Scientists working to grow meat in labs

Well here's the latest queasy twist for the legions of food activists warning about the proliferation of factory farming and genetically modified foods: Some scientists are working to grow meat inside of laboratories.

One pioneer in the field is Dr. Vladimir Mironov, a developmental biologist and tissue engineer at the University of South Carolina. He told Reuters' Harriet McLeod that growing "in-vitro" or "cultured" meat may be viewed by many as "disruptive technology," but he sees it as the wave of the future in food cultivation.

"It will be functional, natural, designed food," Mironov told Reuters, while noting that scientists in the Netherlands are pursuing similar research. "How do you want it to taste? You want a little bit of fat, you want pork, you want lamb? We design exactly what you want. We can design texture."

What's more, Minonov notes, the lab-based approach to meat cultivation promises to be more humane than the factory-farm alternative. His research team has indeed received a grant from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in an effort to reduce both the need for massive farms and, well, the need to slaughter animals for food.

The process of growing meat, as described in a 2005 New York Times piece by Raizel Robin, essentially involves taking stem cells from a live animal, or cells from a cut of actual meat, and applying a protein to it that causes the cells to multiply.

The process is similar to how yogurt is made. "Once a meat-cell culture exists, it could function the way a yeast or yogurt culture does," Robin wrote, "so that meat growers wouldn't need to use a new animal for each set of starter cells."

Still, the brave new age of lab-based meat, like the factory-farm system of meat production it's meant to rein in, has us wondering if vegetarianism won't be the simpler option in the long run.

(Photo: Getty/H. Armstrong Roberts)