Daily Update #2 - "Is lab-grown meat the next frontier in ethical eating?"

Daily Update #2 - "Is lab-grown meat the next frontier in ethical eating?"

With the fight against climate change slowly becoming a rising issue, more and more people are looking to do their part in cutting down their carbon footprint. CBC News takes a look into the new frontier of lab grown meat, and if the product is able to be more sustainable and efficient than regular grown meat.

Stephanie Hogan is able to successfully craft her argument by presenting multiple sources that show how the growth of meat in labs can lead to less CO2 and methane production across the cattle industry. Referred to as “clean” or “cultured” meat, Hogan believes in “the potential [of clean meat] to be better for both the environment and your health,”  (CBC). To dig more into the topic, Stephanie interviewed Amy Rowat, an associate professor and cultured meat scientist, who put the lab growing process into simpler terms. Rowat described the procedure where “stem cells are taken from an animal's muscle and put in a nutrient-rich broth, of sorts, to encourage them to multiply and grow into muscle fibres,”. Hogan says we have reason for optimism for this “clean” meat as it is essentially “real meat, but with one key difference: Animals don't have to be raised or killed to produce it.” From an environmental standpoint, a study by Amy Rowat found that “To produce one billion quarter-pounder burgers, it takes 1.2 million cows living for three years on 8,600 square kilometres of land. The same number of cultured burgers would require the muscle stem cells of just one living cow, and they'd take only about a month and a half to grow.” Although the cultured burgers are a little more expensive now, the improvement of the technology used to produce the burgers will only become more efficient, as Rowat “believes cultured meat will eventually be on par cost-wise with organic beef.”

 By using a variety of sources, Hogan was able to successfully defend her point that moving to lab grown meat would greatly cut down on the amount of emissions we currently put into the atmosphere. She presented her evidence in a well ordered manner that allowed the reader to get the full spectrum of the story, including defending her opinion against varying counterpoints not discussed. The one flaw in Hogan’s piece is that I would have liked to see more hard hitting evidence on the production of CO2 by cows, and how lab grown meat could mitigate those effects.

LINK: https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/what-on-earth-newsletter-lab-grown-meat-green-energy-1.5281252