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Trail’s end
Published in James Barilla, Naturebot, 2021
Cultured meat is made up of stem cells taken from a donor animal and grown in a “bioreactor” that simulates the chemical and physical conditions of the original tissue in the body. These cells can then be harvested and consumed without ever harming the original donor—in theory, cells could be taken from a small sample from a single animal and grown in vast quantities. In essence this approach recreates the animal body outside the body, minus any cognitive or sensory apparatus. In a striking re-enactment of Descartes disarticulation of brain and body, it’s strictly the cells of the body that are reproduced here, not those in the brain or the olfactory bulb. There’s no sensing, thinking, or feeling involved.
Pastoral agriculture, a significant driver of New Zealand’s economy, based on an introduced grassland ecology and technological advances
Published in Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 2023
John R. Caradus, Stephen L. Goldson, Derrick J. Moot, Jacqueline S. Rowarth, Alan V. Stewart
Willingness to accept a plant-based diet can vary depending on the consumers’ cultural origins, their diet preferences, awareness of animal production systems (Wang and Scrimgeour 2021), or in the case of insect-based protein, the fear of the new and unfamiliar (de Koning et al. 2020). It is acknowledged that economics, health/nutrition and aesthetics/taste are important factors in determining consumer food choices rather than explicitly environmental benefit and sustainability (Tucker 2018). A survey of over 1000 consumers from Germany and New Zealand balanced across age, gender and income showed a general preference for meat based rather than in vitro meat diets (Lemken et al. 2019). Modelling has indicated that manufacture of cultured meat is not necessarily environmentally superior to cattle (Lynch and Pierrehumbert 2019). Additionally, it is proposed that plant-based diets will incur higher cost to households (Kidd et al. 2021) and on their own may not provide the full nutrition needed for a global population: balanced diet is plant based and animal optimised (Smith et al. 2021). For New Zealand’s introduced grassland, the prospect of using grass protein concentrate has shown that refining the extraction method was crucial for achieving optimum protein functionality during its use for food applications (Kaur et al. 2021). In vitro meats are being produced using animal cells under laboratory conditions (Post 2012). In New Zealand there is little understanding of this potential food source, and consumers are hesitant to engage with in vitro meats due to lack of familiarity (Malavalli et al. 2021). In Europe and USA, many consumers appear willing to eat in vitro meats, although in the case of the USA it is deemed unlikely to replace farmed meat in their diet (Hocquette et al. 2015; Wilks and Phillips 2017; Bryant and Dillard 2019). The debate between those promoting alternative protein sources and those supporting the value of conventional livestock production looks set to continue (Sexton et al. 2019).