Eat meat for the future!
I can already hear the outcry and and feel the glares from my good friend, Cooking Comrade on this one. In fact, she’ll probably give me a good “whatfor” just for the title of my article. That’s okay. She’ll forgive me, and I hope the vegan community will also.
I’m not condemning veganism for the record. I believe properly done, a vegan diet can be healthy and fulfilling. Difficult as it may be, a fully vegan lifestyle can even be very rewarding. Technologically, we’ve advance far enough to pretty much be able to eliminate any form of animal product from our lives. If the world went vegan, we’d probably be a happier, healthier world, but, we can’t do it. Well, not overnight.
Animal By-Products run our world.
I was reading an article today on in vitro meat. Essentially, this is vat grown meat that can be grown and harvested without hurting an animal because, well, it was never in an animal.
At its most simple explanation, In Vitro Meat is taking some muscle cells (the parts of the animal we eat the most), and growing it in a stem-cell protein solution. Basically, we scrape a pig with a plastic pig scraper, Porky gets a nice scratching, and we can grow bacon endlessly.
At least that’s the idea. In Vitro meat is still pretty early in development, and though the technology is rapidly advancing, I don’t think we’ll see “animal free” meat in my lifetime. The reason is pretty simple. Despite the leaps and bounds in technology, the robot eyes, brain implanted computers and exoskeletons, we are still very much a agriculturally driven world economy. That economy would collapse if we suddenly cut out a big hunk of it. The truth is, we need people to keep eating real meat for the same reason we need people to keep driving cars that use gas.
The infrastructure depends on it. We can’t simply flip a switch and get rid of these things, it takes time to convert thousands of gas stations into hydrogen charging stations, and it takes time to balance the textiles market out with the lack of new food production. You see, without cows being slaughtered for tasty steaks, then there is a lot less cow hide to be turned into a swanky leather coat. That means the price of leather goes up, and that causes an increase on the demand for cotton. The price of cotton skyrockets, and suddenly none of us can afford underwear.
The only way for new and awesome advances in technology to keep from destroying the entire world is to ween it slowly off of the things it been using. It’s not easy, and the longer we’ve been doing something the longer it will take to ween us. We can do it, though, and we will.
Like a good doctor will tell you, its not healthy to change completely overnight.