Science is great, would it be possible to grow big blobs of meat rather than having to kill an animal?

Answer 1

why not? You probably mean, big layers of animal muscle tissue, though. We know how to make such cells live in labs, we can grow such tissue in labs, so I don't see why you couldn't grow it on a larger scale.

the only catch would be the sanitary dimension. In a living body, the body takes care of defending itself against most bacteria, viruses, etc. And it's quite "magic" in that all you need to do, is feed the animal, say, grass.

whereas if you're going to grow animal muscle tissue on a large scale in some tank, you'll need to guarantee a sterile environment, and if there is any failure at any point in time, it will degrade (i.e., rot), very quickly.

but still, this is probably doable.

by the way, back in the 60's, French sci-fi writer Barjavel, in his novel "Ravage" (1943), had already imagined restaurants where customers went to the sterile meat growth tank, to "pay a visit" to the "mother meat", before going back to the dining room and ordering a bit of it. He had also imagined that thanks to varying growth speeds, and to artificial flavouring, restaurants were able to offer meat tasting like beef, or whale, or venison...

I don't think the book is available in English though

Answer 2

It is something scientists have been looking at. One of the main potential benifits is obviously helping to resolve world-hunger problems. However, it would probably be more expensive than farming cows, so I don't know how much real use it would be.

However, I imagine it may appeal to people who are vegetarian because they don't believe in killing animals (rather than just not liking meat!) as the meat would never have come from a living animal, so there's no moral objections there :)

I imagine there may be contraversy, in line the GM arguements; however, if clearly labelled, it's then up to consumers to chose what they want to eat. It's not like artificial meat could cross over into the live population, like GM cops can!

Answer 3

Too simple. The natural balance creating a healthy planet would have stable populations of preditors and prey. If some animals didn't eat mice there would simply be a lot more mice. These would eat a lot more grain. This would result in less for other use and result in starvation and malnutrition for other grain consumers.

Answer 4

It is already possible to culture tissue to some extent.. the easiest tissue to culture would be liver since it readily regenerates, the problem would be raising the tissue growth to an industrial level cause it would take more space than having a field of cows and getting people to eat it

Answer 5

What if these big blobs suddenly grew teeth and started to eat us?

Answer 6

It will be possible in the future, but with all the controversy over GM foods, would you feel happy about eating it?

Answer 7

Yeh, just inject taste. In chinese restaurants they do that. Its actually all veggie but they inject meat taste. So you could eat like anyhting, even shark, kangaroo, alligator. It doesnt harm anything~!!

Answer 8

it is already in the works, I just recently read an article on something similar to that in my discover magazine, wish I could find it so I could go more in depth on it for you, but it would be nice wouldn't it?

Answer 9

it will happen, and i think we should have cheap energy in the future by growing massive amounts of ostrich legs above treadmills that will create electricity!!

Answer 10

KFC already do this. Allegedly.