the conundrum

Here are two recent pieces from The Guardian and The New Yorker, respectively.


When meat is not murder

Would you eat steak if it had been grown in a petri dish?

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Saturday August 13, 2005
The Guardian

It is the ultimate conundrum for vegetarians who think that meat is murder: a revolution in processed food that will see fresh meat grown from animal cells without a single cow, sheep or pig being killed.

Researchers have published details in a biotechnology journal describing a new technique which they hailed as the answer to the world's food shortage. Lumps of meat would be cultured in laboratory vats rather than carved from livestock reared on a farm. Scientists have adapted the cutting-edge medical technique of tissue engineering, where individual cells are multiplied into whole tissues, and applied them to food production. "With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world's annual meat supply," said Jason Matheny, an agricultural scientist at the University of Maryland.

According to researchers, meat grown in laboratories would be more environmentally friendly and could be tailored to be healthier than farm-reared meat by controlling its nutrient content and screening it for food-borne diseases.

Vegetarians might also be tempted because the cells needed to grow chunks of meat can be taken without harming the donor animal.

Experiments for Nasa, the US space agency, have already shown that morsels of edible fish can be grown in petri dishes, though no one has yet eaten the food.

Mr Matheny and his colleagues have taken the prospect of "cultured meat" a step further by working out how to produce it on an industrial scale. They envisage muscle cells growing on huge sheets that would be regularly stretched to exercise the cells as they grow. Once enough cells had grown, they would be scraped off and shaped into processed meat products such as chicken nuggets.

"If you didn't stretch them, you would be eating mush," said Mr Matheny.

The idea of doing away with traditional livestock and growing steaks from scratch dates back at least 70 years. In a horizon-scanning essay from 1932, Winston Churchill said: "Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."

Several decades too late, Churchill's vision finally looks set to become a reality.

Lab-raised steaks will be off the menu for some time though. Scientists believe that while tissue engineering is advanced enough to grow bland, homogeneous meat, tasty and textured cuts will have to wait.

"Right now, it would be possible to produce something like spam at an incredibly high cost, but the know-how to grow something that has structure, such as a steak, is a long way off," said Mr Matheny.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------


From Adam Gopnik’s essay “Two Cooks” about Fergus Henderson’s new restaurant St. John, in London. (08-22 issue).



"....his larger subject is a humane, mindful approach to cooking and eating, one that reconnects what we have on our plates to the actual lives of the plants and animals we eat. By eating what he calls “pink-in-plastic”—packaged supermarket meat—we cut ourselves off from the reality of what we’re eating; by “embracing your carcass,” to use his strange and lovely phrase, we are embracing our own animality and the real existence of our food. If we’re going to slaughter beasts, then we should eat beasts as beasts, head to toe, rather than turning them into neatly packaged filets, treating them as objectified consumer commodities".