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Scientists in the Netherlands hoping to create a more efficient alternative to rearing animals have grown small pieces of beef muscle in a laboratory.
These strips will be mixed with blood and artificially grown fat to produce a hamburger by the autumn.
The stem cells in this particular experiment were harvested from by-products of slaughtered animals but in the future, scientists say, they could be taken from a live animal through biopsy.
One usually assumes the main motivation for vegetarianism - aside from those who practise for religious reasons - is about the welfare of animals. The typical vegetarian forswears meat because animals are killed to get it.
So if the meat does not come from dead animals would there be an ethical problem in eating it if it one day lands on supermarket shelves?
if you want to minimise animal suffering and promote more sustainable agriculture, adopting a vegetarian diet might be the worst possible thing you could do.
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- at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein
- more environmental damage, and
- a great deal more animal cruelty than does farming red meat.
Published figures suggest that, in Australia, producing wheat and other grains results in:
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Agriculture to produce wheat, rice and pulses requires clear-felling native vegetation. That act alone results in the deaths of thousands of Australian animals and plants per hectare.
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Wooded grasslands of the Cerrado suffering ongoing deforestation as soy agriculture expands to feed growing demand for meat
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The rising global appetite for meat is contributing to the destruction of enormous wooded grasslands in southern America, WWF warned on Monday.
While satellite data and stronger law enforcement have led to a decline in deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, the Cerrado, a savannah that covers more than one-fifth of Brazil, has experienced ongoing deforestation due to the expansion of soy agriculture, led by demand for soybean to produce feed for factory-farmed animals.
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Human activity through agriculture and cattle rearing has devastated 50% of the Cerrado, with only 20% of it still intact.
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Vegetarianism: is it a good idea? Vegetarianism is a complex set of beliefs and practices, spanning from the extreme “fruitarianism,” where people only eat fruits and other plant parts that can be gathered without “harming” the plant (though I’m sure the plant would rather keep its fruits and use them for the evolutionary purpose of dispersing its own offspring) to various forms of “flexitaranism,” like pollotarianism (poultry is okay to eat) and pescetarianism (fisk okay).
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Is it true that a vegetarian diet increases one’s health? Yes, but only in certain respects, partially because vegetarians also tend to be health conscious in general (they exercise, don’t smoke, drink less, etc.), and it is not the case for the more extreme versions (including veganism), where one needs to be extremely careful to achieve a balanced diet which may need to be supplemented artificially, especially for growing children.
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vegetarian men are seen as wimps and less macho than those who like tucking into a steak – even by women who do not eat meat themselves, research shows.
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Researchers gave hundreds of young men and women descriptions of fictional students varying only according to diet, and asked them to rate aspects of their personalities.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the vegetarian characters were seen as being more virtuous.
Further questioning revealed that men who do not eat meat were also viewed as less masculine than the others – even by vegetarians.
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society's answer to the question “Is it acceptable to hurt animals for our pleasure?” isn't always “No.” Odds are that most of the people who objected to the dog fighting and crush videos are frequent consumers of meat, milk, and eggs from industrialized farms. And the life of an animal in a typical industrialized farm is notoriously punishing. Many spend their lives in cages so confining they can barely move; ammonia fumes burn their eyes; their beaks or tails are chopped off to prevent them from biting each other out of stress; and the farm's conditions make many of them so sick or weak that they die in their cages or on the way to slaughter. As a society, however, we apparently believe that the pleasure we get from eating those animals makes their suffering worth it.
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many people will object that eating animals isn’t a matter of pleasure at all, but of the need for sustenance. While that may have been true for our ancestors who survived by hunting wild animals, I don’t think it has much relevance to our current situation. First, it's questionable whether we actually do need to eat animal products in order to be healthy; the American Dietetic Association has given the thumbs up to vegetarian and even vegan diets. But even if you believe that some amount of animal product consumption is medically necessary, we could still buy from farms that raise their livestock much more humanely. It would cost more, but we could always compensate by cutting back on other luxuries, or simply by eating less meat. By any reasonable estimate, Americans could cut their meat consumption drastically with no ill effects on their health (and likely with many positive effects). Buying the sheer amount of meat that Americans do, at the low prices made possible by industrialized farms, is a luxury that can’t be defended with a “need for sustenance” argument. It’s about pleasure — the pleasure of eating more meat than strictly necessary for health, and the pleasure of saving money that can then be spent on other things we enjoy.
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Our conflicted relationship with animals
Why do we get so angry with animal abusers, but eat more animals than ever before? An expert provides some clues
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In his fascinating new book, "Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat," Hal Herzog looks at the wild, tortured paradoxes in our relationship with the weaker, if sometimes more adorable, species.
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it's the human-meat relationship. The fact is, very few people are vegetarians; even most vegetarians eat meat. There have been several studies, including a very large one by the Department of Agriculture, where they asked people one day: Describe your diet. And 5 percent said they were vegetarians. Well, then they called the same people back a couple of days later and asked them about what they ate in the last 24 hours. And over 60 percent of these vegetarians had eaten meat. And so, the fact is, the campaign for moralized meat has been a failure. We actually kill three times as many animals for their flesh as we did when Peter Singer wrote "Animal Liberation" [in 1975]. We eat probably 20 percent more meat than we did when he wrote that book. Even though people are more concerned about animals, it seems like that's been occurring. The question is, why?
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