Clean Meat, Via Lab, Is On The Way
Would you eat beef, chicken, even foie gras grown from animal cells in the lab? Anthropologist Barbara J. King takes a look at new food technologies.
A year ago this month, animal activist Paul Shapiro sat in the offices of the Hampton Creek food technology company in San Francisco and put a forkful of foie gras in his mouth.
This small act was a big deal. Shapiro, at the time the vice president of farm animal protection at the Humane Society of the United States, hadn't eaten meat or any animal product for decades. And the fatty duck liver, considered a delicacy, is notoriously associated with forced feeding of ducks, a process which grossly increases size of the liver and causes suffering and sometimes death. It is an illegal procedure in California.
Shapiro's forkfulreal meat grown in a laboratory without any need for animal slaughter.
