In a mad dash to be the first scientific team to invent artificial meat by 2012, (PETA is currently offering a 1 million dollar prize to the first team that succeeds), Dutch scientist claim they are less than six months away from producing a synthetic lab grown sausage.
According to a recent article published in the Huffington Post, scientist may be just a year away from inventing artificial hamburger meat.
The idea of inventing cruelty free synthetic meat has been around for several years. However, it has only been in the last few years that the technology has enabled such products to become available.
Some of the potential benefits of such an invention could be the end of factory farming and widespread animal abuse, a reduction in methane gas and CO2 emissions, not to mention cheap readily available animal protein that could help reduce malnutrition and world hunger.
While I tend to be someone who encourages a whole-foods diet, I find myself being all too enthusiastic about the possibilities of animal-free meat products. The idea that so much land, currently being used to produce grain to feed cattle, can now be freed up to produce food that feeds people, or better yet free to return back to natural prairie lands, is an exiting idea. Still, convincing people to sink into a hamburger made from the stem cells of cows and fed on horse serum might be a hard sell. Furthermore, the meat is white in appearance and hardly appealing, namely because it contains no blood vessels.
