Anyone who has a conscience has to pause when thinking about modern meat production. These two videos give you a taste of the practices being used today:

Processing the chicks:

Processing the meat:

It’s especially poignant if you have ever raised pigs or chickens or cows. Pigs in particular, because pigs are definitely as smart as dogs, and in some ways smarter. And even a chicken, which you would not consider to be brilliant given the brain size, can make a great pet. Think about how smart crows and parrots can be:

The amazing intelligence of crows

So we have these millions of animals in the meat industry. We raise them, in most cases, in not-very-nice ways. And then we kill them in not-very-nice ways. It is hard to see a moral high ground here.

Additionally, there has been a lot of coverage of the fact that raising all of the animals in the meat industry is not a particularly “green” process. There is a big greenhouse gas problem, both in terms of CO2 and methane. This article puts the environmental problems into perspective:

According to a 2006 United Nations initiative, the livestock industry is one of the largest contributors to environmental degradation worldwide, and modern practices of raising animals for food contributes on a “massive scale” to deforestation, air and water pollution, land degradation, loss of topsoil, climate change, the overuse of resources including oil and water, and loss of biodiversity. The initiative concluded that “the livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” In 2006 FAO estimated that meat industry contributes 18% of all emissions of greenhouse gasses. This figure was revised in 2009 by two World Bank scientists and estimated at 51% minimum.

Additionally, meat is not a very efficient way to create food. The same article points out that, “To produce 1 pound of feedlot beef requires about 2,400 gallons of water and 7 pounds of grain.” If that grain and water went straight to people rather than going through a cow, you could feed a lot more people.

Additionally, the meat we get from fish in the ocean creates its own special problems:

How long before sharks start going extinct?

But the fact is that people enjoy eating meat – obviously there is some evolutionary background here. Our pet dogs and cats do too.

So what can we do? We can find a way to create meat without the animals. This is the goal of in-vitro meat production. People have been talking about it in a science fiction way for a long time, but it is getting much closer to reality. This video shows you the state of the art in artificial meat today:

See also:

This article talks about the technology:

In vitro cultured meat production

There are two leading technologies according to the article: “scaffold-based and self-organizing techniques.”

In scaffold-based techniques, embryonic myoblasts or adult skeletal muscle satellite cells are proliferated, attached to a scaffold or carrier, such as a collagen meshwork or microcarrier beads, and then perfused with a culture medium in a stationary or rotating bioreactor. By introducing a variety of environmental cues, these cells fuse into myotubes, which can then differentiate into myofibers. The resulting myofibers may then be harvested, cooked, and consumed as meat…

A scaffold-based technique may be appropriate for producing processed meats, such as hamburger or sausage. But it is not suitable for producing highly structured meats, such as steaks. To produce these, one would need a more ambitious approach, creating structured muscle tissue as self-organizing constructs or proliferating existing muscle tissue in vitro.

- See How Muscles Work for details on muscle cells.

This article is also fascinating:

Eight Ways In-Vitro Meat will Change Our Lives:

In-Vitro Meat — aka tank steak, sci fi sausage, petri pork, beaker bacon, Frankenburger, vat-grown veal, laboratory lamb, synthetic shmeat, trans-ham, factory filet, test tube tuna, cultured chicken, or any other moniker that can seduce the shopper’s stomach — will appear in 3-10 years as a cheaper, healthier, “greener” protein that’s easily manufactured in a metropolis. Its entree will be enormous; not just food-huge like curry rippling through London in the 1970′s or colonized tomatoes teaming up with pasta in early 1800′s Italy. No. Bigger. In-Vitro Meat will be socially transformative, like automobiles, cinema, vaccines.

As mentioned in the video, several governments are funding research in the field of in-vitro meat. See also: The $1 million PETA meat prize.