Growing Meat

I wrote not long ago on the morality of eating meat. William Saletan at Slate tells us that before long-whatever our moral feelings on the matter-the meat we eat will no longer be coming from animals:

In the case of meat, maybe we don't have to go cold no-turkey. Maybe what we're asking for, what God is giving us, is the wisdom to see that we can't change our craving for meat, but we can change the way we satisfy it.

How? By growing meat in labs, the way we grow tissue from stem cells. That's the great thing about cells: They're programmed to multiply. You just have to figure out what chemical and structural environment they need to do their thing. Researchers in Holland and the United States are working on the problem. They've grown and sautéed fish that smelled like dinner, though FDA rules didn't allow them to taste it. Now they're working on pork. The short-term goal is sausage, ground beef, and chicken nuggets. Steaks will be more difficult. Three Dutch universities and a nonprofit consortium called New Harvest are involved. They need money. A fraction of what we spend on cattle subsidies would help.

I've thought too that, given our growing ability to manipulate the growth of animal cells, it would only be a matter of time before we could induce cells to become animal tissue that we could eat. Once it becomes profitable and as easy-if not easier-to simply grow our meat in a vat, not a whole lot of people will countenance the whole-sale slaughter of animals in barbaric conditions simply to suit our craving for a Big Mac (and let's be honest; who would even notice that the "meat" in a Big Mac didn't come from a cow?)

I don't know how we can not support this. Neither does Saletan:

Growing meat like this will be good for us in lots of ways. We'll be able to make beef with no fat, or with good fat transplanted from fish. We'll avoid bird flu, mad-cow disease, and salmonella. We'll scale back the land consumption and pollution involved in cattle farming. But 300 years from now, when our descendants look back at slaughterhouses the way we look back at slavery, they won't remember the benefits to us, any more than they'll remember our dried-up tears for a horse. They'll want to know whether we saw the moral calling of our age. If we do, it's time to pony up.

So...let's pony up.