Today I was reading The Age website and discovered an article about a $290,000 burger. My first thought was, "how on earth can Jamie Oliver justify charging that for something he cooked in his restaurant? I don't care if he cooks the thing naked, to live up to his Naked Chef title, surely nobody would want to pay that much for a meal!" After my mental anti-Oliver rant, I decided to read the article, and it turns out that the reason the burger is so expensive, is because the meat used to make it was artificially grown in a lab. This disturbed me more than the my earlier thought of Jamie Oliver cooking nude!
Apparently scientists are researching how to use stem cells to grow meat in a petri dish, instead of in a paddock, because in the next forty years our meat demand is going to outstrip our capacity to produce meat. Demand is expected to double and was are currently already using seventy percent of our agricultural land to farm meat. So it is expected that in the future we will be eating meat that has been grown in a lab rather than having grown up on a farm. I don't know about you, but I for one am still not comfortable eating chicken from a can, tuna from a can I have come to enjoy (although it has taken me many years, and it has to be cooked with something, not just eaten out of the can), but not chicken! So if I am still unable to eat chicken from a can, what chance do I have of ever being able to eat meat from a petri dish?
If you want to read the article, check out The Age online.
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