I think this could be a very interesting field in the years to come. For example, why make it exclusively to mimic the taste of existing meats? We might not be able to resurrect the mammoth or the aurochs, but we have viable tissue samples for something like lab-grown meat. We could get back the animals we hunted to extinction for their meat. We might not bring back the dodo or the passenger pigeon, but we might be able to eat them again and find out for ourselves why we ate them all the last time.
I'm only half kidding. The idea raises some philosophical questions, that's for sure. On the one hand, making it possible for us to eat the meat of animals that don't exist anymore because of us is a little on the ghoulish side. How like humans in our greed that it wasn't enough for us to kill all of them just so we could eat them, but that we would resurrect their flesh after we had done it so that we could go on eating them forever. They would live on beyond the grave, but only in meat form. Then there's the fact that nobody living knows what the meat of an elephant bird or a woolly rhinoceros should really taste like. What we get might or might not taste right and we'd never know the difference.
On the other hand, it could lead to a renaissance of culinary creativity, giving chefs and home cooks the ability to play with meat they've never had the chance to cook with before, like dinosaur meat or mastodon. And they could do it free of guilt, because no living animal had been bred in captivity or hunted down to give them that meat. It needn't even taste like any meat we've ever eaten in the past or present either. We could use the inspiration to design new meats and new ways of engineering protein to feed ourselves, possibly useful as we head out to explore space and colonize it. We might even need to do it because we've gone too far already and driven too many of the animals we eat into extinction.
I find myself wondering how lab-grown meats are going to be received by vegetarians and vegans. Will they still object on ethical grounds or personal preference, or will they accept lab-grown meats as the answer to their ethical objections and see it as a valid alternative to eating meat? It turns out that a lot of the things they eat carry their own ethical questions because of agricultural practices and sustainability. Will we all have to compromise on the lab meat question and accept it along with more sustainable agricultural practices in general as the only practical way to feed ourselves if we want to go on being able to do it? We've also become very reliant on a small set of crops and animals. If something were to happen, for example a blight or a plague which involved a whole species, we might have to turn to new ways of feeding ourselves or face famine while we figured out what to fill the gaping hole in our diet with. Potatoes could all die out in a blight, for example. It's happened before. The same could happen to wheat or chickens or any one of the major food sources we rely on. We're also losing a lot of the arable land we grow crops on and losing land for grazing. Agriculture and the raising of livestock take up a lot of resources, mainly water and land. They also cause a lot of pollution because food production is done on an industrial scale now. It does no good to feed us if we end up drowning in our own waste and pollution anyway. It defeats the objective of survival.
It's going to raise some interesting issues, I think. We're going to have to wrestle with the divide between our practical needs and our ideals and find a way to make the two match up in a way we can live with, literally. Our continued survival might depend on it, seeing as we have altered our environment so drastically that we've forced ourselves into the position of having to adapt again to the world we thought we were adapting to ourselves.
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