fried and eaten in London after having been grown from cow stem cells in a lab. This burger is all muscle– because there were no fat or skin or cartilage cells to begin with, there was no such tissue in the meat. This development could have some interesting implications for world hunger– if meat can be mass-produced in places with climates that can’t support large numbers of animals, everyone can get their protein.

Widespread use of this discovery could also help environment in some major ways. Right now, it’s estimated that confined animals produce three times as much waste as humans in the US, and account for a huge percentage of carbon and methane emissions. Runoff from factory farms ends up in groundwater and ecosystems, causing diseases to develop in places that they shouldn’t be developing in.

So how much value do lab-grown burgers have? Are they the next “pink slime”? Or are they the solution to world hunger and the destructive consequences of factory farming?

Or do you think hunger can be fixed in a much less creepy and “scientific” way? After all, meat is being produced so fast, and there is so much of it, that it has already become less expensive than vegetables. Things like Epic Meal Time, a Youtube series that features recipes for 60-pound 6 piece chicken nuggets, among other food items, show that getting enough animal protein in your diet is clearly not an issue in some places. Should we focus first on the politics and socioeconomic barriers that contribute to world hunger, instead of trying to fix everything with science?

 

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/science/a-lab-grown-burger-gets-a-taste-test.html

http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-factory-farms-and-environment