NEWS: Alternative ways of growing meat - News 7/7/05

[Guest guest]

A new hellish idea -- but interesting to read at the end about the

British physicist who recommonds vegetarianism to save the environment.

 

ys

 

hkdd

 

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News Thu Jul 7, 2005

 

Burgers from a lab? US study says it's possible

Reuters

 

Laboratories using new tissue engineering technology might be able to

produce meat that is healthier for consumers and cut down on pollution

produced by factory farming, researchers said on Wednesday.

 

While NASA engineers have grown fish tissue in lab dishes, no one has

seriously proposed a way to grow meat on commercial levels.

 

But a new study conducted by University of Maryland doctoral student

Jason Matheny and his colleagues describe two possible ways to do it.

 

Writing in the journal Tissue Engineering, Matheny said scientists could

grow cells from the muscle tissue of cattle, pigs, poultry or fish in

large flat sheets on thin membranes. These sheets of cells would be

grown and stretched, then removed from the membranes and stacked to

increase thickness and resemble meat.

 

Using another method, scientists could grow muscle cells on small

three-dimensional beads that stretch with small changes in temperature.

The resulting tissue could be used to make processed meat such as

chicken nuggets or hamburgers.

 

"There would be a lot of benefits from cultured meat," Matheny said in a

statement. "For one thing, you could control the nutrients."

 

Meat is high in omega-6 fatty acid, which is desirable, but not in large

amounts. Healthful omega-3 fatty acids, such as those found in walnuts

and fish oils, could be substituted.

 

"Cultured meat could also reduce the pollution that results from raising

livestock, and you wouldn't need the drugs that are used on animals

raised for meat," Matheny said.

 

Raising livestock requires million of gallons of water and hundreds of

acres of land. Meat grown from tissue would bypass those requirements.

 

The demand for meat is increasing worldwide, Matheny said. "China's meat

demand is doubling every ten years," he said. "Poultry consumption in

India has doubled in the last five years."

 

Writing in this month's Physics World, British physicist Alan Calvert

calculated that the animals eaten by people produce 21 percent of the

carbon dioxide that can be attributed to human activity. He recommends

people switch to a vegetarian diet as a way to battle global warming.

 

"Worldwide reduction of meat production in the pursuit of the targets

set in the Kyoto treaty seems to carry fewer political unknowns than

cutting our consumption of fossil fuels," he said in a statement.

 

The Kyoto treaty is a global agreement aimed at reducing production of

so-called greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that help fuel global

warming.