At the same time, meat eating is more popular than ever, with newly affluent people in China and India chowing down on pork, beef, and chicken. Yet the factory-farming practices that feed that global appetite are increasingly criticized for generating vast amounts of greenhouse gases and toxic waste, and for being inhumane. And despite centuries of breeding, animals remain woefully inefficient at converting feed into meat: The ratio of plant protein in for meat protein out varies from 4 to 1 for chicken up to 20 to 1 for feedlot beef. Given all the problems with ani-mal husbandry, maybe it's time to put Bossie out to pasture and grow animal-free flesh. Welcome to the future of in vitro meat.
Lab-based production would be "cleaner, more efficient, more sanitary," says Jason Matheny, a health economics graduate student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "It would solve all of the animal welfare problems." Matheny, who in 2004 founded New Harvest, a nonprofit devoted to advancing meat substitutes, is not the only one considering the idea. The Netherlands is financing research aimed at making lab-grown meat commercially viable. Faux flesh gained further attention in April, when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals offered a $1 million prize to any person who can develop marketable in vitro chicken by 2012.
