In Vitro Meat Essay

In 2014, roughly 24.1 billion pounds of beef was consumed by Americans (Brunker and White, 2015). America is in the top five of most meat consumed worldwide. This shows how important and impactful meat production is to the United States. In Vitro meat also known as “Cultured Meat” is a quite a controversial topic that should be discussed. The in vitro meat has created a large buzz in the agricultural industry within the last 5 years or so. In 2013, an actual product of in vitro meat was created and taste tested by panelists. The results were quite shocking to hear. The meat was said to have similar texture to a regular ground beef patty. Although, the burger was not as flavorful as a normal burger due to a lack of fat. However, I personally

Frederick Edwin Smith had predicted that “It will no longer be necessary to raise an entire animal just for one part, someday it will be possible to grow a steak as large and as tender and juicy as can be desired” (Birkenhead and Smith,1930). Even Winston Churchill also thought the idea was possible to only grow a chicken breast, or wing by growing these parts under a medium (Churchill, 1932). There have been multiple experiments to prove that you can keep muscle alive while it is outside of the body. The muscle just needs to be cared for with certain nutrients to grow properly. Since this thought of keeping a muscle alive outside of the body to create a certain part of an animal instead of growing an entire animal has been around just short of a century; in 2013, a man named Mark Post made this idea a reality. Mark Post of the Department of Physiology, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands made cultured meat a reality. For cultured beef to become an alternative to livestock beef, the production needed to be resource efficient, sustainable, scalable, and lead to a product that is indistinguishable from current beef(Post,2014). Also, the product needed to be worthy and equivalent of the traditional