"Brown’s long-term goal is to offer a product that can satisfy the world’s growing, and largely unsustainable, demand for meat, especially in ballooning markets like India and China."
"Meat is environmentally toxic and colossally inefficient, ethically dubious (even if you’re OK with killing animals, raising and slaughtering animals in factory farms is hard to defend), and it’s unhealthy (that’s even true if you don’t eat it—there’s good evidence that the rampant use of antibiotics in livestock production has given rise to drug-resistant infections)."
The amount of resources required to raise an animal to the age at which it can be slaughtered for use as food is a very real problem as the natural resources of the world are strained by population growth.
I don't disagree that we need to find more sustainable ways to feed ourselves, but we also need to be feeding ourselves quality food that matches our biological needs. Not whatever is most conveniently and cheaply produced.
I eat a lot of meat. I could not conceive of giving up meat. Not going to happen. I don't care if I have to slaughter the animals myself to get it.
But if there was a high enough quality "laboratory meat"? I'd try it. I'd even be willing to pay more for it in certain circumstances:
- Consider custom-adapted marbling. - Arbitrary sized cuts. Want a fillet larger than any real animal? - New types of "meat"? Yes please. - Healthier versions? If they can come up with variations that taste as nice while being better for me, sure, I'll pay a premium for that.
While there undoubtably will also be attempts to make cheap replacements, there's no reason to automatically assume that the fact it is "faux-meat" means it can't be just as healthy - or better - than the real thing.
Is it possible, sure but economics just a question of what your willing to sacrifice for what you want. And significant quantities of fake meat is probably a much better option for everyone involved.
For beef, sure. But chickens are very quick to produce (2 months).
Anyway, to reply to the "statisfy China" thing, let me tell to the author of this "invention" that he is solving a solved problem: China has a long track record of feeding its numerous populace with doufu (tofu) instead of meat. I was very impressed the first time I saw a countryside market. They were selling big doufu pieces in different street shops, and only one butcher was selling a few pieces of hanging meat.
The trick is to actually use little pieces of pork in a doufu-based dish, and many spices, like the delicious Mapo doufu.
Even when eating meat-based Chinese dishes, like Huiguorou, you will eat much less meat than in a classic Western course.
So, in fact, the solution to the possible future problem of Chinese people eating too much meat is not to feed them with that chicken ersatz, it is to avoid Westernization to go that far.
I have a few proposals in this direction that should be common sense:
- Stop using hamburgers as the logo for food in games, apps and other places. Only a very tiny part of the world regularly eat these nocive things.
- Stop displaying actors eating snacks in movies. (We already stopped showing them smoking, except for the villains). Going at any time to the fridge and eating something out of it is a very recent and nocive habit that should not be shown as the normal "American Dream" life in successful mainstream movies.
- Stop this cliché about disgusting intestine-based dishes or other "un-noble" parts. I am no vegetarian, but I think animal we kill for food should be eaten to the last piece of eatable tissue. In China, we (yes, me too) eat tendon, kidneys, fish tripes and heads, duck tongues, pig feet, everything, and cooked in hundres of different manners. It is healthy: eating meat or fish becomes a pleasure by its diversity, not by its volume.
Chicken produces 190 kilocalories/square metre/year.
Rice produces 1250 kilocalories/square metre/year. I assume soy is similar.
There are many other similar calculations to be made regarding demands placed on the land. With 7 billion people and counting, they're important numbers.
I understand the need to find some substitute with 7 billion people in the planet, but i think grown-in-a-lab meat will probably be a better alternative in the near future.
There's plenty more room out there for everything we need. Only political borders (placed by us humans) prevent us from using all available land/resources to provide for all of humanity.
Put another way, if food producing acreage is the limiting factor for humans then as omnivores we may grow for 150,000 generations, as herbivores we may make it to 150,005 generations. Either way, growth will have to stop and we will have wiped out massive numbers of other species.
No, it really hasn't. It just hasn't. This is one of those crazy truisms that becomes difficult to even debunk because it has no science behind it...but the people pushing it do so with such gusto and such complete confidence that people simply believe their unfounded assertions. It's a tiny sect of science deniers that selectively choose evidence and ignore everything that conflicts with their particular preference. The "paleo diet" is based entirely on a fictional retelling of human history, and it's about time it stopped being promoted as "research" or "conclusive".
Just the most recent article on the subject, but there have been dozens or hundreds of others: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/23/hu...
The evidence of human diets spans millennia, including pre-humans and early human populations. There are a very few bits of evidence of isolated populations eating what could be called a "paleo diet" by modern definitions (with a lot more bugs and grubs and nasty stuff like brains and organs from rats), but on the whole, humans have always been omnivores, eating anything remotely edible within their grasp, including mammals, reptiles, plants, fish, insects, fungus...if an alien landed during early human times, they'd have probably tried to eat it, too. But, most populations in most places were eating plenty of plant matter, including grains, and some of the oldest food evidence we have includes grains.
The idea that the early human diet was nearly all meat is a highly selective reading of the evidence; picking and choosing from only those populations in those locations where meat was the only available food source. I don't want to attack your deeply felt beliefs, as you seem to have a personal investment in the paleo cult, but it's simply not borne out by science.
Also, I strongly recommend not taking ones anthropology lessons from fad diet book authors.
Citations:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101018/full/news.2010.549.ht...
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2009/12/17/...
And a fun discussion of the woo factor of the "paleo diet":
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Paleo_diet
Note that I'm not arguing that people should be consuming a bunch of white bread and refined sugar. Knowing the paleo diet is based on junk science doesn't mean I think the modern first world diet is sane.
Pre-historic humans, for example, had a life expectancy of about 30.
Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."
http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in...
"Fake" meat tastes and looks like the real thing, but it has none of its downsides (look up "Forks over Knives" for some decent documentary on that. take with a grain of salt).
Infant mortality has everything to do with medical care and very little to do with the diet. That's why infant deaths should be thrown out when talking about the diet.
If I have 3 people, one died at age 0, one died at age 50 and one died at age 60, the average lifespan is about 36.5. Clearly misleading. I don't think people realize just how high infant mortality was prior to the advent of modern medicine.
If you have 5 people who are born on the same day, 4 of which live till 80, 1 of which dies shortly after birth, the average lifespan will be 64 even though 80% of the people lived until 80.
His point was that most of our increase in average lifespan can be attributed to the reduction in infant mortality rather than people living to higher ages.
Though it doesn't account for general childhood mortality or death during childbirth, both of which were pretty big factors.
But seriously, the fact that 10,000 years ago human-type creatures ate a lot of meat should be like number 76 on your list of arguments in the sustainability of diets debate.