Frankenburger = Dangerous
I woke up this morning to a flush of posts about this new “Laboratory Grown Burger” which is claimed to be the obvious future to meat production. A company has created a burger patty from lab grown strips of meat grown from cow stem cells.
I’ve had it said to me that this is a great idea because firstly, its metabollically identical to meat from an animal, and that it also can finally end the killing of animals for food. But I see it as MUCH bigger issues than those.
Science aside, its the other impacts of this that scares the crap out of me. If you allow this to be produced, one company will patent the technology, and will control the food. Instead of thousands of independently owned and operated farms producing the meat, you have one company “creating” the food for the world. THAT is dangerous. No one should control the food. It is no different to Monsanto controlling the seeds because they own the patents to their GM versions.
Secondly, the arguments that this will solve environmental issues by reducing livestock and their damage on the environment is fundamentally wrong. Have a look at the TED talk by a fellow named Allan Savoury to find out the real cause of desertification, and how it can be fixed… you might be quite surprised.
There is also the issue of extinction of current livestock species. You “create” the meat, there is no need for these animals to exist any more. They will simply cease to exist any longer. And what if it all goes to shit, and they realise this isn’t right, or healthy, or heaven forbid profitable… when the animals are gone, there is no going back.
Now, we are told that these “creations” are identical at a molecular level to animal meat. All well and good when it stays that way. Human history has proved our inability to do handle power and success, and worse still, our flawed belief that we know everything, and we are always right. What happens when the corporation which “provides” us with our food (ie, ration distribution basically) discover that they can *slightly tweak* the created meat to include what they believe is some additional health benefit? They get it passed by the FDA because the FDA doesn’t actually do ANY of its own testing but requires the companies seeking approval to submit their own research (WTF!!!) and it gets passed, and humankind eat it. What if someone so powerful gets the notion that the world is overpopulated and in certain areas (who decides these areas? The powerful few!), a sterility gene is added to that areas food creation and voila…. human population managed.
There are just WAY to many issues with this aside from the science of “lets fabricate it so animals don’t have to die” here.