“Is meat vegetarian if it doesn’t come from an animal?” This was the ethics question gregoryP posed me this morning after coming across this article from the U. Maryland News Desk:
The idea of culturing meat is to create an edible product that tastes like cuts of beef, poultry, pork, lamb or fish and has the nutrients and texture of meat.
Scientists know that a single muscle cell from a cow or chicken can be isolated and divided into thousands of new muscle cells. Experiments with fish tissue have created small amounts of in vitro meat in NASA experiments researching potential food products for long-term space travel, where storage is a problem.
“But that was a single experiment and was geared toward a special situation – space travel,” says Matheny. “We need a different approach for large scale production.”
Matheny’s team developed ideas for two techniques that have potential for large scale meat production. One is to grow the cells in large flat sheets on thin membranes. The sheets of meat would be grown and stretched, then removed from the membranes and stacked on top of one another to increase thickness.
But why stop at growing fake chicken? If a single cell is being divided into a whole flank of tender meat, we could conceivably start growing celebrity meat. If consumers will pay $9.50 to merely see Brad Pitt at the movies, imagine how much they’ll pay to eat Brad Pitt!