Sunday, November 29, 2009

Artificial Meat

I'm very skeptical that this would be an economic proposition any time soon. You'd think it would be a lot easier to produce artificial milk - engineer some micro-organisms to secrete cow milk. Instead we still go to the trouble of raising cows, milking them, and transporting the perishable product to market. I'd like this to be true - it has big environmental and possibly ethical advantages.

4 comments:

  1. It's interesting, because the technology isn't difficult as I understand it - but resources haven't been put into flavor/texture/scaling up because it creeps people out. Not one student in my sustainabiity course would be willing to even try lab meat, despite no vegetarians and much professed dismay about the environmental consequences of modern meat production (I would eat it in a flash, myself, love the idea).

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  2. I might eat it in preference to eating animals (I don't eat mammals). My point is that lots of things are technically possible or might be technically possible, the question is whether they make economic sense - e.g. ethanol as land transport fuel (hydrogen too), fusion power, solar arrays in space etc.

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