SHMEAT!

For the past couple years, tissue engineering has been taken to a whole new level. It has been brought to the level of…edible. This is known as in vitro meat, or lab grown meat. It is also known to some as Shmeat, a name I particularly like. Scientists have successfully grown an edible hamburger. Okay, so not an entire burger, just a one by three centimeter chunk of muscle tissue. BUT if a burger were to be made by continuing to grow that little piece of meat, a burger would cost about $250,000.

 Now why would scientists even bother? It’s expensive. We have cows, chickens, even the shrinking population of fish. All that can be bought at the Stop and Shop down the street for less than twenty bucks. An even better question: what is the point of lab grown meat? There are many reasons besides ‘oh let’s experiment with tissue engineering since we have some money to do so!’

First off, the really bad effects harvesting meat has on the environment. In order to raise a farm animal, such as a cow, you need land. This cow needs to be fed properly to achieve the perfect scrumptious, deliciousness of meat Americans have come to love so dearly. To have an eight ounce piece of steak, you need approximately 1.6 kilograms of feed. That adds up to about 18 years of growing corn. Plus the land needed just for the animals themselves. That’s a ton of farmland just for a package of meat.

Next we have water. Still looking at this eight ounce steak, it takes 3,515 liters of water to produce this meat. That’s five years’ worth of water for a single human being. WHAT? That is far more than I had expected. With the amount of fresh water decreasing, this is a bit of a statistic against the wonderful world of meat.  Then the amount of greenhouse gases released to produce regular meat is equal to the amount of released when driving 25 kilometers.

Not what in vitro meat actually looks like

In vitro meat (terrible name, they need a better one when the product makes it to the market) has many pros when it comes to the environmentally and animal rights conscious. In vitro meat would not require feed, and needs only lab space and storage. There you decrease the amount of farmland needed greatly. You definitely save on the water bill as well. What is really interesting about in vitro meat is that you get to eat an animal without harming one. I know some vegetarian friends who love bacon, but love the living piglets more. Lab grown bacon? Not a problem, and not one little piggy shall be harmed for you juicy bacon.

This then blows up into the whole argument over natural versus artificial. I think it is pretty cool that science has come the way it has. However, I think I’d rather just cut off on the meat than eat something from a test tube. There’s the alternative for people who prefer slaughter on animals: vegetarianism or just eat less meat (which is not all that hard). But meat eating is going to become a real problem with the growing population. All our land is being consumed to harvest a product that we really don’t need to eat as much of as we do. The demand for meat will only increase as developing countries become developed. Shmeat will not be in stores for a while yet, but it looks to be a very plausible part in our future.