Slashdot Mirror
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.
I don't really care much about Peta's talking points. I would gladly eat cheaper meat, though.
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.
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.
The whole water thing is a dumb argument environmentalists dreamed up to make us feel bad about being alive. It's not like water from a stream in Minnesota is being diverted to livestock instead of irrigating poor farmers in the Sahara.
love is just extroverted narcissism
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?
Yes, the net amount of water stays the same on Earth, but some water is more useful than others. E.g. fresh is more useful than salty, treated is more useful than not, a unit of water in the Sahara is more useful than a unit of water in Canada. When we "use" water, we often turn useful water into not useful water, or move it from a place where it's useful to a place where it's less useful.
Plus there's the issue where much of the water we "use" comes from groundwater sources, which can be completely non-renewable on any sort of human timescale.
The difference between a chicken and a turnip is one is a vertebrate animal that is capable of learned behavior, while the other is a vegetable. You can't raise and dispatch a turnip inhumanely, because it is incapable of consciousness and feeling, a quality that is shared between humans and prey animals. Of course, for the approximately %1 of the human population who are psychopathic and incapable of experiencing empathy, this is not likely a concern. However some people choose to source meat where the animal was both raised humanely and dispatched instantly without pain or suffering, or forego eating it entirely since there cannot be a guarantee how the food was produced.
If there is an acceptable substitute to natural meat then there could be no chance that any animal was treated inhumanely or suffered in its production. Some would value having that choice.