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Thursday, September 22, 2011 – Daily News 5C Meat from a petri dish: Credible or inedible? COLUMBIA, Mo. (MCT) — Nicholas Gen- ovese is a lab-coated collec- tion of incongruities. He's being bankrolled by an animal rights group to make meat. The molecular biologist is working in a lab at a land- grant university that pulls in millions in grants for its research on livestock. Yet the money backing him pushes the desire to end the use of animals as food. And the guy he answers to at the University of Mis- souri makes clear that he sees just three reasons for a cow to exist: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Genovese's work explores a hope — certainly distant, perhaps fanciful — to grow muscle meat sepa- rate from an animal. It would start in a laboratory and move to a factory. It aims for a world that would leave both meat lover and animal lover with a satisfied burp. "One of the interesting things about being a human being is that we advance things," Genovese said. "Think of what we've done in the last several years with computers and cellphones. ... Why can't we make the same kind of advances with food?" Whether you refuse to eat anything with a face or can't enjoy a patio party without indulging your carnivorous side, Genovese thinks the petri dishes he's toying with now may yield part of an answer to make you guilt- free and satiated. The tech- nology is touted by those concerned about animal cru- elty, energy shortages and climate change. But the path to meat with- out feet won't be easy. It would rework Midwestern agriculture, which is cen- tered on raising grain that feeds livestock. And it won't come without resistance that starts, for many, in the gut. "We really need to figure out what we're putting in our bodies rather than making something bigger and cheap- er," said Michael Foust, the owner and chef at The Farm- house restaurant in Kansas City's River Market. "If I served it, I'd be out of busi- ness in a week." Nobody will be serving it anytime soon. And the work Genovese is doing at Colum- bia isn't directly about mak- ing meat. Rather it involves research about self-replicat- ing cells that might solve just one of the many technologi- cal and industrial obstacles that stand between you and animal-free meat. But if he and the handful of other scientists can over- come the herd of practical problems, so-called cultured meat could end what some people consider mass animal cruelty — eliminating the need for operations that jam cattle in feed lots, stuff hogs in massive containment barns or crowd chickens in consume 8 percent of the Earth's fresh water. They produce — in ways that go far beyond flatulence — 18 percent of the planet's green- house gases. That's more than all forms of transporta- tion. One Oxford University study concluded the factory flesh route might require slightly more energy per bite than poultry but would offer savings on all other key mea- sures. Compared with con- ventional beef production, cultured meat would take barely half the energy, belch out less than 4 percent as much in greenhouse gases, use 4 percent as much water and tie up about 1 percent as much land. Building the new burger should be possible. Scien- tists already grow individual organs in vitro for trans- plants. With meat, that work shifts to making muscle tis- sue. But in labs across the places where they never see the sun. "There's the potential to continue to produce meat while you reduce an enor- mous amount of factory farming," said Paul Shapiro, who advocates farm animal protection for the Humane Society of the United States. The goal would be facili- ties that grow muscle tissue, multiplying endlessly a sin- gle cow, pig or chicken cell to create ton after ton of meat. And just the meat. No hooves, snouts, beaks and other things that make an animal an animal — but don't land on the dinner table. That increased efficiency could allow more people to eat higher on the food chain even as the planet struggles to meet its growing appetite for meat. Such futuristic in vitro meat technology might also more gently coax protein from an ever more crowded planet. Consider that animals raised for our dinner tables now use 30 percent of the world's ice-free land. They Help Our Friends & Place Your business Info in the Daily News for only $25 "Paws & Claws" Adopt A Pet Page runs the last Saturday of every month. To be a Pet Sponsor call Suzy at the Red Bluff Daily (530) 527-2151 ext. 103 Let's all help the Tehama County & Corning Animal Shelters find homes for these pets. Tehama County Department of Animal Services, Red Bluff This pet sponsored by THE AQUARIUM & PETS 345 So. Main St. Red Bluff 527-4588 Jasper Border Collie [Mix] Male Corning Animal Shelter This pet sponsored by CABERNET APARTMENTS & DUPLEXES 15 Cabernet Ct. Red Bluff 529-0879 Mamma Mia Labrador Retriever Female Corning Animal Shelter This pet sponsored by SUNSHINE CLEANERS 238 S. Main St., Red Bluff 527-0363 Jack Russell Terrier [Mix] Male Nascar world — the small field of research is concentrated in the Netherlands — only matchstick-size bits of cul- tured muscle tissue have been grown. There are but two reports of consumption. One by a performance artist in Australia who gulped a small bit of frog flesh. The second was a Russian TV reporter who ate a sample before a researcher could object. He pronounced it tasteless.