Future Of Food May Be From A Vat Of Goo

Scientists are working on growing meat in test tubes.

Obviously, beef sirloin and drumsticks aren't going to come tumbling out of a test tube at any point in the future, but something akin to hamburger, hotdog, or chicken nuggets is definitely on the way.

Scientists are also considering other foodstuffs for replication in a laboratory (which I am assuming refers to grain, potato, and other starches and vegetables).

I would imagine that nobody is going to entirely be giving up their dead animal carcass in exchange for lab goo that may taste the same, even if it is only a fraction of the price, assuming one can afford the natural stuff. However, perhaps in 20 or 30 years we will be comfortable in the knowledge that our hotdogs were never actually pig nostrils in a prior iteration. Perhaps we won't care, who knows? If you can buy a 10-pound bag of hamburger for two dollars, will you care?

There are two undeniable major benefits to the world we live in though: One is that famine will become much less common, if not eliminated entirely. People in the world's poorest countries will have much less malnutrition and better-balanced diets. Drought and arable land will no longer be concerns. With well-fed populations comes better health and economic prosperity. The planet's ability to handle a larger population will be much improved.

Second: Creating food in a factory will free up vast portions of the world's farm lands for other uses, and reduce the pollution that goes with farming and livestock. The article says that livestock alone is responsible for 18% of the world's greenhouse gasses, while deforestation to make way for more land to be used in farming represents 20% of all the world's carbon emissions.

Anyway, it's a very exciting possibility, this potential of turning out thousands and thousands of tons of food from a factory for a fraction of the cost of growing and harvesting it naturally, and personally — as long as they taste the same — I'll still enjoy my chicken nuggets even if they never were actually chickens.