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What If You Could Eat Chicken Without Killing a Chicken? (theoutline.com)
From a report on The Outline: San Francisco-based startup Memphis Meats announced this week that it had grown chicken in a lab -- chicken strips, to be precise. The strips, which were grown using self-reproducing cells, are technically "meat," but because the cells were not from an animal, the process by which this "meat" was "raised" is much cleaner, resulting in animal food that has the potential to sate both environmental groups as well as animal rights activists and vegetarians. Memphis Meats says it's hoping the product is ready for commercial sale by 2021. The company is part of an ever-increasing horde of Silicon Valley startups trying to solve the complicated problems of the meat industry, which range from cultural ideas about food to industrial and environmental issues to, increasingly, discussions about animal cruelty. [...] About 99 percent of animals raised for slaughter in the U.S. come from factory farms, and about a third of the land mass of the Earth is used in raising livestock. More so than chicken, livestock is incredibly inefficient to raise: It takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce just a pound of beef.
There's still no chicken in chicken nuggets.
...can they cross the road?
Table-ized A.I.
"about a third of the land mass of the Earth is used in raising livestock"
I don't really care much about Peta's talking points. I would gladly eat cheaper meat, though.
And watch it scream as you tear it off and cook it? Yeah, I'm down for that!!!
Mmm, mmm tastes like Chicken!
While technically chicken muscle cells, the texture of the meat comes from being attached to a skeleton. Once the texture of the muscle striations is solved, then it can be a proper replacement.
Just go to Subway!
Not many wild chickens in the world. If we could make artificial chicken meat, and I'd be all for eating it since it seems less cruel to me, then people would stop breeding chickens for food.
Chicken isn't the most perfect example for this because we also eat eggs. Apply that logic to pigs though - yep, much more of a problem.
If we are not supposed to eat animals then why are they made of meat?
and then go kill a chicken because i hate them and they're really dumb and eat my garden.
I think I'll pass unless it's economically feasible. Get there and we'll see how it tastes.
Chickity China the Chinese chicken
You have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin'
Chicken evisceration is highly automated and efficient.
I think lab meat would have a hard time being marketed except to a select amount of people for a very long time. A large portion of people are against GMO food, regardless of it's benefit to the environment or society, regardless of the lack of scientific proof to negative claims. People will gladly, ignorantly, eat things that are "natural" even though they've been bred and scientifically modified over hundreds of years to be something that shouldn't exist naturally on earth. That's pretty much everything in the produce department. Put a labcoat on and make something though, and then you've become some mad scientist bent on ruining the world with your hubris. insert mad scientist laugh here.
meat is really just a collection cells, nutrients and water. Whether they are assembled in a womb or in a machine, if it tastes the same, has the same texture, and can be cooked the same way, then so what?
I feel this question is asked by someone whose parents never tricked their kids into eating something by saying it was something else or didn't contain an ingredient that the child irrationally doesn't like.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... - The SV progressive should probably switch to tea as their go-to psychoactive drug, it will save the earth.
In the same idea, mentioning beef water use to make a point about chicken probably falls in the logical fallacy realm... Not to mention their 2,500 gallon is about 30% higher than HuffPo's number (1.800), so that's probably also probably an overly inflated number.
Seriously, the price is what will hold back to fake meat. Because I kind of doubt they will be able to compete against actual meat price wise.
KFC to switch to this!
and no the saveings will not be passed to you.
The yum! Brands ceo needs a new boat!
Looks like Clarke is predicting the future again.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Take a truck load of chicken, get them to the pet doctor, and have him/her amputate all of the legs. No chicken killed, and a nice big bucket of fresh chicken drumsticks.
Plus, you can let the chicken "run" freely, without any inhuman chicken wire.
On one hand i support doing things efficiently and protecting the environment, on the other hand animal rights activists tend to piss me off so every time i ate one of these murder free chickens i would go out and have to kill some kind of wild life, most likely a rabbit but failing that i'd settle for stray cats or homeless people
Call me old fashioned.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
It takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce just a pound of beef.
Water that is released by the animal into the environment, and flows back into the ocean. Where sunlight evaporates the water, they form into clouds and it rains down again.
Main concerns are if you try to raise beef in the desert and have to divert rivers in order to support your operation. Or if you are emptying natural aquifers faster than they are replenished. But in many areas of the midwest and south there is sufficient surface water to operate a farm, and coming up with the 36 - 40 gallons of water per head you need is not such a big deal.
An olympic sized swimming pool has enough water to supply 200 head of cattle for 3 months. That can cover you for summer, and you need significantly less water per head for the rest of the year.
According to Betteridge's law of headlines, the answer is no.
A large portion of people are against GMO food
A tiny handful of people are against GMO food, they are just exceedingly loud and annoying.
Do you think anyone eating at McDonalds or Burger King gives a rats ass (ironically one of the many ingredients they are probably consuming) about GMO? Those are some of the largest food joints on earth...
Most people do not care that much about GMO, nor conditions in which animals are treated. Most people want food and don't really care who or what had to die or suffer to obtain it, so long as it is readily at hand. As long as the lab meat does not taste disgusting and chewing it is similar, I think it will be accepted.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can't wait for the day in which it will be possible to buy meat surrogate, for all meats, at a reasonable price, and with a reasonable similarity to the real thing in texture, flavor, smell and taste.
I'm a white male heterosexual. However, I often want to suck a nice fat cock. But I can't because women don't have penises! BUT - what if scientists could make a woman with a penis? Then I could suck her off (and maybe she could even fuck me in the ass a little bit). And the best part is -- it would not be gay or anything.
"livestock is incredibly inefficient to raise: It takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce just a pound of beef.".
Perhaps. Perhaps not. What is one of, if not the key ingredient in fertilizer for sustainable organic farming(aka where you get your non mutant vegetables from)? I give you...shit. What comes from all that inefficient livestock? Shit... So even if we weren't eating the meat directly for food, we'd still need it to till into the soil to be able to farm more efficiently.
I'm actually working on getting to the point of raising my own chickens for eggs and meat, along with rabbits, ducks (more and better eggs) and goats (milk and meat)
without killing my wife
Just like any competitive industry, new problems will arise. In the race to produce the product more and more cheaply, companies will find ways to avoid buying costly materials to produce the new food, and instead find ways to use shit to produce it. And I won't be surprised if they literally do use shit as a protein source. And then we'll discover all kinds of new contamination possibilities, as well.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do this. I'm just saying it'll need to have careful oversight (FDA, etc.) to avoid these issues.
What if you could eat pork without involving a pig? Would it be kosher? If so, that sounds like a market right there.
Goat is missing.
What in my post makes you think I'm talking about the U.S. only? In fact you find McDonalds all over the world. In fact the most vociferous anti-GMO people hail mostly from America, and the rest of the world cares FAR less about how food is obtained (Hello, Foie Gras).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Am I the only reminded of Azimov's The Martian Way? I mean the part, where an Earth's politician is explaining to electorate, how much water (used as reaction mass) it takes for a spaceship to get into space. The book's main characters observe, that most of the water so used falls right back onto the planet. But at least, in that novel some amount of water, however minuscule compared to Earth's vast oceans, does leave...
Well, in case of meat production — or indeed any other Earth-bound activity — no water is lost. Zero. Nada. So, what is the quoted statement supposed to mean?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This was an episode of the show "Better Off Ted"
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
and I do every day. A disengage eggs, a dozen chickens eaten and since they weren't born dejure, defacto I didn't kill them
This made me think of cartoon child port (not really though) and how people are convicted for watching it. If some people feel as strongly about animals getting killed as childern getting fucked, they will be against this too...
Here's some quick napkin-calculations. A gallon of water weighs a little over 8 pounds. If you consider meat is mostly water, that means a pound of meat "takes" about a pint of water out of the environment. The other 2499 7/8 gallons are returned to the environment to be evaporated, filtered by the ground, or otherwise recycled. But they're not "taken" by any sane use of that word. To use a sensational figure like 2500 gallons, it's obvious to most that it's sensationalism.
As discussed here, the water figure comes primarily from what is used to irrigate pasture, and is higher for beef because cattlemen grow pastures in drier climates than chicken or pork farmers. That is not a beef problem as much as it is a land-use problem. If we kicked the cattlemen out of California, that pastureland would become something else, like an orchard, and then we'd have an apple problem instead of a beef problem.
This is market forces at work. It just shows that our demand for beef is high enough that it pays for a cattleman to grow pastures on arid land. The only other place you hear of irrigation at that extreme is in the UAE, since that's the only type of land they have. Make irrigation more expensive, those costs will just be passed on in the price of meat, fewer people will want to pay the higher prices, and the most expensive operations will pivot to something else. Chances are that land would not be returned to its natural, arid state, though, so you've still got a water-use problem, plus higher beef prices.
Economics, Bruh!
With regular meat, the animal's growth is controlled by hormones, so I'm wondering if the lab meat is grown using various added hormones to force the growth. I know one of the reasons some people prefer organic meat is because they know it doesn't have added hormones. What are the health impacts of eating whatever added stuff they have to use to make the lab meat grow?
With all the shortcuts the food industry has taken, if they get this lab meat to be cheaper than real meat, it will be a long time before people are convinced it's healthy meat.
Absolutely, assuming it's roughly on par with real meat in terms of cost and quality.
It's really kind of crazy that we grow all this food to feed a whole animal, when we only want part of the animal. Plus there's the whole ethical question; I tend to not get too hung up about it, but given the choice between meat where an animal was raised in a feedlot and killed vs meat that was grown, I'll choose the latter.
Realistically, I imagine it will be a little while before they can adequately replace a t-bone steak, but I can't seeing it being too hard to replace the meat in any processed or semi-processed meat product. So we'll probably be eating this as chicken fingers first, then as ground beef. Maybe someday they'll figure out how to fully replicate all meats. Then it could conceivably be better than a natural t-bone steak. Perfectly marbled meat with no gristle? Yes please!
I suspect by the time mechanically recovered meat has been processed, decontaminated, reconstituted, shaped, and cooked, there may be little difference. But by then even chicken doesn't quite taste like chicken anymore.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Not 2500 gallons of water for a pound of beef ... only 1799 !!
http://gracelinks.org/blog/785...
Their purpose in life is to reproduce and get eaten. In nature, that is exactly what happens to them. I really see no problem with doing it to them in industrial production. Of course, I do hope not to get reincarnated as a chicken next time, but we will see.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Not really sure how this matters. How much is taken up growing crops? How much is taken up by roads, buildings, etc?
That's like saying my garage takes up X% of my slab. Ya? And?
The idea that humans need to be this fly on the wall, not interacting with the environment to "save" it is ridiculous.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I prefer animals to be dead when I eat them. I don't much fancy the idea of passing a live chicken either, sounds painful.
does that make YOU chicken?
If I want to eat meat, something has to die for me to do so. I accept that. If I want to not kill an animal I can opt for meat-free options, something I do from time to time. Growing some kind of replacement in a lab strikes me as disgusting.
It's sure to please vegetarians who don't eat meat for fashion. There are plenty who don't eat meat for religious reasons and others that don't like the taste or texture of meat.
They need to be working on real problems like how to make chickens taste like bacon!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
and likely far worse for me than eating real chicken. This smacks of control in the end by the people who would "hack" the chicken, beef, fish, whatever. What happens if they get the formula wrong one day? What happens if their formula is hacked?
This is franken food. This is no better than Star Trek computers making food on command, it just takes longer.
Mr. Data: "Computer! Feline supplement number twenty-seven."
"About 99 percent of animals raised for slaughter in the U.S. come from factory farms, and about a third of the land mass of the Earth is used in raising livestock."
Surprised this isn't being discussed more.
Also surprised I'm not seeing a prevalence of 'well, I eat free-range/organic' remarks. Considering that free-range/organic requires MUCH MORE space, where are we going to keep these animals? Let's assume the space for free-range/organic is just a factor of 10 more...we're already using 1/3rd of the land in the US for the existing, efficiently-raised factory-farmed animals. If they need 10x more space, where will that be? The moon isn't even big enough for all the land that'd be required.
I need to taste the despair of a giant factory farm chicken.
Muscle grown in a lab will never have the same texture and flavor of meat from a live animal. Why? Because it has not been used in motion. It has not been subjected to the natural creation and destruction cycles of living cells. It'll be bland and fibrous, worse than white meat. Gross!
As for the amount of water used in raising livestock, it's not like the water is destroyed. It's used to sustain living creatures bred to feed the world's population, then recycled. Either by man or by nature. It's called the water cycle, dimwits!
Now, if you're genuinely concerned about the availability of FRESH water, perhaps you should get on board with Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, which can produce electricity, desalinate sea water, and provide the power to pump the resulting fresh water anywhere it's needed. All with a tiny fraction of the waste created by any other power source, and no carbon emissions. ...that and we should probably stop using fresh water to carry away OUR waste. Seems kinda stupid to me that we do all that work to make water suitable for drinking, just to mix it with pee and poop and call it sewage... to do more work to clean up. Composting would be more useful. Put nutrients back into the soil and all. How about calculating how much water is wasted from THAT process per pound?
Chicken Little by Frederick Pohl.
nothing more needs to be said.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
enough animals have died in the process.
We get "factory-chemical process created" chicken and then I would worry about the chemicals and the quality.
Okay... let me think...
Humanity recklessly mucks up God's creation, despite being clearly told that we were to be its caretakers, and the increasingly fervent warnings about the consequences of our actions from basically all of our greatest thinkers that have seriously considered the issue.
The planet, as we were warned, transitions to something Humanity has never seen before, killing most or all of our species in the process.
God Wins. Maybe the next caretakers He creates will do a better job...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
barbecue Spam done on a grill is a highly effective sodium delivery mechanism.
Don't forget the pineapple.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You can... but why?
when's the last time you had a hotdog?
Would you notice the difference?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Vegetarians want to exterminate all animal life.
That might sound contrary but consider this:
If we all end up eating vegetables and factory grown meat tissue then we don't need actual real animals anymore.
So, no more farms, no more game reserves, nobody taking care of actual animals.
The cow, the chicken, the pig, etc will become as endangered a species as the elephant and the jaguar.
Eventually extinct.
A curse on vegetarians and animal rights weirdos I say. They have a philosophy of death.
Tastes like, not chicken.
The 2,500 gallons of water is for cattle beef. Bison beef tends to use much less. One ounce of beef uses about 20 times the resources that chicken or fish does.
The real comparison would be to the resources used for chicken or for fish. There is some debate over the impacts of farm raised livestock in comparison to wild livestock, in terms of net ecological and economic inputs, however. A well designed system uses other things to remove waste products - for example, in fish farms, increased amounts of bivalves and seaweeds can remove a lot of waste and also produce useable protein or food sources, and reduces the amount the fish need to be fed. Chicken fed natural bugs with certain plants can also reduce their toxic effluent.
Personally, I tend to buy organic and wild fish and chicken, but there are reasonable arguments that we all should really eat bugs or at least roasted bug larvae.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Humanity grows in size, so we use more land to grow food.
At the end of the day, it comes down to "Can we grow food on this land," regardless of the land's "natual" state.
After that, it's a matter of "how can we profit the most by growing food on this piece of land." -- whether the profit is 'mankind's' overall profit, or just the landowner's pocketbook.
I've seen a number of "shock" billboards lately about the amount of water required to grow, say, a single egg... yet the billboard commits the sin of omission of not stating the staggering amount of water used to grow oats, for example.
It's not that oats are less water efficient than eggs, but that 50 gallons of water needed to grow a single egg is less worrying when you compare it to the amount of water needed to produce a bowl of oatmeal.
While the average consumer doesn't know exactly how many gallons of water it makes to grow a tomato, a hell of a lot of us grow gardens, and dump several thousand gallons of water into the garden each year -- and know that a tomato or carrot is far from "cheap" in terms of water required.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
to raise one walnut and about a gallon to make a almond. Should we stop growing nut trees?
Less environmental damage done by your pizza toppings. Safer pizza toppings for you. Cheaper pizza toppings for you. More variety of pizza toppings for you. Less killing for your your pizza toppings. More land available to grow pizza toppings.
Eventually.
Right now, IVM is about at the stage the integrated circuit was in circa 1958. So nothing to worry about; but still, interesting.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Um...
Pretty sure that means we can keep going like that, and not only that, but the system encourages it. Particularly the crew the just got installed in FuckThePlanet.exe
That glass sure looks half-empty to me.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It tastes like chicken.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
A properly seasoned cooked steak is the food of the gods. I don't care if it took 10,000 gallons of water to get it to my plate. And my gout be damned!!
So if the chicken, in the lab, never eats anything, then explain to me exactly what nutrients I'm getting when I eat your tasty cellular sponge? Today, I select my chicken based on what it ate. Grain or corn, peas or carrots.
And it "takes" gallons of water to produce a pound of beef? What, cows don't piss any of it back? Water cycles. It isn't "taken".
Actually, I'll correct that statement. Water is indeed "taken" when the laboratory uses it, and taints it with biochemicals that don't get consumed by nature.
So, enjoy your lab that destroys water, oh, and land, to produce sponges that taste good but have zero nutritional value. You got half-way there with your factory-farms -- along with your diabetes, mad cows, tainted everything, bland, boring, tastless meat -- enjoy the rest of the ride.
I'll be over here, talking to my local farmers, and eating animals that I can certify myself.
Feral hogs are a major problem all across the south. They won't die out just because people stop breeding them.
What If You Could Eat Chicken Without Killing a Chicken?
I can: in very very small bites, very slowly. The parts just grow back by themselves!
Yes. And: They can also farm vertically, and not just with chicken.
A square block of farm with 50 levels will significantly outproduce a square block of farm with one level. It can also protect the product from weather, disease, accidents and predators whereas that's a little tough to do with animals roaming about.
Etc.
As I said above, IVM tech is presently about where integrated circuits were in 1958. The fact that's it's expensive at this point isn't really relevant at all. Anyone who suggests it is hasn't thought the matter through. Possibly because they aren't capable of it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
See:
o Haldane’s Possible Worlds and Other Essays (1927)
o F. Pohl / C M Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (1953)
o Winston Churchill’s Fifty Years Hence (1932)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I have no problem with the killing and eating of chickens. I do have a problem with factory farming of animals where the animal is basically tortured for x years and does not get to live a happy animal life. Right now we spend a bit extra for the promise that our eggs and meat are ethically produced. I'd like more than just a promise.
Methinks lab-grown chicken won't have salmonella or contribute to waterway "deadzones"
"Save a chicken! Eat a pizza."
Had a drawing of a chicken kneeling and begging.
If not, then no.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
>> It takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce just a pound of beef.
So what? Water is an effectively infinite global resource and it isn't ever actually consumed (i.e. lost). It all ultimately passes through the cow/human back into the environment where it evaporates then falls as rain.
Wait? Is there someone wrong with killing a chicken? They are bred and exist to be eaten. It's equivalent to pulling a turnip out of the ground. Things die, we live.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I must be getting old..
Scum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America.
-- Frederik Pohl 1952.
Once ethical chicken meat can be grown for cheaper than the cost of raising a chicken, that's it for chickens in the first-world.
Would I eat it? No.
While this answers a lot of the animal cruelty questions, and many of the sustainability questions, it can't deal with the health questions. Meat is still bad for you, no matter the source. Research funded by independent (that is, not the meat industry) research has been showing this for decades. Just about every study reinforces this general premise in yet more specific ways.
Meat is the new tobacco. The meat industry is following the tobacco industry playbook, play by play. Either you learn from history (we don't seem to ever do that) or you repeat it (which is what nearly all of you are doing right now with meat). But the choice is always yours to make. Choose wisely.
I should note that my cardiologist is also a vegan (which was actually a surprise to me). As are many of his fellow cardiologists here in pork-happy NC (second only to Iowa in number of hogs). Just like tobacco, those who studied it were the first to quit. And the truth slowly made its way from the tobacco researchers to the practicing physicians, to their staffs, to their patients, to the patients' families. Notice that smoking is still with us -- this is a slow process. But do any of your doctors smoke? Even one? Why do you think that is?
Meat is going to make tobacco look easy. Meat is now and is going to continue to be a public health challenge. More than 95% of the population still eats meat - a slightly higher percentage of the population than drinks alcohol. But this is a smaller percentage than a decade ago. And that was less than two decades ago. The trend lines are there. The science is there. But most people don't want to hear the truth as it means that they personally have to change. People hate that. But the truth is the truth. Do with it what you will.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Subway fires employee who put penis on sandwich bread and posted picture to Instagram
It takes half a million gallons of water to raise a baby to adulthood. We need to stop having babies.
Is it better to be a chicken that lives for 2 (?) years and then is slaughtered (hopefully painlessly), or to never exist?
Chicken-free chicken sandwiches. Already implemented and rolled out nationwide.
Lab-grown meat will not be "sating vegetarians". A vegetarian is not defined as someone who refuses to slaughter animals (by that definition, most meat eaters would qualify these days). It is one who does not eat meat.
Wow. You people are so stupid you must be dum0crats.
This puts the question to the animal rights reps.
Would you eat the best meat if it was right here?
What if it was free?
What if you were paid to eat it?
What if there is a chicken here and if you don't eat it we kill another chicken?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_la5XiQJdk
I cannot wait for the spin of "free range" lab meat.....
What if I enjoy choking my chicken, you insensitive clod!
Probably millions of chickens, and ducks, have been culled. Last count, I heard, about 180 people died from it China.
It is all over the world: China, Greece, France, Thailand, Germany, and the USA.
The epidemic has hit Tennessee, and maybe Alabama.
Just another reason to avoid chicken.
You should see how much water it takes to raise a fish -- literally oceans of the stuff ;)
One huge irony of all of this is if this artificial meat becomes a common thing, we will soon see the mass extinction of livestock bred for meat - pigs, cows, sheep, chickens etc.
I wonder if organizations like PETA have considered this?
On the flip side, there is a case in Australia where one man has almost single-handedly reversed the decline of crocodiles in his area by breeding them and harvesting them for meat and skins. Some he releases back into the wild, the rest he keeps on his croc farm to breed more and to be harvested.
...lution to tick a check boy on my order:
[ ] fake chicken
[ ] real chicken
On the other hand: this does not really concern me. I eat chicken roasted on a grill. It always will be "real chicken" and on other circumstances I eat: beef. Aka cows. Or sheep, I like sheep, or goat, they are tasty too, and as I'm german, I occasionally eat pork aka pig.
To understand why I switch between cow/beef and pork/pig you need to read Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott ;D
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce just a pound of beef..... We are still talking about living beings here, not some kind of dead commodity.
If people can only think like that, they can die for all i care.
I wouldn't. But my cats can now be ethical vegetarians.
I call bullshit on that 99% of US meat comes from factory farms.
I grew up in raising cattle in Texas where cattle are not raised anywhere near 99% on a commercial farm let alone a corporate ranching operation.
Cattle only enter a mass operation described as a finishing step to take calf p[ast a certain age ie weight to their slaughter weight ie condition. It varies on many factors like the animals genetics-how big can it be fed too/ How fast does it add weight in a feedlot environment/
Feed lots can be small as little as a few 100 head to massive operations like the poster mentioned as factory farms.
BUT cattle spend MUCH of their lives out grazing grass in pastures not in pens being feed grain and high doses of antibiotics.
Personally Im all for lab meat if its better for the environment AND it has no health risks
Margaret Atwood was on target long ago.
Well, then you are obviously not aware that most people are against GMO. At least in Europe.
Let me refer you to me original statement - MOST people are not. Even in Europe. It's just that the ones that are, are especially loud and obnoxious about it.
Nothing I have seen traveling around Europe leads me to believe the people there care any more than the U.S. In fact the U.S. stores I shop at have a lot more labeling saying "Non GMO" that I ever saw in European grocery stores.
But perhaps you are not well-travelled enough to know what people on multiple continents really think.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have absolutely no issue with killing animals for food, and I object to the assumption that my vegetarian diet has anything to do with a particular moral or religious stand. I am happily a vegetarian for medical reasons. Will this lab-grown meat "sate" me?
A tourist from the city passed a farmhouse and saw a pig with a wooden leg. He went to the farmer and asked him about the pig.
The farmer said, "Oh, this is a great pig! There's no pig like him anywhere! Once, when I was plowing a field, the tractor tipped over and pinned my leg to the ground. This pig saw me and went to the house to get my wife. He saved my life!
"Another time, my wife and I were asleep in the house when a fire started. This pig woke us up and got us out of the house before it burned down. He saved me again! He's a wonderful pig!"
"But you didn't tell us how he got the wooden leg," said the tourist.
"Oh," said the farmer, "a pig like that, you don't eat all at once!"
(adapted from Prairie Home Companion, this short version here: http://www.mendosa.com/pig.htm...)
2500 gallons for 1 lbs of beef?!?! This figure possess great likeness to that of male bovine excrement.
I'm from Ft Worth, TX. aka. "CowTown" I know a LITTLE BIT about the industry.
A bull here will drink around 50gal per day on the hottest day and 20gal on a cold one. Bulls are just about full size at 3 years of age and usually sent to slaughter around then (or before).
A large bull will be around 1600lbs and render half of that as beef. But lets say it's a scrawny 1000lbs for numbers sake (and this will make around 500 lbs of beef).
500 lbs of beef
35 gal water per day (on avg)
1095 days of life
35 * 1095 = 38,325 gal of water total for animals lifetime
38,325 / 500lbs = 76.65 gal per pound of beef
and this is worst case scenario: hot texas + scrawny bull
The numbers only get better in cooler climates with better bulls.
Now how in the hell did some bat-shit crazy liberal come up with the 2500 gal per pound because if there's some kind of new math I don't know about, I'd love to hear it.