Meat eating ethical?

[Confused Ape]

Unless killing and eating animals is outlawed and strictly enforced this debate will never end. The creation of artificial meats will not stop traditional meat consumption.

I will choose traditional meat over laboratory meat unless a radical difference in price swayed me.

Mass production of in-vitro meat is unlikely to happen in our lifetimes but it's being developed for practical reasons. Vertical farming for crops is also being researched.

Special report: 'In vitro' beef - it's the meat of the future

Stem cells taken from just one animal could, in theory, be used to make a million times more meat than could be butchered from a single beef carcass. The reduction in the need for land, water and feed, as well as the decrease in greenhouse gases and other environmental pollutants, would change the environmental footprint of meat eating.

"Eventually, my vision is that you have a limited herd of donor animals which you keep in stock in the world. You basically kill animals and take all the stem cells from them, so you would still need animals for this technology," Professor Post said.

There would be no need to keep these herds in factory farms because the technology wouldn't require billions of food animals and birds. Conventional meat would still be available because they'd have to do something with the rest of the carcasses but it would probably be a very expensive luxury food.

"Right now, we are using 70 per cent of all our agricultural capacity to grow meat through livestock. You are going to need alternatives. If we don't do anything, meat will become a luxury food and will become very expensive," he said.

Carnivorism is a huge global industry, producing some 228 million tonnes of meat each year – the retail value of beef in the United States alone is $74bn (£50bn). By 2050, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world will be eating twice as much meat as we eat now, primarily driven by the increased demand from a growing middle class in China and other developing nations.

Each Briton, on average, eats about 85kg of meat a year, which roughly translates into 33 chickens, one pig, three-quarters of a sheep and a fifth of a cow. This kind of appetite accounts for why some 30 per cent of ice-free land in the world is used for growing food for animal livestock while just 4 per cent is used for crops destined for human consumption.

Would people eat it? Humans eat all kinds of things and, in some parts of the world, they'd be able to carry on eating local delicacies - eg. fried tarantulas in Cambodia and termites in Africa.

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Product Description
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