PETA just announced a million-dollar reward for whomever can successfully produce an in-vitro chicken-meat product. To get around that whole suffering animal thing, apparently the answer is for us to eat something created from stem cells and grown in “a medium.”
Seems odd, given the trend to oh, eat more organic, natural, and whole foods given what our grocery stores are filled with. And it seems unnecessary because, aside from the fact that we don’t need meat, there are some soy- and gluten-based mock meats that taste and feel so real that I can’t eat them.
One would hope the skeeve factor would put the kibash on this thing…but the skeeve factor of cloned animals, factory farming, slaughterhouses, and ecoli-licious meatpacking has failed to deter a world of meat eaters, so maybe not.
Here’s a coincidence: Yesterday I saw a link to the Iron Deficient Chef site, which includes five-minute-ish episodes and a ton of little drop-down learn-abouts. They just launched, so there are only a few, but the latest episode mentions in-vitro meat.
Something about the in-vitro chicken meat made me lose my appetite. PETA confuses the hell out of me.
According to NYT, it was a huge, ugly debate within PETA, but this won out. Guess who’s not getting a donation this year–I can’t pay to spur this effort.
This is worse than the monthly mailings and magazines I started getting from Habitat for Humanity. Use the money to buy nails, not to show me pictures of you using the nails or to ask me for more money to buy more nails!
I think Peta’s reward is pretty weird too. There’s plenty of vegetarian and vegan options without that. Pleased to see you found Iron Deficient Chef at the time Spoon did a piece on in-vitro meat. There have been several more episodes since that one, and one on GM any day now. All the best, Carol in Sydney, home of http://www.irondeficientchef.com