Imagine:
“Its Tuesday morning, you crawl out of bed, shower and dress. Today is a good day. Just yesterday you received that promotion at work putting you in charge of the whole north wing! After quickly showering and dressing, you head to work with a smile and a cup of coffee.
You pull into your assigned parking space and walk into the building and head for your office. You wave to Jon and Cliff as you pass, they grin and wave then turn back to their sheets of meat they had just been exercising. Ah…you love your job. You grow sheets of homegrown meat. Goodbye to the days of yesterday when Butchers were kings! HELLO to today, the wonderful world of Cultured Meat!”
WTF?! Yeah, you read that right. Cultured meat. I read an article on Gizmag about this very thing. NASA started it all with experiments showing that with a single cell, small amounts of meat can be cultured for human consumption. Now if that doesn’t sound appetizing, I don’t know what is. This idea is picking up some steam and being taken semi-seriously in the fake-meat-market (check out this organization: New Harvest). NASA began with small amounts of meat, but imagine this being mass-produced! Huge meat shops where processed meats are grown on a sheet opposed to harvested from live animals. Despite all the weirdness of this, there may be some “benefits.” The meat could be altered in a way to provide healthier doses of nutrients with each slice of bacon; the growth of this meat may be more cost effective than growing/killing livestock; etc.
One of the biggest hurdles…getting the meat texture right. Humans are big suckers for wanting their steak to feel like steak rather than having the texture of oatmeal or tofu chunks. But just because we can grow it, doesn’t mean the meat won’t have to exercise. That’s how they plan on getting a chicken leg to feel like a chicken leg…exercise it. At least you’ll be able to bite into a cultured burger knowing that it wasn’t a couch potato.
(other references: MSNBC.com and FoodProductionDaily)
(photo courtesy of Univ. of Maryland)