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In August a story appeared in the Press about laboratory-manufactured "meat." Scientists at the University of Maryland were proposing to grow meat by tissue culture in the laboratory. Sheets of muscle cells would be grown flat, stretched, and stacked to produce a mass resembling flesh meat. A spokesman was reported as saying the product would be healthier food than the real thing because it could be cultured to be lower in fat and richer in particular nutritive substances. The resulting material would then have to be textured to transform the amorphous mush into something that looked and felt more like flesh meat.
Of course the Press took the opportunity to deploy some inept headlines such as "A juicy steak for vegetarians?" and suggested that lab-grown meat could solve the world food shortage. By what strange logic could a food grown from animal muscle cells – cattle, sheep, chicken – be described as "vegetarian"? And what material would feed its growth? Probably a chemical cocktail, spiced with those "nutritive substances," rather than an organic vegetable preparation.
In the popular imagination a vegetarian is anxious only to avoid killing for food, so if animal food can be produced in a laboratory, a vegetarian, it is assumed, would have no objection to eating it, and could enjoy the "juicy steaks" that we are all suppose to have a suppressed longing for.
Actually, all anyone ever tastes whatever is eaten are the fats, oils, and aqueous juices that go into solution, in which form alone they create sensations on the taste buds of the tongue and mouth. Those tasteable solutions can be produced from wholly vegetable sources — from which various meat-like flavours have been developed for the various vegan taste-like-meat products popular with those who really do enjoy meat flavours.
But to avoid killing for food is only
part of the vegetarian purpose, which includes also eating whole,
healthy food, free from commercial "junk." When the
word "vegetarian" was coined in 1842 it was derived,
like the word "vegetable," from the Latin vegetus and
vegetare (meaning to animate), because a vegetarian diet was considered
to animate, or give life, rather than the disease and death of
dead animal food. Although in its popular use "vegetarian"
is taken to mean "vegetable-eater," its true meaning
of life-promoting, animated, healthy, still applies, and could
never include eaters of laboratory-made animal food.
Roger Hards
(from the September 2005 newsletter)
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Since 1990 Brazil's cattle herd has expanded by some 50 million
animals, with 80% of this growth in the Amazon region. Last year
26,000 sq km of rain forest was destroyed, mostly for ranching.
Cattle pasture now accounts for six times more cleared land in
the Amazon than crop land.
Besides the environmental damage, ranching is also having a devastating
social impact. Beef producers have killed hundreds of people who
have stood in their way, and pressed 25,000 others into slave
labour.
To make matters worse, it seems that beef from the region is now
infected by Foot & Mouth Disease. If it's unethical to eat
highly subsidised British beef, it's far worse to eat Brazilian
beef; yet in the first half of 2005 British beef imports from
Brazil rose by 70% to 34,000 tonnes.
(from a digest in The Week, 22 October 05, of a Guardian article by George Monbiot) ______________________________________________________________________________________________