What if it were possible to have meat, without slaughtering an animal, or without excess waste? Why do we need the whole pig if all we want is the bacon? That exactly what has happened, as Dutch scientists grow bacon from stem cells. Dutch scientists have used real pig stem cells to grow just the bacon, rather than go the route of genetically modifying the pigs DNA as other scientists have done.
Would you eat meat that was grown in a science laboratory? Not even the scientists who created it have dared to eat the bacon yet, if that’s any consolation.
Skeptics worry that the laboratory created meat may have harmful side-effects to the humans who consume it, though no research has been conducted in that field yet. Maybe they could just grow their own test subjects using human stem cells…….oh dear!
The scientists state that by being able to grow the food in a lab, they may be able to alter the properties of the substance to make it healthier for human consumption. Imagine eating bacon in the morning that lowered your cholesterol and helped you live longer. We could resort to just eating artificial foods like they did on Star Trek from the Food Replicators. In fact, maybe this is just the kind of forward thinking that Gene Roddenberry had for our future. Instead of bringing all of the ingredients with you on a space voyage you would just being a pack of living cells and grow the food as you needed it for your journey.
Image of bacon from Wikimedia Commons, unable to optain real photo of laboratory grade bacon.
