By 2009 you may be able to buy meat created from stem cells in a lab at your local supermarket. The lab-grown meat is part of a worldwide research effort geared to transform meat grown from cell cultures -- once reserved for experiments -- to a mass-market, industrial scale.
Using this model, a single cell could theoretically grow enough meat to feed everyone in the world for a year. According to some, the best way to grow so much meat would be in "meat sheets," layers of animal muscle and fat cells stretched out into sheets over edible or removable material.
Depending on need, the meat could then be ground or rolled, for a thicker cut.
Meat for $1,000 a Pound?
Although artificial meat eliminates the need for slaughterhouses and factory farms, and could technically create healthier, fortified meats, the nutrient solutions now used to grow such meat are expensive, yielding meat at about $1,000 to $10,000 a pound.
Researchers believe using plants and fungal sources for nutrients could eventually reduce costs to about $1 pound, but there is still the issue of how to "exercise" the meat, a necessity to produce a product like the real thing.
Already, Dutch researchers are working on creating artificial pork meat from pig stem cells, which they believe will yield ground artificial meat suitable for burgers, sausages and more.
The meat could be available in a few years, but the technology to create a high-quality steak is still a decade or more away.
Aside from the fact that lab-grown meat is unappetizing at best, time will only tell what health effects this man-made meat will reveal.
It's common knowledge that the less processed a food is, say an apple, the better. Eat one apple whole, and you will be getting a decent amount of nutrients and fiber that work together synergistically (and, yes, some sugar as well).
Take that same apple and extract its juice, bake it into a pie or grind it into applesauce on a mass-scale and you have another animal altogether -- one that will not be nearly as healthy as the original, and really doesn't bear much of a resemblance to it at all.
Artificial lab-grown meat is just the latest of a number of high-tech foods gone wrong, many of which I've written about in the past:
The up-side to artificial meat that I can see is that it eliminates the need for factory farms. If you're not familiar with the atrocities of how most meat in this country is being raised, I suggest you read Michael Pollan's excellent article on the topic.
It makes far more sense to me, though, to dedicate research to finding ways to raise real animals sustainedly and humanely (which, ironically, our ancestors did quite well) than to devote research to creating artificial animals, which could have devastating and yet unseen consequences to your health.