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The New Fake Meat

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I wonder about this new idea of laboratory-grown meat that could replace cows. I confess I’m almost as skeptical about this as I am about Soylent, although I guess at the least some sort of substitution for the horrors of eating would make Dylan Matthews happy. Would Americans eat this? They say no at this point. But then Americans eat all sort of artificial, laboratory-created food. I mean, what the hell is in a Hot Pocket? What is the blue in the blue Gatorade? Frozen veggie burgers? Aerosol cheese? I could go on for weeks with these questions. But meat is a different beast than processed meat products. An actual burger made of lab-meat may well be a bridge too far. There are however certainly good reasons to support the research, which is the impact of cows on the environment is really harsh:

While companies like Modern Meadow and Muufri are still in the proof-of-concept stage, it’s hard to overstate the potential impact of displacing the cow. The livestock sector uses 30 percent of the planet’s entire land surface and consumes one-third of the world’s fresh water. The industry also claims 20 percent of global energy consumption, and generates more greenhouse gas emissions than planes, trains, and automobiles combined. The massive consumption of water and crops for meat production has a dramatic effect on the environment, exacerbating erosion, habitat and biodiversity loss, and water scarcity.

With the human population set to hit nine billion by 2050, it’s no wonder that livestock is the fastest-growing agricultural sector on the planet. Removing the cow from the global food system, then, seems like an obvious solution to the looming challenges of feeding the post-industrial world. A comprehensive University of Oxford assessment suggests that popular adoption of cultured meat production in Europe could yield approximately 35 to 60 percent lower energy use and 80 to 95 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventionally produced meat. For a world wracked by growing systemic crises like hunger and water scarcity, ditching the world’s approximately 1.3 billion cows for less resource-intensive sources seems like an opportunity too good to pass up.

That’s a big deal. The article goes on to focus on some local organic farmer who puts her buyers in touch with the land and the food cycle through holding burger nights on the pasture, which is fine and all but I think goes farther to demonstrate the disconnect between the modern food movement and the need to feed 7 billion people. But the questions of fake meat and the need to replace cows on the planet are interesting and important ones.

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