Can People Have Meat and a Planet, Too?

[How about just skipping meat for healthier and more environmentaly friendly proteins? -RS]

[From New York Times Blog]

By Andrew C. Revkin

Muscle cells (in this case mouse) can be cultured in the lab. (Karim Sultan/Utrecht University)

The world has seen the first international conference on manufacturing meat. This is the process, tested so far only at laboratory scale, of growing pork, chicken, or beef through cell culture in vats instead of raising and slaughtering animals.
beef on the hoofBeef cattle raised for the Harris Ranch Beef Company, Coalinga, Calif. (Gary Kazanjian for The New York Times)

My colleague Mark Bittman wrote a fine piece recently about the greenhouse-gas consequences of conventional meat production. Others have explored the environmental and ethical impacts of factory and feedlot farming. Manufactured meat, in theory, provides an end run around these issues. What if you can have your meat, be ethical, and environmental, too? (And presumably they%u2019ll engineer the bad fats out as well%u2026.)

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