I've been taking about 'meat things' for nearly 10 years, so I was really excited by the new Michael Specter piece in The New Yorker about artificially grown meat, Test-tube Burgers. You can't read most of it online, so I want to copy this small section:
...One study, completed last year by researchers at Oxford and the University of Amsterdam, reported that the production of cultured meat could consume roughly half the energy and occupy just two percent of the land now devoted to the world's meat industry....
I say real factories because we are all aware I assume by this point of the nature of 'factory farming'. But mass production of animal stock is an ad hoc kludge. Domesticated animals have been bred for meat production, but they remain organisms with all the range of activities and ends which the term 'organism' entails. Raising raw tissue in cultures may seem 'yucky,' a point Specter covers in assessing the reaction of some environmentalists and animal-rights activists who don't seem as excited by the shift from conventional livestock raising to growing tissue as one would expect if they ran the numbers, but it is probably inevitable if it is feasible. The article makes the point that most of the focus on this area seems to be in the Netherlands, but thank god the Chinese are paying attention to this!
