Fire up the carbon-neutral barbecue.
I'm all for what the skeptical are calling ''Franken-meat.'' PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is putting a million dollars where our mouths are: a big honking check to whoever can create marketable, affordable, realistic-tasting lab-grown chicken parts by the next presidential election year, 2012 -- a date which, like the warning on your rear-view mirror, is closer than it appears.
A million bucks -- a dollar, says PETA, for the number of chickens killed every hour in this country. If it's a gimmick, it's an engaging one, and ultimately both plausible and profitable.
Baby pork back ribs without killing a piglet ... veal that doesn't slaughter a calf ... chicken wings that you can grow without needing an entire [dead] chicken. Lab-cloned, made-to-order meat. Test-tube foie gras means Arnold Schwarzenegger could make the high-priced spread legal in California again. Cloned lamb chops mean not cloning a whole Dolly, just her baby gams.
As a vegetarian, I think cruelty-free, in vitro meat is a swell idea. Beyond the billions of domesticated animals not getting killed, wild species now on the verge of extinction because they're on the menu might still be saved -- and in Africa, that includes our closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees.
And you -- even if you don't give a hang about the multiple billions of blameless creatures slaughtered every year to feed our species, perhaps you do give a hang about how much, or how little, time our species might have left on the planet. Livestock raised for human food reportedly accounting for nearly 20% of greenhouses gases -- and I'm not sure that that includes the destruction of natural forests and grasslands to grow animal feed. That little enterprise also releases tons and tons of greenhouse gases, and wheat acreage and cornfields are many factors less effective at cleaning up carbon dioxide than trees and natural grasslands.
Anyway, on-the-hoof meat is a pretty inefficient means of delivering protein. You'd have to run your shower for at least three hours nonstop to equal the amount of water it takes to grow a single pound of beef. And as my columnist colleague Paul Krugman points out, it takes 700 calories' worth of animal feed to produce a 100-calorie piece of beef.
Fewer cattle, pigs, chickens -- fewer greenhouse gases, more available water, more forest, more open space, more available land. I like that recipe. By 2013, restaurants could be bragging about serving cloned chops and filet.
And McDonald's can change all those signs to read, ``Billions SAVED.''
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And what's to prevent this from working for other food groups-same rules as above.
Kinda shocking that humans would be totally removed from how their food is produced.
Sounds kinda creepy-one only need to see Soylent Green and read Robert Silverberg's The World Inside to see what might happen.
On the other, there's all the protesting against genetically modified stuff.
There's a serious meme clash here. Should be fun to watch.
We can take the excess people we've axed and we can make meat out of them. We make it up into little green cubes and call it "soylent green" (that way the rest eating it will think they're eating veggie burgers instead of people). Lots and lots of protein and no animals get injured.
I can't, however, argue with the sustainability issues raised by the continuing consumption of animal protein. I think I'd rather see more and better choices of fruit, grain, and vegetable offerings than some cloned lamb chops. Creepy!
Sorry I am a carnivore through and through. I think the PETA folks are not playing with a full deck. But the more important danger of PETA is they are yet another entity that wants to limit my freedom and control what I do......do me a favor....everyone just leave me the fu*&^%$# alone! I will eat what I want, when I want.
Please take the time to at least read one paragraph before making any comments concerning Al Franken. This is about synthetic/grown food called franken meat. Sheesh...
BUT a million bucks is (if you'll pardon the phrase) Chicken Feed.
Make it one hundred million and watch the research go into triple overtime. Besides that hundred million will be paid back a thousand fold, nay a MILLION FOLD in saved environmental concerns, no more killing of animals, and of course huge profits worldwide.
I read about that proposal a little while ago and funny thing is, not a week earlier I had been talking to a friend about that same idea.
Same with De-salinination of ocean water. No reason to not be putting up those plants up and down the coast....Now we just need to know what to do with all the salt since it cannot be put back into the ocean.
Lets tell the elite that salt is the new GOLD and they'll start buying it up by the ton.
Sign me up for artificially-grown meat, too. I'd be happy to eat beef that didn't result in a dead cow. Better for the cow; better for the environment. Of course, there are other products that come from animals, so it's not likely that we'd stop raising and killing them entirely. There would still be meat-on-the-hoof/ wing for people who get squicked about meat from a laboratory.