Healthier Me

Artificial meat - no thanks!

Posted on 24th October 2011 | There are 0 comments. Why not be the first?

A new article on the BBC website mentioned the idea of growing meat from a meatless source i.e. grown in a laboratory petri dish. It does sound very admirable and proponents say you could help feed the world's starving. However, first of all most of the world's population live a predominantly vegetarian diet, so this isn't necessarily the case.

More importantly though you've got to think about where your food comes from. The more divorced we become from the source of our food the easier it is to lead a poorer and poorer diet. We have to trust food manufacturers more and more, eating more heavily processed foods, and we're moving away from a natural diet.

There are already enough children out there who don't know that cows come in colours other than black-and-white, that all apples aren't exactly the same shape and size and that carrots come from the ground. As soon as you start moving away from naturally grown food, as soon as you stop caring about where food comes from, that's when we can fall into poor health. We start eating the wrong foods because we don't have that choice any more. If you disassociate your eating habits from the origins of your food food comes from, you restrict your choice.

The other aspect to consider is from a direct nutritional perspective. There's a lot of information out there that says all cholesterol is bad so don't eat saturated fats. Whereas once you start looking at diets of healthy people who do eat the saturated fat on their meat, you might also find out that their cholesterol levels can actually protect them from heart disease. If you look at the source of these "good" saturated fats, they come from cattle allowed to graze on pasture land where they're getting a lot of all the essential fatty acids in their diet, and that comes through in the meat. So it depends on the actual source of the meat. Compare those cows with those coming from intensive farming systems, being fed really poor quality diets and kept under stressed conditions. Of course they are going to provide a much poorer quality meat.

We do have the choice, called comsumer power and we can vote with our feet. If we demand better quality food, then manufacturers and producers will supply that. It comes back to what we're prepared to pay for it. Ultimately we have to bear our health in mind - it's worth paying that bit more rather than sacrificing our health for it. But coming back to the meat grown in the lab, how do we know what quality it is? Whether it's really nutritional? And also it's going to deprive us of the joy of seeing cows grazing in a field and its going to deprive of us of genetic diversity, which deprives us of choice, and pass the power of our entire food chain into very few hands.

From where I'm sitting it seems that growing meat in a petri dish is just a little bit too much like playing God.

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