Will you eat cultured meat?
Recent studies claim that meat produces 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases and that slaughterhouses play a major role in contributing to driving species to extinction. A solution to overcome this predicament is to find a new source of meat that doesn’t emit greenhouse gases and doesn’t make animals suffer. A newly found source: synthetic meat.
The world’s first cultured beef burger was created by Professor Mark Post at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Thus the race to commercially produce available synthetic meat has begun and some companies even received funds from people like Bill Gates and Richard Branson.
Cultured meat (or clean meat) is similar to the process of making livestock meat, except the cells grows outside of the animal’s body.
Here the process of how cultured meat is made:
- Stem cells from muscles are taken. These stem cells function in creating new muscle tissue when the muscle is injured.
- The stem cells are put in a medium that contains nutrients and naturally-occurring growth factors that allows the stem cells to proliferate.
- Proliferation continues until it reached trillions of cells. The growth takes place in a bioreactor.
- The cells then merge into myotubes.
- These myotubes are then placed in a gel that’s 99 percent water, which helps them form into shapes of muscle fibers.
- When these muscle fibers pile up or start to layer, this becomes the cultured meat.
What do you think? Will you eat cultured meat? A lot of people are open to the idea but there’s nothing wrong with trying this out first, right?
