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Originally Posted by lucifer_sam
It's not economically viable and it diverts funds that could easily be used for stem cell research and battling cancer to pursue a poor and unnecessary goal. PETA has taken it upon themselves to spearhead this movement instead of targeting animal rights issues that actually matter. I'm a supporter of free-range farming and grass-fed animals, but trying to take the meat out of meat is an absurd goal for an organization that supposedly wants to preserve the integrity of animals.
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I agree, lucifer_sam, that lab-grown meat (cultured meat) certainly isn't economical at present and may never be...at least not until the human population rises enough and resources are depleted enough that the price of all meat becomes quite high (which *will* happen). I also suspect most people who eat animals aren't bothered enough by their slaughter to convert to eating animal tissue grown in labs, anyway.
PETA isn't the only group interested in lab cultures of animal tissue. So is NASA.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/38755 My university has research on possible foods for space travel, and cultured animal tissue is one of those foods.
I have a bad story relating to that. Not long ago some graduate students from the meat division of food science asked me to take part in one of their taste studies of lab meat, since they knew I'm vegan. Since the original tissue was taken from the muscle of a calf who is not going to be killed (I checked), I went ahead and participated, thinking this would be a good chance to learn more about it...and I felt that the benefits of the study outweighed the negatives. (I'd rather people ate lab-meat than meat of whole animals.)
I had to rank the attributes of the cultured meat samples, which looked a lot like beef jerkey but tasted pretty bland, about like how I remember meat tasted the last time I had some when I was 18.
When I got done and turned in my sheet to the students, they started chuckling, so I said, "What." Then they chuckled more and one of them said there had been a little "switch" made with my sample. I actually vomited right then and there, and the students got suspended by their supervisor.