Test Tube Meat — A Mockery of Nature
by Spence Cooper on 10/04/09 at 10:55 am
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The idea of creating meat from a test tube by men in white lab coats didn’t start with PETA’s (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) publicity stunt of a $1 million Prize for the creation of “commercially viable” test-tube meat by 2012.
“The Dutch In Vitro Meat project,” writes Scientific American’s Brendan Borrell, “is the brainchild of businessman Willem van Eelen, now in his 80s, who nearly starved to death in a Japanese prison camp during World War II and came to believe that in vitromeat could solve world hunger. He later took classes in biology and consulted with researchers and companies over 25 years, culminating in a series of patents on in vitro meat production, which he filed in the late 1990s. In 2005 the Dutch government granted three universities and a Dutch meat processor owned by Smithfield Foods two million euros over four years to develop Eelen’s idea.”
The sad irony in PETA’s challenge is that despite PETA’s desire to eliminate the cruel wholesale slaughter of animals by creating meat in a test tube, the blood-like serum used as a medium to grow animal cells for test tube meat is made — “at least by American scientists — from calf fetuses”.
Beyond everyone’s natural gag reflex at glass tube-grown burgers, beyond all the scientific hype of reducing the environmental impact from growing livestock, feeding the world from only one cell, and reducing the carbon foot print, is man’s laughable arrogance in all this — arrogance epitomized by Vladimir Mironov, a cell biologist and anatomy professor at the Medical University for South Carolina. He said: “We want to create something better than natural meat.”
Better than natural? What’s better than natural — natural-like flavored meat? Talk about redefining reality. How do men convince themselves that what they create in test tubes is better than what took 3.5 billion years to evolve on its own — life.
The inevitable direction this lab created meat will take is clear: in time, test tube meat will replace real meat altogether, in the same way GM crops are slowly but surly replacing real crops. “As far as I know there is no genetically pure corn in the world because of pollen drift,” claims holistic farmer and author Joel Salatin. “Even if we could make [lab meat]…,” says, Joel, “how do we know that whatever we create is not going to become a technological master?”
We know who the technology master would be. We know based on the activities in the recent past — just take organic farming. The entire organic industry is under assault by mega corporate structures, and corrupt lawmakers alike.
Beyond the possible health risks, potential for corruption, and centralized corporate control of production associated with lab produced meat, something far more sinister looms: man’s continuing alienation from himself, nature, and the world around him.
Lou Bendrick with Grist writes: Josh Viertel, president of Slow Food USA, believes that problems in our food system have arisen because of a gap between people who grow food and people who eat food. “The problems with cruelty to animals are born of that gap. I see this…as a solution that just increases that gap. The root cause of the problem is that we’re too far away from the way our food is grown. We don’t have a connection to the people who grow it. We don’t understand the story behind it. This is a technology that’s just going to give more to companies and create a larger distance between us.”
There are, thank God, still influential people around that see the insanity in all this wacky scientific and corporate intervention in our food chain. Ex-hippies Ben and Jerry, the founders of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, have launched a campaign to raise awareness of the government’s approval last year to allow meat and milk from cloned animals into the nation’s food supply. In case you didn’t know, the FDA has decided for us that meat and milk from cloned animals are safe for consumption. As part of their campaign, say Ben and Jerry, they’re calling for a system that will allow consumers to track animals cloned for food.
