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A new meat market

By Jan Manson

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Take another look at that chicken sandwich you had for lunch. Soon that meat could come from a chicken that never lived.

This doesn’t mean “living” in the existential sense. It means the chicken would simply be a hunk of flesh, cultivated in vitro in a lab, which is an idea being pushed by the animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, better known as PETA.

The group recently challenged the scientific community by offering a $1 million dollar prize for creating the first lab-grown meat. Not a soy or micro-protein product, but real meat, grown from a lab procedure and not from a live animal. PETA’s challenge has brought to the forefront controversial questions of the ethics and the dangers of genetic science.

According to an article published in April on the National Public Radio Web site, www.npr.org, in order to win PETA’s prize, the lab-grown meat “must have a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh, be produced in sufficiently large quantities to be sold commercially, and successfully sold at a competitive price in at least 10 states.”

What are the implications of lab-grown meat for the average consumer? While it’s unlikely that such a product would hit the shelves anytime soon, the success of Boca, Morningstar and other brands of “fake” meats hints that this could be a viable industry.

“I think it’s an interesting idea,” says recent KU graduate Mikey Fletcher, who has been a vegetarian for the past five years. “I don’t think it will get many vegetarians to switch, though. There are already a lot of fake meat products out there, and many vegetarians aren’t looking to get meat back into their diet.”

Fletcher says he likes that people who had not considered vegetarianism before might be turned on to it through PETA’s work. However, Fletcher says going vegetarian is just one part of the larger puzzle of being environmentally conscious and caring about animal rights.

Danica Pollard, a chef at Lidia’s in Kansas City, Mo., says the idea is too weird for her to try. “But restaurants would definitely use it,” Pollard says. “There are cutting-edge places that would want to be the first to offer that kind of choice.”

Pollard says that while she wouldn’t eat it, she does like the idea that lab-grown meat could reduce animal suffering and lower the risk of diseases, such as the bird flu and mad cow disease, for consumers.

The United States has historically been a leader in technological innovation, and this would mark a milestone in food production. The impact of alternative meat could affect layers of society and could create new financial markets and rewards for newly created companies.

University of Kansas anthropology professor Don Stull explores the topic of meat packing workers and the problems hovering around the industry in his 2003 book Slaughterhouse Blues. Many slaughterhouse workers are immigrants and are often paid low wages for their repetitive, gruesome and grueling work.

Slaughterhouse Blues examines how the American meatpacking industry has changed since the 1970s. The location of the industry has switched to rural areas and many people are disconnected from their food’s source.

The book focuses on the historical perspective of the meat industry. It investigates modern meat production and the industrialization, which has encouraged factory farming in place of family-run farms. This effect can be measured by workers and the so-called, “Human Price of Our Meat.” Stull and co-author Michael Broadway noticed the trend for low-paid workers (salaries often under $20,000 per year) and injuries on the job.

The PETA challenge questions the ethics and practices surrounding the meat industry. From Burger King to The Jungle, people respond to investigative reporting that sheds light on sensitive subjects. But not everyone is optimistic about the announcement.

Animal rights activist Tyler Davis thinks PETA is missing the point. He says that while it was good for PETA to be focused on the smaller goal of getting people to stop consuming meat, PETA was overlooking the dangers of aligning themselves with companies such as Boca and Morningstar who are owned by Phillip Morris. Plus, they would be tampering with the food supply, the consequences of which would need to be studied over a period of many years to know if the modified food was truly safe.

Davis said he would much rather see PETA support sustainable farms.

“I would like to see PETA highlight the real alternatives like small, sustainable farms and show people the real problems with the meat industry,” Davis says. Not just animal cruelty but the health concerns with meat and the lack of transparency in the industries that deal with meat and alternative meat products.

KFC Canada has implemented “vegan” chicken into some stores after protests about cruelty in slaughterhouses that KFC was connected with. The events that play out in the next few years could shape the future of food in America.

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