Lab-Grown Meat: The Answer to Animal Cruelty and Environmental Ruin From Feedlots?

Alternet, we really need to do something about this!

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Not


FREE AMERICA

REVOLUTIONARY (DIRECT) DEMOCRACY

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< rant >I contend that we really aren't as clever as we think we are. Our record so far seems to be to discover new technologies then find ways to completely fuck things up. < /rant >


"If you could prove in a lab that God exists, Monsanto would immediately sue for patent infringement."

-Insertnamehere

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Factory-meat victims also include the many people who go hungry because land that could have been used to grow food for people is used to grow food for animals.

The reality is that there is more than enough food. It has a whole lot more to do with food being used as a weapon. There are farmers that are paid to not farm their land...

I would argue that the problem really lies with the lack of a culture of agriculture in this country. When we were more agraian,food was sourced more locally and people were more closely connected with the soil. Everything that is wrong with society can be tied with the way we treat our soils.

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My husband and I are big meat eaters. After all, my husband is a meat cutter. However, we buy our own cows, get them slaughtered by a neighbor and let my hubby cut it for us. We do this because we knew factory farms were pretty bad and didn't want to support them. However, I didn't realize just how bad they were. I think create animals that feel no pain is a great idea but really not the solution. I believe the true solution is doing a lot of things that are unlikely to happen. But things like tighter regulations on aliens so that their won't be many illegal workers there and more injury reports. Regulations and inspections on these plants. I know inspections are suppose to be done, but realistically they are only done maybe yearly, so if they actually get done it would probably help. centerpieces for weddings harry potter toys

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I got a good chuckle out of "meatri dish," and wanted to share carniculture, which is a sci-fi term for growing muscle cells in foot vats.

That could essentially work; we only eat muscle tissue when eating "meat" and so many meat products are pressed and formed anyway, a McNugget would taste and feel the same regardless of whether the muscle tissue came from minced up chicken muscle groups, or from a vat. It wouldn't be possible to clone a steak or a chicken leg in this way, but since consumers are less and less competent to recognize and consume actual food, this would likely be an acceptable substitute.

The problem, much like fuel efficient cars and green industries are facing, is that it needs to be cheap. The technology to invent successful tissue cloning tanks and maintaining their sterility neither exists nor would it be cheap to start up. It is simply cheaper to raise animals for the purpose of eating them. If PETA is at all serious about their offer, they need to put far more money where their mouth is. A million bucks won't even get you in the door.

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If muscle (and fat) tissue is cultured and harvested, no resources need be used in constructing bone, beaks, lips, gristle, and all of that other stuff. All you need is amino acids obtained from plants, a delivery system, a matrix to grow it on, and genes activated to produce the required tissue. No animal suffering, no waste, no fences, just delicious steak! What's wrong with that?

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When are we going to stop monkeying with our infantile understanding of science? A child with building blocks cannot build a safe sky-scraper.

There are countless examples of humans playing God and ruining a perfectly good piece of the world. This is just another one of those things. If we don't want animals to feel pain, then we shouldn't hurt them. Is that so hard to understand?

Rather, we fancy ourselves gods, believing that we can "create" something better?

If everyone would substitute just a portion of their animal protein with plant protein, it would make a huge difference.

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We're well adapted for having meat as part of our diets. Deal with it and stop living in your creationist universe.

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. . .there's no point in making fun of anyone eating hot dogs. At least sausages have some human history behind them.

Here's a "how many angels dance on the head of a pin" question for alternet: How many omnivores are guilted into changing their diet because of manipulation? I'm betting none, even considering the temporary nature of most vegetarian diets. Of course, the underlying question is, what type and amount of information should make anyone consider changing their diet? Is THIS it? Seems a bit too important for that to me.

"Mommy, do plants scream? Does the tomato plant LIKE having its hands pulled off? Does that lettuce hurt when the knife cuts it off its legs? Mommy, does the plant hurt when I bite it? Am I cruel to the carrot?"

That's probably about 20 years away, when we become even more alienated from nature and think we dominate it and choose who we are in every way. Cabbageless Coleslaw is probably in development right now, by the same company that came up with Meatless Brats. Maybe KarrotlessKake?

Anyone think the Amish have big, deep conversations with their obviously troubled kids about Bossy and Babe out in the barn (temporarily)? Did the children of the Native Americans used to walk around disturbed and depressed during the celebrations after successful hunts?

If you gave up meat yesterday or last week, does that make you a vegetarian who should try to guilt-trip others? What if you gave up meat 2 months ago but ate some yesterday? Funny that all time you DON'T eat meat makes you a vegetarian, but the time meat is eaten doesn't count. Maybe you should have to be completely meat-free for 6 months to call yourself that, and then feel entitled to work on the lifestyles of others. And you have to feel good after the 6 months. If you're enervated and if you crave meat more than once every two weeks or so, you can't step into the heads of others. Got to clean up your own first.

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SPAMMER!--TOMBSTONE THEM ALL!!!

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well worth the read. thank you very much for taking the time to share with those who are starting on the subject. Greetings

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These scientists seem to be free from feeling the pain and suffering they create on this planet with their "technology" and bioengineering and patented life forms. Maybe they should be ground up and served as burger for zoo animals.

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Author Keith Akers, in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983), notes that by arguing against the killing of plants, the meat-eater "seeks to reduce vegetarianism to absurdity. If vegetarians object to killing living creatures (it is argued), then logically they should object to killing plants and insects as well as animals. But this is absurd. Therefore, it can’t be wrong to kill animals.

"Fruitarians take the argument concerning plants quite seriously; they do not eat any food which causes injury or death to either animals or plants. This means, in their view, a diet of those fruits, nuts and seeds which can be eaten without the destruction of the plant that produces the food.

"Finding an ethically significant line between plants and animals, though, is not particularly difficult. Plants have no evolutionary need to feel pain, and completely lack a central nervous system. Nature does not create pain gratuitously, but only when it enables the organism to survive. Animals, being mobile, would benefit from having a sense of pain; plants would not."

In determining a boundary between sentient and insentient life, Peter Singer in Animal Liberation suggests that "somewhere between a shrimp and an oyster seems as good a place to draw the line as any, and better than most."

Keith Akers states further, "Even if one does not want to become a fruitarian and believes that plants have feelings (against all evidence to the contrary), it does not follow that vegetarianism is absurd. We ought to destroy as few plants as possible. And by raising and eating an animal for food, many more plants are destroyed indirectly by the animals we eat than if we merely ate the plants directly."

(Meat-eaters indirectly kill ten times more plants than do vegetarians!)

"What about insects?" asks Akers, "While there may be reason to kill insects, there is no reason to kill them for food. One distinguishes between the way meat animals are killed for food and the way insects are killed.

"Insects are killed only when they intrude upon human territory, posing a threat to the comfort, health, or well-being of humans. There is a huge difference between ridding oneself of intruders and going out of one's way to find and kill something which would otherwise be harmless."

According to Akers:

"These questions may have a certain fascination for philosophers, but most vegetarians are not bothered by them. For any vegetarian who is not a biological pacifist, there would not seem to be any particular difficulty in distinguishing ethically between insects and plants on the one hand, and animals and humans on the other."


A new ethic towards animals is emerging. I had the opportunity to hear John Robbins, author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America (1987) speak at a Unitarian church here in Oakland, CA several years ago. The church was PACKED.

John writes in The Food Revolution (2001):

"The revolution sweeping our relationship to our food and our world, I believe, is part of an historical imperative. This is what happens when the human spirit is activated. One hundred and fifty years ago, slavery was legal in the United States. One hundred years ago, women could not vote in most states. Eighty years ago, there were no laws in the United States against any form of child abuse. Fifty years ago, we had no Civil Rights Act, no Clean Air or Clean Water legislation, no Endangered Species Act. Today, millions of people are refusing to buy clothes and shoes made in sweatshops and are seeking to live healthier and more Earth-friendly lifestyles. In the last fifteen years alone, as people in the United States have realized how cruelly veal calves are treated, veal consumption has dropped 62 percent."

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~ 4 pheasant breasts
~ thick cut bacon
~ 1 can each cream of celery and mushroom soup
~ 2 cups cooked white rice
~ 1 cup brown or wild rice
~ 1/3 cup shaved almonds

Wrap each breast with bacon. Secure with toothpicks if necessary.

Place in a baking dish.

Combine the soup and 1 can of water together. Pour over the pheasant.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 - 40 minutes.

Serve over the cooked rice.

Enjoy.

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Given how often people consume meat in forms that are highly processed, this seems like it could be an excellent substitute for those occasions. You wouldn't even notice with Chicken McNuggets, etc.
This need not preclude eating real animals sometimes. Maybe it would be feasible to only eat grass-fed (or otherwise naturally fed) animals when we eat meat if we kept the quantity down.

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The elitism and sense of moral superiority and certitude of articles such as this on Alternet leave me shaking my head.

As a farmer, I support and donate animals to an organization called Heifer Internatonal. They provide animals such as hogs, cattle, goats, and chickens to "help children and families around the world receive training and animal gifts that help them become self-reliant." Donating a sow to a poor Haitian family can tremendously improve both their diets and economic security. A sow will have up to 16 piglets a year. The pigs eat waste materials and they grow to 200 lbs in about a year.

It's the same with giving some of these people a cow or a goat or a flock of baby chicks. They and their children finally have a better diet and at the same time a means to help them economically. Please check-out some of the great stories on www.heifer.org.

Alternet--and the goofus writers of articles such as this---need to get out of their San Francisco high-rise office and get out into the world of real people. Because you people know NOTHING about agriculture. You know NOTHING about poverty! Articles such as this on Alternet, and Alternet's vegan-Nazi attitude in general is not the answer to the people that Heifer.org tries to help. It is a slap in the face to people like me who have spent a lifetime in agriculture--unlike you whose only real experience with ag is through books and videos you have seen.

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I dunno. This just seems bizarre. looking as far as my taste buds, nasal passages and palate, something from a meatri-dish sounds kinda yucky.

The whole point of a steak or a bird is that it's an aminall... you're eating another's body to sustain your own. If you don't do that, what's the point of even eating meat in the first place? Might as well just be a veggie.

The technofix urge is remarkable amongst the owning-class. Maybe that's where we should get our meat from... throw their furniture on their lawns and eat the stoopids who run things.

The life is in the blood, as they used to say. Let's git bloody!

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I don't know why all the bother to eat real meat, whether lab grown or animal grown.
Many varieties of fake meat, soy or gluten-based for example, made by some brands actually tastes much BETTER than real meat, to me anyway. Not all brands or varieties are that good, I know. You have got to shop around. But I never crave real meat with the choices of the imitation meat out there.

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I'd like to see a return to organic farming. In 1989, concern over the use of the pesticide Alar on apples caused many Americans to consider organic produce. We produce pesticides at a rate some 13,000 times faster than we did in the 1950s. Our environment is being flooded by pesticide compounds.

Poisons used to kill insects accumulate on crops, in the soil and in greater concentration in the tissues of living creatures higher on the food chain. The EPA's Pesticide Monitoring Journal reports that "Foods of animal origin (are) the major source of pesticide residues in the diet."

In his Pulitzer Prize nominated book, How to Survive in America the Poisoned, pesticide authority Lewis Regenstein writes: "Meat contains approximately 14 times more pesticides than do plant foods...Thus, by eating foods of animal origin, one ingests greatly concentrated amounts of hazardous chemicals."

A 1976 study by the EPA found the breast milk of mothers who consume animal products to be 50 to 100 times more contaminated by pesticide residues than the milk of vegetarian or vegan mothers.

Organic farming and Integrated Pest Management (IPM) are getting more attention today. These utilize natural insect controls, such as predatory insects, weather, crop rotation, pest-resistant varieties, soil tillage, and other environmentally safe practices.

A 1979 Department of Agriculture task force of scientists and economists came to "...positive conclusions on the importance of organic farming and its potential contributions to agriculture and society." Until the end of the Second World War, American farmers produced bountiful harvests without relying on pesticides. There is no reason why America cannot do so again.

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Once again, as soon as Alternet publishes an article critical of factory farming, the anti-vegetarians respond in full force. It's really easy to sit back and condemn someone else's lifestyle choices, but I can't see how any reasonable and informed person can defend the factory farm system that houses and slaughters 95% of the animals raised in the US for food. Would anyone care to give it a try?

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1. Vasumurti mentions a Peter Singer quote about shrimp and oyster--- these species would be a lot easier to clone (parts of) than complex mammalian beefcattle. The "shmeat" could be grown in thousands of tanks in big buildings like the Searswillis Tower (after the bureaucrats have all gone fishin'). Modern culinary tech knows how to make these taste like beefcow if the goofdiners insist.

2. One day in a well-baited stinky recycling yard I claphanded 1200 flies and ate them all (took about 3 hours) and didn't get sick. A more efficient way: I saw a machine once with a light bulb inside; flies tried to enter through a grid of alternately charged bars, once contacting the bars and completing a circuit, the fly "fried" for a second and fell inside. In our version, the electroevent would trigger a fan which would whisk the carcass into a freezing compartment. Every so often a truck drives by, someone takes out a drawer and empties the catch into a refrigeration unit on the truck. We'll grind up the meat and make quiche, guacamole, or pesto.

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Why Heifer International is Rolling in Dung

By MARTHA ROSENBERG

It almost sounds like a joke. Set up dairy enterprises in rural African villages with no refrigeration, electricity, veterinary care or passable roads for a population that can't drink milk because it's 90% lactose intolerant.

But the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation didn't think it was a joke when it announced the gift of $42 million to Heifer International at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January--the biggest gift the Little Rock, AR-based Christian charity which sends live animals to poor countries has ever received.

Using cherubic, 4-H/Unicef style advertising-- kids hugging the animal "gifts" they will also dispatch--Heifer pledges to stamp out world hunger in poor countries using the grain, water and grazing land they don't have to raise animals.

To get around the lack of rural electricity for the proposed dairy operations in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, Heifer will create "chilling plants" with their own backup power generators according to a press release where the milk will be stored for pickup by "refrigerated commercial dairy delivery trucks"-- both of them.

Farmers will artificially inseminate cows, perhaps by candlelight, with "high-production dairy animal semen"--more backup generators required to keep it frozen?--and increase milk quality through providing "improved animal nutrition" to the cows with the food they don't have.

Got that?

Because of children's natural love of animals, Heifer International is a popular charity project in elementary schools--though it stresses it cannot reveal the fate of individual animals it sends overseas so don't ask. But teachers who go on Heifer sponsored junkets to recipient nations can come back with disturbing stories.

Like Donna Sosnowski, a fourth-grade teacher at Virginia Palmer Elementary School in Sun Valley, NV who discovered children were sleeping with their Heifer animals to keep them from being stolen on a tour of Honduras this summer, according to the Reno Gazette Journal.

And Amy Carrington, a teacher in White County, Arkansas who also toured Honduras where "villagers shared their hardships with her, such as when a disease killed off all the chickens in a particular village," reported the Daily Citizen in Searcy, AK.

Then there’s Heifer International's Global Village program in Perryville, AK where school kids who vote that they want meat for dinner will witness the 0D teacher break a rabbit's neck, chop off its head, skin it and cook it.

Last year one unidentified mother emailed Arkansas' Fox 16 TV station to say her son still talks about hearing the rabbit scream as its neck was broken when he attended a Global Village as a 5th grader.

Heifer also has the nation's top columnist, the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, in its thrall.

"The tale begins in the rolling hills of western Uganda, where Beatrice was born and raised," begins a PR wire style piece this month about Heifer poster child and star of the children's book Beatrice's Goat, Beatrice Biira. "As a girl, she desperately yearned (sic.) for an education, but it seemed hopeless: Her parents were peasants who couldn't afford to send her to school."

PR story short, Beatrice grew up, went to college and plans to work against African poverty all because some children at the Niantic Community Church in Niantic, CN "decided to buy goats for African villagers through Heifer International, a venerable aid group based in Arkansas that helps impoverished farming families," writes Kristof in the irony-free column titled The Luckiest Girl.

"A dairy goat in Heifer's online gift catalog costs $120; a flock of chicks or ducklings costs just $20," he adds, in case you want to donate too.

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Since the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced its grant, Heifer has received an unprecedented $126.5 million in matching donations which funds a lot of Noah's Arks--or death ships as animal advocates might say.

Despite gender dressing--Heifer claims most dairy operations are run by women--experts say animal based agriculture misuses land and resources, promotes high fat Western diets and jeopardizes human and animal health by inviting zoonotic diseases like Avian flu.

Programs like Heifer also betray a "Caucasian bias" by ignoring lactose intolerance Dr. Hetal Karsan, a gastroenterologist at Atlanta's Emory
University, told the Associated Press. Maybe pharma will send Lactaid supplements.

Martha Rosenberg is staff cartoonist on the Evanston Roundtable. She can be

reached at mrosenberg@evmark.org

http://counterpunch.org/rosenberg07122008.html

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If you want a significant population reduction on this planet, and a sustainable number of people living here, then free-range meats from small farms would be sufficient, though perhaps a less frequent dish than current rate of consumption.

If you want 10 billion people living on this planet, then you need to turn to lab-grown meat and vertical (indoor) crop farming.

Personally, I prefer the former, but the latter looks exciting and futuristic in and of itself. Sans the huge population, of course.

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If you would start by preparing your own hamburgers;
killing the cows, slaughter them, preparing the bloody meat it will change the way you eat it.

There is even a difference in preparing an applepie together with your kids, cleaning the kitchen.

The problem seems to me LIFE in an artificiel world,

My ancestors lived thousand of years on the little islands from danmark to france. Since 8000 years the sealevel is raising. Only by eating FISh and shellfish and seabirds they could survive in the salty dunes no grain will grow.
My children and grandchildren do have problems with drinking milk and eating grains.
We tried 3 years a vegan diet but my teener kids had to stop ordered by the schooldoktor.

Sometimes some articles in alternet are written by collegekids who hardly know the real world.
Still I believe USA is the only power big enough for changing the world into a better place.

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To suggest we can't get rid of factory farms is to suggest we are beyond salvation. Not that we aren't--beyond salvation--but this is a dangerous acceptance of an unacceptable status quo. The fact that the average American doesn't care where his food (let alone anything else he buys) comes from is a fairly good barometer for the health of our Republic. If you're willing to put manure in your mouth to save money on beef--and along with that manure you're getting some pretty dangerous types of bacteria--what could you possibly care about your precious Liberty? Yet, that is the attitude of all too many, probably even most, Americans. Cost overrides Quality.

Yes, producing meat in a lab would save animals the pain of slaughter, even after the most humane existence on the most bucolic farm in Marin, but if the gluttony that defines such a large part of our existence today is not dealt with, we're only trading the misery of farm animals for the misery of all animals in the vanishing, polluted, globally warming Wild, and the misery of all the humans that depend on them.

Producing meat in laboratories in order to wipe out factory farms while still providing unrealistically cheap food so that people can buy as much of it as they can afford, for the least amount of money necessary is not a recipe for a sustainable future. Food is expensive to produce, and while we have, or will have the technology to produce food by formula, without having to engage the lives of creatures and plants in the process, if all we're doing is simply changing the production to allow the continuation of a culture of thoughtless consumption and waste, we are only digging our grave that much deeper, that much further out in the future, but we're still digging our grave, and into it taking much of the life on the planet as we know it.

It's not just how we produce our food, that's important, but how we consume it, and everything else we take into our lives. If we don't start thinking more about how we feed and clothe ourselves, and how we furnish our existences, we will not be able to consider how our freedoms are being threatened for the sake of the conveniences we keep demanding at every turn, and our freedom will become little more than a symbolic gesture.

And the sad thing about that? Not only will we fail to save the animals their suffering, we will simply add their misery to our own.

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I think lab grown meat is a great idea, and I hope it comes to fruition. As the author is, I am also a vegetarian and would probably just stay away from anything that was flesh for food. But for meat eaters who eat cheap, abused, genetically altered animals anyway, what's the difference?

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IT'S PEOPLE!!!!!

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The idea of genetically "pain-free", soul-less animal zombies killed for their flesh sounds downright creepy--like a horror movie. It would be like lobotomizing a group of humans and making them do the sh*t work that nobody else wants to do. The other idea, lab-grown meat without live animals involved at all, sounds better, and I know Ingrid Newkirk would be the first in line to try it. As for me, as a vegan with no desire to eat animal-based foods, I'd pass because I don't happen to think that eating animals is good for your health. But it's clear that most people aren't able to make the leap to plant-based living even if they're disturbed by the realities of animal farming, so this would be an acceptable ethical compromise for them.

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i've been veg since 1976 and vegan since 1999. lab-grown meat will solve so many problems associated with animal agriculture- torture and slaughter, resource consumption and depletion, industrial pollution, etc.

ideally, we'd all be eating locally grown vegetarian and vegan food. but that is not gonna happen anytime soon.

while i will never eat lab-grown meat (i'll stick to my rainforest-killing, overly packaged, overly processed soy foods, thanks),
i think the planet (and animals) will be much better off. for that reason, i support it.

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Okay, let's start with what's wrong with this idea -- because that pretty much covers the ground here.

Has anyone forgotten about our so-called free market system? How about the idea that the cheapest product to produce will sell more and make more money? Be prepared for scandals, suits, and coverups, if lab meat makes it to the big time -- and victims all around.

Even in a lab dewar, you have to feed the tissues something, in order to grow them. Have you ever noticed how bland tasting factory farmed meat is, compared to game, or range fed beef? Lab meat would be even more tasteless. They'd feed it mostly saline solution and corn syrup, and it would be just about as nutritious as you might imagine.

And it would not be even as healthy to eat as factory-meat now is. Infection would have to be controlled as well, in a system largely lacking in natural immunities, and the rates of antibiotic and artificial hormone feeds, to promote growth and add weight, would likely be enormous. Would you really want all that in your body, at even higher rates than now exist in store-bought meats?

Lab meat would be targetted to the poorest of the poor.

Better we all get to liking our veggies.

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Indeed.Producing meat in a lab would save animals the pain of slaughter, even after the most humane existence on the most bucolic farm in Marin, but if the gluttony that defines such a large part of our existence today is not dealt with, we're only trading the misery of farm animals for the misery of all animals in the vanishing, polluted, globally warming Wild, and the misery of all the humans that depend on them.
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Another lady I know, who is 36, didn't go as far as to say that she definitely does not want children. But to be openly, loudly undecided on the issue - at the point when her biological clock should be ticking so loudly that she can hardly sleep, eat or think about anything else - is to be brave enough, frankly. It's an admission that invites suspicion and pity. To be a thirtysomething woman in 2009 and not want a child so desperately that you think you might die is simply not allowed. Convert Blu Ray to MKV

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