Medical meat.

In a lab at the biomedical-engineering faculty at the University of Technology in Eindhoven, Post is holding an early example of what he hopes will be the food of the future: in vitro meat. Post, the university's professor of angiogenesis (growth of new blood vessels), is a specialist in tissue engineering. He is also part of a small team of Dutch scientists racing to develop the ability to grow muscle independent of a living animal so that it can be produced in commercial quantities and sold as meat. . .

"We're developing a very simplified version of what we know as meat," he explains. "The cells are grown in this dish within a growing medium and this unit is where they receive the electrical stimulation. These electrodes ensure there is an electrical current - about 1Hz - passing through the cells. To make these skeletal cells develop into muscle, they need to be constantly exercised, just like in the body." This, he explains, is one of the scientific hurdles for in vitro meat that has not yet been fully addressed. "We can convert stem cells into skeletal muscle cells; however, turning them into trained skeletal muscle appears to be a little harder."

But overcoming that challenge would bring vast rewards. The red-meat market was worth $61 billion last year in the US alone, according to Mintel. Carve out even a pastrami-thin slice and the in vitro pioneers will be wealthy beyond imagination. The rewards are not only financial. Livestock's Long Shadow, an influential 2006 report by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, calculated that the global livestock industry is responsible for about 18 per cent of mankind's greenhouse-gas emissions - more than all of our cars, trains, shipping and planes combined. The FAO said it also accounts for more than eight per cent of our freshwater use, largely to grow crops fed to animals. Meat production now uses up 70 per cent of the world's agricultural land. And then, of course, there is the animal suffering attributed to the industry and intensive animal-farming.

The UN FAO publishes nonsense stats. This is a UN specialty it seems, a part of its political agenda. Could that 70% of ag land be used in some other way? Often it could not since it is marginal land unsuited to cropping, but they say it in a way that would lead the naive reader to think that all land was the same and could be used for any purpose. They do similar sleazy tricks with their GHG and water numbers as has been discussed in many previous posts.

The only reasons to produce food in vitro is that it might be cheaper or better. Some day it will be, but not soon. Plant, fungi and animal flesh are all possible to grow that way though none are perfected yet. Then we won't have to rip the earth to plant crops, or keep domestic livestock. Given that the vast majority of human calories come from cereals they'd be far better off to work on growing them in vats. It's a far larger market with far greater impacts.