So What Is Meat?

For us, meat is just the juicy, tasty slab of tissue from animals. But some people think it’s more than that simple definition. People who are developing cell-cultured meat believe that meat can be the product of cultural consensus, not of killing animals. If people accept meat in various shapes and forms, then they can accept that meat can come from different methods. Cell-cultured meat is one of the methods that big food companies are looking at for the future, as NPR details: 

At the center of Chase Purdy's briskly paced and quietly bold Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food is Josh Tetrick, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur and CEO of Just Inc. Tetrick's company and a handful of others like it are growing cell-cultured meat that tastes, feels and looks like the livestock-harvested meat that people are used to — except without the farms and killing of animals. And before anyone raises a skeptical brow: Yes, it's actually meat. Technically, at least. The struggle for mainstream acceptance of cell-cultured meat is real. Convincing the American public that cells grown in "serum" in a big vat is meat will be challenging, but it could happen — and sooner than you might think.

Meat, it seems, is all about what consumers are used to. For the sake of the planet and the future of food sustainability, it might be time to reconsider meat harvested from dead animals. If we're going to eat meat at all, eliminating the need to kill an animal that consumes food resources humans could otherwise be using — and that's also captive to an industry that pollutes the air and soil and deforests broad swaths of the planet — might be a good start.

image via NPR