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Scientists Work To Grow Meat In a Lab
codeman07 writes "In a small laboratory on an upper floor of the basic science building at the Medical University of South Carolina, Vladimir Mironov, M.D., Ph.D., has been working for a decade to grow meat. A developmental biologist and tissue engineer, Dr. Mironov, 56, is one of only a few scientists worldwide involved in bioengineering 'cultured' meat. It's a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available for growing meat the old-fashioned way... on the hoof. Growth of 'in-vitro' or cultured meat is also underway in the Netherlands, Mironov told Reuters in an interview, but in the United States, it is science in search of funding and demand."
Nice to see that Mironov is still getting some attention, but this story is at least five years old. I wrote a feature story about lab-grown meat almost six years ago for the Village Voice, which goes into much more detail than the Reuters piece: http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-07-26/art/brave-new-hamburger/
Arthur C Clarke, The Food of the Gods
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
I'm going to slice it differently. And I'm even a mostly-vegetarian.
The reason that humans have been domesticating animals for food for millenia has a lot to do with animals being able to take advantage of food sources that humans couldn't or wouldn't eat. For instance, pigs were raised in large part on table scraps. Cattle, sheep, and goats were raised on grasses, typically in places where growing plants wasn't viable. Chickens and ducks were expected to forage quite a bit. All this made perfect sense, and can increase overall food supply.
What doesn't make sense (in terms of increasing the food supply) is using perfectly good arable land to grow feed corn that humans really don't want to eat, then turn around and feed that corn to animals who aren't built to eat corn, and then pump those animals full of drugs to ensure that they don't get sick eating the corn that they aren't really supposed to be eating. From a purely engineering standpoint, feedlot beef is probably the least efficient food on the planet, and the only reason that it's economically viable at all is because of artificially low prices for feed corn created by a combination of US government policy and massive overproduction.
I am officially gone from