Quote:
Originally Posted by Mowicz
1) I don't think we know for certain whether or not it will be healthier. It definitely will not be 'good for you.'
A) "Ideal" Fatty Acid content varies from person to person, and across gender. They can't really go so far as to make the claim that they're going to make burgers that are 'good for you' because it's just not true. Everything is good in moderation, and everything in large doses is a bad thing.
B) I'm not trying to start a conspiracy theory here or anything, but we can't be completely certain of what is being put into the burgers. It'll most likely be something like a 'fluoridated water' situation, where we are allegedly receiving a treatment we can't refuse...or worse?
C) The article seems kind of dense, since the disorders listed (swine flu for instance) have nothing to do with the ingestion of meat. *shrug*
That being said, maybe they'll have less fat...but then, so does lean meat. Zero fat? So does protein supplementation (which isn't as healthy and serves a specific purpose).
2) I'm not really seeing how it's better for animals either. Did you mean that fewer animals will be slaughtered? But cows are domesticated right? If we released all the cows into the wild they'd all die since they depend on humans for food and such. It's kind of a tough call there, about which is worse.
3) And the environment? Cow farts?
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Protein is protein is protein. It doesn't matter whether it comes right from an animal or from a lab. The project they're working on comes from protein taken originally from an animal, and is identical in every way. To say "it definitely won't be good for you" is factually incorrect. Every person needs to get the 8 essential amino acids. How you get them is up to you.
The idea is that it's engineered. The "ingredients" if you will, are pretty much whatever people want to put in the meat. It's possible that a person could be analyzed and the best "meat solution" created for them. Even in our society, there's probably rich people who are willing to pay for meat specially created to be the best, most healthy meat solution for them.
It would be better for animals because far fewer animals would be required to be farmed for their meat. It's something you learn in second-year ecology: eating cow meat (as delicious as it is) is incredibly inefficient. A field which provides food for a herd of cattle could provide food for more than 100x the amount of people. We wouldn't have to slaughter as many animals, and they wouldn't have to live in the conditions that many of them do. A lot of people think of the idyllic family farm out in the country when they think of cows. Around the world, a lot of the cows which are eaten are farmed in giant "super farms" which don't give the animals very good living conditions. They are pumped full of steroids and other chemicals so they grow faster and bigger. And you argue that "we wouldn't know what's in the meat". Trust me, you don't know what's in the meat already.
It would be better for the environment for a few reasons.
- "Cow farts" (and burps) are actually significant when we talk about global warming. It sounds silly, but the sheer number of cows in the world are producing a very high quantity of methane gas (16% in fact). The livestock industry in general produces almost 40% of "human caused" methane release.
- Reducing the amount of farmed animals reduces the amount of farmland required in general. We could use former cattle fields to farm crops. This would reduce the need to cut down forests in the tropics, and expand human development in general.
This "in-vitro" meat thing is just an innovative solution to the problems we are facing as a society right now. Regardless of what they are, we are going to need to make some extremely big changes in how we live. Either we willingly change how we live now, or nature will do it for us.
