MEAT ISN’T MURDER

It’s been about a year since we heard about the efforts of scientists to grow edible meat in a lab. At that point one researcher told The Guardian newspaper that “right now it would be possible to produce something like spam at an incredibly high cost.” Well, progress can’t be stopped, and the latest news claims that lab-grown meat that smells and tastes like ground chuck will be available at your supermarket in just a few years. While the technology already exists to grow the meat in small batches, the problem is that large-scale manufacturing would cost between $1000 and $10,000 to produce a single pound of meat. However, researchers believe this price will come down to $1 per pound by 2009 at the current rate of research and development. Along with the ethical benefits of no longer having to torture and slaughter millions of animals, proponents of lab-grown meat claim that the “food” can be genetically altered to be far healthier than animal flesh. Sadly, the technology to create an animal-free steak is still at least a decade away, but scientists hope that the existing technology will satisfy the world’s demand for ground meat, which is about half of all the the meat eaten worldwide, and a $127 billion global market. (Wired.com)