Human. It's What's For Dinner!
SPOILERS! (Click to view)
Increasingly, bioengineers are growing nerve, heart and other tissues in labs. Recently, scientists even reported developing artificial penis tissue in rabbits. Although such research is meant to help treat patients, biomedical engineer Mark Post at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and his colleagues suggest it could also help feed the rising demand for meat worldwide.
The researchers noted that growing skeletal muscle in labs -- the kind people typically think of as the meat they eat -- could help tackle a number of problems:
Avoiding animal suffering by reducing the farming and killing of livestock.
Dramatically cutting down on food-borne ailments such as mad cow disease and salmonella or germs such as swine flu, by monitoring the growth of meat in labs.
Livestock currently take up 70 percent of all agricultural land, corresponding to 30 percent of the world's land surface, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Labs would presumably require much less space.
Livestock generate 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than all of the vehicles on Earth, the FAO added. Since the animals themselves are mostly responsible for these gases, reducing livestock numbers could help alleviate global warming.
If we can't change our craving for meat, at least we could change the way we sate it. The solution could be to grow meat in labs, the way we grow therapeutic tissue from stem cells.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has just offered a $1 million prize to anyone who develops a commercially viable "in vitro chicken-meat product." The catch is that the product can't contain or entail the use of "animal-derived products, except for starter cells obtained in the initial development stages."
The idea is simple: Instead of growing a chicken embryo into a bird and cutting meat from it, you skip the bird part and grow the meat directly from the embryo.
SPOILERS! (Click to view)
If you don't believe this can be done, read up on the blood vessels, livers, bladders, and hearts we've already grown in labs. Check out this month's International In Vitro Meat Symposium. Scan the latest updates on "cultured meat" R&D.
It's no freakier or more far-fetched than what you've been hearing from politicians about stem cells and what they can do for people. Scientists aren't even allowed to try a stem-cell experiment in people till it works in animals. That's all PETA is asking for: "animal stem cells that would be placed in a medium to grow and reproduce."To put it crudely, if you can grow a hunk of flesh for transplant, you can grow it for food.
In Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's epic sci-fi satire "Transmetropolitan," supermarkets and fast food joints sell dolphin, manatee, whale, baby seal, monkey and reindeer, while the Long Pig franchise sells "cloned human meat at prices you like."
"In principle, we could harvest the meat progenitor cells from fresh human cadavers and grow meat from them," Post said. "Once taken out of its disease and animalistic, cannibalistic context -- you are not killing fellow citizens for it, they are already dead -- there is no reason why not."
Reality is changing. Eating meat and eating animals used to be the same thing. Now they're coming apart. Should we promote lab-grown meat so people can eat flesh without eating animals? Or is PETA's promotion of meat the final surrender to a mentality of predation?
When I first heard of lab meat two years ago, a friend cracked, "If God wanted us to be vegetarians, then why did He make animals out of meat?" Here's the punch line: Animals were only the first incarnation of meat. Get ready for the second. 
thank you, honey.
you're so sweet.
XO