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PETA Offers X-Prize for Artificial Meat
Bored MPA writes "The Times reports that PETA is to announce plans on Monday for a $1 million prize to the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012." PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk addressed the controversial decision by saying, "We don't mind taking uncomfortable positions if it means that fewer animals suffer." An unexpected and pragmatic move from an organization that has a strong base of support from pro-organic vegans." The question I always had about this- if they can take one sample from one animal and clone it in a vat and feed this world, will the vegans be ok with that?
They can go to hell for all I care about them. Bunch of stinking terrorists.
Is called Quorn. It's made from mushrooms!
This is just sick. I'd much rather eat a Bambi, and i'm sorry this won't stop people from wanting real food. Atleast not until we get Nazi Socialistic law put on us that forces us to.
no matter the past evolutionary impact of meat in the protohuman diet it is now unnecessary
Please provide credible academic citations for this assertion. It is incorrect.
Oh yea, and they need to make sure they got money set aside to pay for animal contraceptives, spade or neutering before they get us all on spamalicious meals. Once we stop eating them the animal population will rise, and thus conditions for the animals will worsen, food will become scarce, disease will become rampant. If they don't work that out first, we will have to start killing them just to thin out their population, and that will be oh so much better for them.
Yummmm...
You are what you eat. I don't want to be a vegetable.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
If we weren't meant to eat meat, it wouldn't taste so good.
I belong to PETA by the way. I'm a Person Eating Tasty Animals.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Oh, so you can't eat grain? Or more simply, you can't eat soy?
Most of the USA's cattle is fed GMO soy, which is eadible by humans (not considering the GMO bit, as we don't trust it yet where I live).
Anyway, it's really annoying everytime there is a vegetarian related story to see so many smart people on slashdot state so much bullshit.
No, as human beings, we DO NOT need to eat animals to survive. People have been proving it for centuries, be it as cultures or as individuals.
It's incredible in fact that we still need to even mention it.
Meat is only a question of culture at best, taste at worse. Or rather, the first pressure is harder to escape than the second.
Ever wondered why quite a few of the good ol' Greek philosophers were vegetarian?
Pythagorus, Epicurus, Aristotle, Diogenese, Plutarch, Plato etc. Or even Kant, Tolstoy or Voltaire in more recent times...
As thinkers searching for Truth, searching for the things that are right, they reached the moral conclusion that killing animals, sentient beings, for the sole enjoyment of eating their flesh was wrong. As it is not needed, it cannot be morally justified.
Of course, I don't think you're simple enough to be impressed by some "big names" and of course, you could find philosophers that were not vegetarian.. but even some great men and women were in favour of slavery, so it really is a question of thinking ahead of your time.
Some will then say that anyway it's natural, so we should not argue about it... and will argue so while wearing polyamide based clothes, browsing the web or talking on the phone with another person in another country. All of which, like marriage, highways, and writing books, are highly natural, as we all know.
Let's start being honnest for once, the very thing that makes us humans is that we spend our time trying to escape our natural state and have done so ever since we started burying our dead. So using that "natural" argument as a means of justifying something that has become far from natural is hypocritical.
And it silences the fact that we happen to be the only animal (as far as I know) that posesses a sense of morality.
So rather than allow us to do whatever, it should rather give us more responsability.
We all know the old Uncle Ben saying.
Anyway to finish this off and going back to what the parent poster was saying, how equiped are we to eat meat? Can we even eat meat with our bare bodies? Can we hack a pig to pieces with our teeth and hands? We can digest meat, it does not mean we should base our entire diet around it, the way we have. Even if yes, meat is good.
The same way it's not because we can kill all the sharks in the sea that we should. (And actually, we really should not and should try to prevent it from happening, but that is another issue, cf. the film Sharkwater for that).
But as we were saying, nature does justify what we do, the goal and the consequences of our actions do.
And saying all this, we don't even dive into factory farming and it's inherent horrors, the whole environmental issue and the resource allocation problem that is very real.
Like the fact that half of the water used everyday in the USA is for cattle, or that decreasing proteinic ratios mean that 12 kg of cereal are needed to obtain 3 l of milk -if my memory serves me well-, or to obtain 500 g or meat in the case or beef... meaning we don't even have room on the planet for the crops to feed all the cattle that would be eaten by 6 billion human beings if humanity followed an american/western diet, and that's not even counting the crops still needed to feed humans the rest of the plant based food they need anyway.
To sum it up, it's really annoying when people who give the issue little thought if any act like they know better than people who actually look into it and make informed, rational, and well-thought decisions. (not thinking about the parent poster in particular)
Vegetarianism is not dumb or for tree-huggers, it's a very logical position.
No wit here.
"Vegetarianism is not dumb or for tree-huggers, it's a very logical position."
Vegetarianism (when done for moral reasons) is hypocritical and without logic. You don't get to take the high ground on ethics by claiming that you don't kill animals when vegetarians murder TRILLIONS of the most defenseless life forms on the planet DAILY. Your complaint about the horrors of factory farming. Have you seen how they grow plants? It sure isn't free range. Claiming that eating plants is ethically OK and meat is not is like a murderer saying that his killing is OK because he only kills dumb people. No... Your shade of gray is not better than mine.
"we don't even have room on the planet for the crops to feed all the cattle that would be eaten by 6 billion human beings if humanity followed an american/western diet, and that's not even counting the crops still needed to feed humans the rest of the plant based food they need anyway."
This is a problem of over population. Period. Over population is not solved by eating plants. It is solved by having fewer babies than deaths. Period. Even if you poorly thought out idea had any validity, it would only be a temporary measure. So, either you are are not clearly thinking things out, or you are intentionally using and invalid argument. Unless, you have some plan on what you plan on eating when the population outstrips the plant production. If you do, lets hear it.
There is no ethical argument against any farmed meat. The fact is humanity would not exist had we not eventually begun eating meat. People don't just get to change what millions of years of evolution has determined is a proper human diet.