PETA recently announced it would award $1 million to the first person who develops commercially viable in vitro chicken meat during the next four years. They’ve set the bar pretty high — the meat has to have “a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh to non-meat-eaters and meat-eaters alike.”
So, what’s the likelihood of that happening? In the near future, not too good, according to Time:
In theory, this seems like an excellent idea, with the potential to ease the burden on the environment from meat production, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve human health. In practice, however, the chances of anyone actually winning the prize seem slim. “No one has yet produced [in vitro meat]. No one has succeeded in coming close,” says Dr. Stig Omholt, director of Norway’s Centre for Integrative Genetics and chair of the In Vitro Meat Consortium, which held its first symposium this month. Still, Omholt says, “it seems possible to develop this technology.”
If such a product is created, it would raise some interesting questions.
For people who are currently meat eaters, would it be possible to justify not switching to the in vitro chicken? It’d be hard to argue against it on the basis that it’s not “natural” — there’s pretty much nothing natural about the current systems we use to produce chicken. And even people who are OK with eating animals in the abstract can understandably be uneasy about the way animals are currently treated on modern factory farms.
Vegetarians might also face a few questions of their own. Would they be OK eating this new chicken? Sure, a bird wouldn’t have suffered or died to produce that cutlet, but you might argue that consuming meat of any kind — test tube or not — perpetuates the culture of “meat addiction” (PETA’s phrase) that led us to treat animals cruelly. Sure, getting the carnivores to stop would presumably save millions of birds from a life of suffering. But PETA itself has been saying for years that meat isn’t necessary. So, why go back?
-Greg Dahlmann
photo: Flickr user eurleif, used under a CC license