It's SA's national pastime: a sunny afternoon in the backyard, laid-back music drifting on the breeze, and friends and family gathered around a sizzling braai, the smoky aroma of griddled steak rising off the coals.
Except, the seared flesh doesn't come from a cow or pig slaughtered in a factory farm; it's not from an actual animal at all - it's been artificially cultivated in a lab.
We're going to extreme lengths to innovate ourselves out of guilt.
Lezette Engelbrecht, online features editor, ITWeb
For years, scientists have been researching ways to manufacture meat without the associated cruelty and environmental impacts. It seems they're getting closer, with scientists having created lab-grown, edible meat that could be store-ready within a year.
The way it's made, however, is likely to turn even the strongest of stomachs. The 'in vitro' meat is produced by taking cells from a live pig and feeding it with horse foetal serum (a nutrient soup consisting of all the parts of blood other than red blood cells and platelets) taken from a horse foetus. The cells multiply to form strands of muscle tissue, and the Frankenfurter is born. New Scientist says a test tube sausage could be available in six months, and a patty within a year.
The truly bizarre bit is how they get the muscles to develop from flaccid strips into the kind of meaty slabs one could slap between a bun. No running around the fields in the open air to strengthen muscles, oh no, these puny strands get manually exercised by stretching them with something you might recognise from childhood - Velcro. Scientists secure the meaty bits in the Velcro and then peel them away until they 'feel the burn', so to speak.
Bizarre as it sounds, the experiment could be a breakthrough in reducing the impact of one of the most carbon-intensive industries in the world. Meat production uses millions of hectares of land (often rainforests) to grow grain for livestock and guzzles huge amounts of water (one kilogram of beef sets you back 14 000 litres - about as much as the average person in Mozambique uses in three years). Not to mention the billions of tonnes of emissions generated in the production, slaughter, processing and transport of meat.
It's an incredibly wasteful activity in an energy-starved world. Producing one calorie (4.2kJ) from animal protein releases 11 times as much carbon dioxide as it does producing a calorie from plant protein. Then there's the methane and carbon dioxide produced by the animals themselves, with methane being 20 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Everyone from Albert Einstein to Paul McCartney have pointed to the fact that not eating meat is the single most effective thing one can do to help combat climate change.
The other strong argument against excessive meat eating is the ethical questionability of breeding millions of animals for the exclusive purpose of killing and eating them. In large-scale factory farms, the ends often justify the means, and animals are enclosed in filthy, cramped quarters to suffer horrific conditions. Beaks, horns and ears are lopped off, faces branded and throats slit open without any kind of pain relief (see the film Earthlings for a more detailed look into how these abattoirs are run).
Misplaced genius
Clearly, anything aimed at reducing people's intake of meat is a step in the right direction. But it's disturbing that we're going to such extreme lengths to innovate ourselves out of guilt, rather than adjusting our lifestyles. Simply reducing meat intake to a few times a week and using sustainable protein alternatives is obviously just far too complex and self-sacrificial. It makes much more sense to spend millions on Frankenstein-esque experiments to create some freakish substitute (bringing the first lab-grown meat to market could cost up to EUR250 000).
It may be inventive, a scientific achievement even, but surely the money and resources could be better spent on fighting disease or poverty. Essentially, we're spending a fortune on creating something to absolve us from greed. In a world that revolves around the growing consumption of unsustainable resources, technology has become a useful crutch.
One sees the same trend in fields such as geo-engineering, which involves madcap ideas like adding iron filings to the oceans or positioning giant mirrors in space to reflect the sunlight. The latest scheme by British scientists is to mimic the effects of volcanoes, because the particles released into the atmosphere during eruptions have a cooling effect. This is the plan: tether a giant balloon weighing a few hundred tonnes 20 kilometres above the earth and link it to the ground with a massive hose pumping tiny sulphate particles into the stratosphere, in an attempt to reflect the sunlight.
I'm not dismissing the intelligence or sincerity of the scientists involved, but it's scary to think even the brightest of minds consider these kinds of solutions more viable than trying to get people to change their behaviour. The solutions are relatively simple and far from soul-destroying: eat less meat (there are loads of alternatives), use less water (most of us don't even keep track), and save energy.
These are all things almost every single person could do that would drastically change the position we're in. But it requires the kinds of lifestyle tweaks people try their best to avoid. Which seems a little counter-instinctive in some ways, because our survival through the millennia has been based on the principle of adapt or die.
Increasingly, however, we're finding ways to adapt the world to ourselves, using technology as a tool. These may delay catastrophe, but will inevitably bring their own complications, perhaps doing more harm than good. Addressing the cause and not the symptom requires bending human will, and this, like a muscle, needs to be strengthened through real-life application, not passive stretching done by men in white coats, on behalf of the rest of us.
Share