konyhatündér

If humans were as ethical as we like to think we are, we would all be vegetarians. As science increasingly confirms that animals have reason, a sense of justice, they lie if the situation requires it, use tools and form cultures, it is more and more difficult to justify why it is all right to eat beings so fundamentally similar to us. And yes, that includes birds, too, not just pigs, horses and dogs (a somewhat stupider variety of the latter are raised for food by the Chinese).
If we are honest, the only reason we continue to eat meat is, well, we just like it too much to give it up.
However, we may have to. A rising population and higher living standards mean that, according to UN estimates, our take-up of meat will rise about 70% by 2050. The bad news is that we could not meet such demand even if we turned all of Earth’s farmland into pastures. And even it livestock could be increased, greenhouse gas emissions would be much much higher, as currently 18% of all emissions is connected to making meat for hungry humans.
So things will have to drastically change in the next 40 or so years for economic and environmental reasons as well, not just the sentimental stuff. (For more on how farming is changing and how that is affecting our food, please see the previous issue of Konyhatündér.) We will either have to eat less than the 26 kg of meat per year that we do today, make raising animals cheaper, somehow make meat production independent of farming, or enlist other sources of protein.
It seems that the future of meat holds all of the above. Novel technologies such as cloning more “efficient” stock for breeding (for about $15,000) might be disturbing, but that will probably fade over the decades as “normal” meat grows more and more expensive. However, cloning cannot satisfy humanity’s hunger for meat sustainably because cloned animals still need to feed.
Alternative protein-sources or “vegetarian meat” such as tofu and soya meat already have a lot of supporters (not me). Now these are joined in the West by a number of new alternatives from Far East cuisines. An example is the Buddhist staple seitan, which emulates duck meat. (It is actually processed wheat gluten which is fried, steamed or baked.) Tempeh, a soybean cake from Indonesia, is made of cooked soybeans held together by the mycelia of a fungus, and it can be cooked, fried, baked, grated, and marinated or brined.
Technology firms are also baking up new alternatives. One is quorn, which is basically bits of an edible mould bound together by egg whites. It was invented by a British company, Marlow Foods, in the sixties, when it was widely thought that there would be a famine in the eighties due to population growth. It has so far not been widely accepted outside the UK, where it has a 60% share of the meat replacement market. Another company, Dutch Meatless BV has invented vegetarian meat made of lupine and wheat fibers. Eggs, especially egg whites in industrial processes are also being replaced.
One of the most interesting technological developments in meat replacement is growing meat in labs. A few cells are taken from live animals, then introduced into a culture media, where they replicate, forming tissue. All it needs is a tad of genetic manipulation, some nutrients to make it grow, and voilá, a sausage. Making complex meat such as a steak is difficult though, as it is made of muscle tissue threaded through with long, fine capillaries to the cells. In order to get a good steak, you would also need fat threaded through the muscle, which is “exercised” through fluctuations in temperature, which make the muscle contract or expand.
At this point, no-one is really talking about how these alternatives might taste, so I presume that the answer is: initially, at least, not as good as “real” food. However, if eating cultured chicken nuggets is a viable alternative to killing, paying a bundle, and threatening the climate, many of us will find it more difficult to convince ourselves that eating real chicken is worth it.