CHAPTER TWO Culturing Meat For The Future: Anti-Death Versus Anti-Life

• Main Author: Brian J. Ford
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.610.6125; http://www.brianjford.com/k-cultured-meat.pdf

Humans can no longer afford to eat meat on a large scale. Livestock production imposes a vast burden on global resources and it is one that the expanding world population can no longer sustain. Yet imagine if we were able to culture such food in factories: we might then be able to manufacture virtually limitless supplies at a greatly reduced cost and a lessened environmental load. In 1976 I calculated that: “We could provide more than enough food for the world‟s population from an area the size of an industrial estate. ” The culture of living cells, I said, would allow us to provide proteinaceous foodstuffs for a large global population from an area the size of a city. 1 The complex could be sited in the freezing wastes of the Arctic so that metabolic temperatures could be simply controlled (there was no thought that the warming effect might pose a problem, when writing one-third of a century ago). There is now an upsurge of interest in the possibilities of meat produced from cultured cells in vitro. What should we call it? How does it fit into a broad social context? Can it work? Does it matter? Will it solve our current demand for food? What will be the environmental consequences? Would people accept it – and how diverse are public attitudes to the consumption of meat? Although the idea of cultured meat seems novel, it is not new. In 1932 Winston Churchill wrote: “Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these