Vegan news portal

Or is it only good for cows and pigs? ... It's easy to understand why the animal-rights set is so keen on

lab-grown meat—no more slaughterhouses or veal pens. But should environmentalists be getting on the bandwagon, too? I'm always hearing how cow burps are a major contributor to global warming. Then again, those massive meat labs will require a lot of power, right?

The hypothetical meat labs won't be carbon-neutral, but they'll still be far greener than our current system for producing burgers and chops. Raising and slaughtering livestock on a large scale doesn't just result in massive methane emissions due to bovine flatulence; it also creates waste-disposal nightmares, squanders valuable land, and guzzles an alarming amount of fossil fuel. So, yes, the environmentally conscious should keep their fingers crossed that lab-grown meat becomes a reality sooner rather than later. But given the numerous scientific challenges that remain, they shouldn't get their hopes up. ... Lab-grown meat would also be more efficient in that no energy would have to be expended to create unwanted byproducts—specifically skeletons. Nor would there be any problems with waste management, a big plus since manure is a worrying contaminant of water supplies. And the lab approach would make locavorism that much easier; why buy lamb cubes from 1,000 miles away when they can come from the corner bioreactor instead? ... So while we should welcome the advent of lab-grown meat, we should also realize that it can't provide a short-term fix. Unfortunately, our meat addiction is one of those environmental problems that we can't just invent ourselves out of.



-- read full article: http://www.slate.com/id/2191705/