Monday, July 19, 2010
Would You Eat This?
Paula Crossfield over at Civil Eats recently posted an interview with Daniel Imhoff, discussing his new book The CAFO Reader. If you don't follow "food news," CAFO refers to Confined Animal Feeding Operations. It's an interesting interview and I encourage you to read it. However, at one point, Imhoff states "Ultimately where we’re going now is in-vitro meat, where we don’t need animals at all, we just clone tissue, and manufacture animal flesh." I've been thinking about this for several days and I'm curious... would you eat this?
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I'm thinkin'....NO!
ReplyDeleteOnly if I was totally unaware that it was cloned. Seriously- how wrong is that? And, I just don't see where that would be cost effective?
ReplyDeleteBut, I'm avoiding CAFO meat as much as possible anyway. Hopefully that would be enough to keep me free from cloned meats. Seriously. Who actually thinks that's a GOOD idea? Except vegetarians, maybe?
Interesting .. if you're vegetarian (and I am), does that count as vegetarian or not? I think I'd still skip it. It would, however, save so much money in terms of environmental damage from the CAFO's ... not to mention all the issues with antibiotic resistance from the feedlots.
ReplyDeleteYour comments bring up some good points. For one, in the US we really don't have a legally established right to know how our food is produced. If test tube meat goes to market, there will almost certainly be lawsuits and if history is our guide, corporate America will win based on the product being "substantially the same" and some hoo ha about labeling being prejudicial (ya think?).
ReplyDeleteI avoid CAFO meat too. But so many people don't yet, so I understand how this idea could be appealing in terms of getting rid of CAFOs. I also think this idea probably would be quite cost effective in that corporations would probably build automated "lab techs" that would be able to produce vast quantities of "meat" sans human salaries or animal feed bills.
BUT... I can't think about this without the little voice in the back of my mind screaming "Soylent Green is people!" If you don't know the movie Soylent Green, check Wikipedia.
Really, people are so far removed from the foods that sustain them already. Test tube meat? I would prefer to see a values paradigm shift instead.
No, I would not! I think it's totally disgusting, and somehow I doubt that they wouldn't tamper with it further. Unfortunately, if they treat it like GMOs, the public will never even be told what it is.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely not. We do not eat CAFO meat, and we're struggling to avoid as much GMO as we can. I know vegetarians have those bumper stickers that say, "I don't eat anything with a face", but in this context I think I could safely say, "I only eat meat that actually did once HAVE a face!". Ew!
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