Slashdot Asks: Would You Eat Lab-Grown Meat? (dmarge.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via WIRED: Lab-grown meat appears to be coming to a supermarket near you whether you like it or not. Granted, you have some time before that becomes a reality. Scientists in Belgium and the United States are working on cultured meat substitutes that taste like real meat and cost less than real meat, but don't use as many environmental resources as meat from animals, nor does it involve the slaughtering of animals. They predict such meat substitutes will cost a lot less by the year 2020 when the efficiency of bulk production kicks in. According to a 2014 Pew poll, only 20 percent of Americans would be willing to try cultured meat, while a 2013 survey in Belgium revealed that just 13 percent of 180 subjects knew what cultured meat was. Also, vegetarians surveyed perceived man-made meat to be unhealthy and unfavorable. However, once respondents were told how the meat is grown, most said they might try it. When educated about the environmental benefits, the number of people who were willing to try it nearly doubled. A poll from The Vegan Scholar found that lab-grown meat was much more appealing to vegetarians than to vegans. Similar Reddit and SurveyMonkey polls have come to similar conclusions, but it's important to note that none of these polls were peer-reviewed. Researchers have suggested that the media greatly overestimates the importance of vegetarian and vegan opinions on lab-grown meat. Given the lack of large surveys determining the public's opinion on lab-grown meat, we thought we would pose the question to Slashdotters: Would you eat lab-grown meat?

Comments

Heck yes,

[Zelig]

Cheaper, more energy efficient, and before long superior in taste and tone. Slam dunk.

I can just imagine cutting a slice off a 1'x2' meat beam; cover THE ENTIRE GRILL with a fillet. Yums, yums.

Re:Heck yes,

[TooManyNames]

Why is that? Are there no grades of meat in your world?

If you set out to surpass the best quality meat available, then maybe you might have a point, but, assuming you can observe and economically reproduce what makes that meat so great, why wouldn't you be able to approach it's quality with cultured meat? At some point, given production efficiencies that would be introduced, cultured meat that closely approximates very high quality meat would be cheaper than low quality meat that's used today. At that point, you'd be comparing crappy real meat against exceptional cultured meat, so, yeah, you'd have something that, at a given price, is superior in taste and tone.

Re:Cheaper ???

[Intron]

What would your laptop with 4GB memory have cost 20 years ago?

I don't see what the big deal is.

[PJ6]

People eat McDonald's. They eat that, they'll eat anything.