For meat lovers, vegan diets are an earthly hell. For vegetarians, the alternatives are no match for the flavor and texture of the juicy burger, but they are forced to curb their cravings. Whatever their view of the ethics of eating meat, there are some hard facts: billions of animals are slaughtered each year for pleasure. Few humans, yes few because 60% of the mammals on Earth are livestock, 36% are humans, and only 4% are wild mammals.
According to the newspaper "The Economist", the number of animals living simultaneously on the surface of the earth is 19 billion chickens, 1.4 billion cows, and one billion sheep and pigs.
An estimated 50 billion chickens are slaughtered each year for food, 1.5 billion pigs and half a billion sheep to satisfy human cravings for bacon and sausages, a number that has tripled over the past 50 years.
With the spread of eating cultured meat, scientists expect the disappearance of diseases associated with raising livestock, such as (German) bird flu.
moral solution
The environmental cost of our growing appetite for meat is alarming. Agriculture is responsible for 10 to 12% of greenhouse gas emissions, and meat accounts for three-quarters of that. Raising livestock requires much more land than other forms of farming, leading to deforestation, as happened when vast areas of the Amazon rainforest were destroyed.
Therefore, in the past 10 years, environmentally friendly products have appeared, such as: vegan eggs, vegetable mayonnaise, and hamburger alternative from soybeans, and this has accompanied the trend of dozens of companies around the world to grow chicken and beef, with the aim of reducing the impact of livestock breeding on the climate and nature, as well as providing meat Clean free of calf and poultry fattening drugs, antibiotics, and sedatives.
The process of growing meat in the laboratory begins with a cell of a chicken or a cow. It does not require slaughtering the animal. Rather, it requires taking a biopsy from a cell or delicate tissue from a living animal. As for the rest of the nutrients that feed the growing cells, they are all plants.
The cows will not go to the slaughterhouse, but the veterinarian injects the animal with a local anesthetic, cuts a sample of muscle the size of a lentil, sews up the place of the small incision, and sends the sample to the lab.
The sample settles into a vial filled with a clear liquid speckled with white threads. Stem cells are isolated from the sample and fed on plant extracts. Within a few days, the threads will thicken in the tubes to look like short strands of spaghetti.
On the other side of the lab, other scientists are repeating the process with muscle cells in temperature- and pressure-controlled steel vessels, where they will continue to grow, after being immersed in a nutrient-enhanced fluid for cell proliferation. , and recombined into a product similar to ground hamburger meat.
It is expected that 60% of the meat on the market in 2040 will be from factories or vegetable products that taste like meat (Al-Jazeera)
When do we eat cultured meat?
It is expected that 60% of the meat on the market in 2040 will be plant-based or plant-based products that taste like meat, and citing surveys in the US, China and India, potential customers' unease about cultured meat will not be a hindrance but that new plant-based meat alternatives will be necessary at the stage transitional disaster to avoid global warming.
As for the issue of taste, in August 2013 it was the first taste experience of a cultured burger, and it was not bad for the meat that was 100% fat-free, only lacking the texture and juiciness that the fat gives to the meat, which prompted the researchers to grow the fat as well.
The cultured meat first came out to the public last year, after "chicken nibbles" passed safety testing by the Singapore Food Agency, and the product has already appeared in some snack bars in the country.
The product is similar to real chicken, but its availability is still limited due to its higher price than traditional chicken, and companies need to increase production, in order to be the cheapest meat in the market.
3 pieces of chicken still cost about $17, which is 10 times what it costs the same weight at McDonald's.
More than 70 other start-ups around the world are tempting investors into a race to bring lab versions of beef, chicken, pork, duck, tuna, foie gras, shrimp, kangaroo, and even mouse as cat food to market, amid fierce competition and a war to protect intellectual property.
6 reasons why we should eat cultured meat
Almost half of the world's crops are eaten by livestock, but only 15% of the plant-based benefits of meat are ultimately passed on to humans. In contrast, cultured meat and plant-based meat alternatives retain about three-quarters of the benefits of their ingredients.
A series of scientific studies has shown that people in rich countries eat more meat than is healthy for them or the planet, and research shows that reducing meat consumption is the best environmental action anyone can take.
Cultured meat also avoids food contamination from animal waste. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meat and poultry are the most common food sources of fatal infections, and are responsible for 29% of food poisoning-related deaths in the United States alone, largely due to infection Salmonella and Listeria.
Diseases associated with livestock, such as bird flu and swine flu, will disappear.
Even if a small amount of cultured meat requires a high use of energy, and thus carbon emissions, increased production will produce fewer emissions, and use much less water and land than conventional meat.
Also promising is the researchers' ability to replace saturated fatty acids, for example, with omega-3 fatty acids, to avoid the cardiovascular disease and diabetes associated with traditional meat consumption.