San Francisco: In order to address the looming crisis over the world’s growing appetite for meat via, Just, a food company here has come up with a solution to serve meat grown from the cells of a live animal- also known as ‘Slaughter-free meat’.BBC research team reported that it tasted chicken nuggets grown out of the cells of a chicken feather.
It is exactly as Winston Churchill had predicted in 1931, “Human race would one day escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” Only, it took it eighty-seven years to come into reality.
BBC added that the chicken - which tasted like chicken - was still alive, reportedly roaming on a farm not far from the laboratory.This meat is not to be confused with the vegetarian plant-based burgers and other meat-substitute products which are gaining popularity in supermarkets.
No, this is actual meat grown from animal cells and variously described as cultured, synthetic, in-vitro, lab-grown or even "clean" meat.
"We make things like eggs or ice cream or butter out of plants and we make meat just out of meat. You just don't need to kill the animal," Tetrick says.Tetrick and other entrepreneurs working on cellular meat say they want to stop the slaughter of animals and protect the environment from the degradation of industrial factory farming.
The United Nations says raising animals for food is one of the major causes of global warming and air and water pollution. Even as the conventional livestock industry strives to become more efficient and environmentally friendly, many doubt it will be able to keep up with the rising global appetite for protein.
We slaughter 70 billion animals each year to feed seven billion people, says Dr Uma Valeti, a cardiologist who founded California-based Memphis Meats, a leading cell-based meat company.He says the global demand for meat is doubling as more people rise out of poverty and that humanity won't be able to raise enough cattle and chicken to sate the appetite of nine billion people by 2050.
"So we could just literally grow any meat, poultry or seafood directly from those animal cells," Dr Valeti says. "I think that is probably much bigger than sliced bread."While critics have labeled it as ‘Frankenstein food’, Josh Tetrick insists that cell-based meat is entirely free from the many animal diseases which plague traditional meat production.And he is betting on human experience favouring progress.
"At the end of the day whether you're talking about a move from picking ice to refrigerator or from slaughtering a whale to refining oil into kerosene and moving from kerosene to a light bulb... even though people called the light bulb the Devil's current... humanity managed to embrace something new. "It always happens and if I had to bet it'll happen for this too."(UNI)
