By Charles Q. Choi via www.msnbc.com
Winston Churchill once predicted that it would be possible to grow chicken breasts and wings more efficiently without having to keep an actual chicken. And in fact scientists have since figured out how to grow tiny nuggets of lab meat and say it will one day be possible to produce steaks in vats, sans any livestock.
Pork chops or burgers cultivated in labs could eliminate contamination problems that regularly generate headlines these days, as well as address environmental concerns that come with industrial livestock farms.
However, such research opens up strange and perhaps even disturbing possibilities once considered only the realm of science fiction. After all, who knows what kind of meat people might want to grow to eat?
Advantages touted
Increasingly, bioengineers are growing nerve, heart and other tissues in labs. Recently, scientists even reported developing artificial penis tissue in rabbits. Although such research is meant to help treat patients, biomedical engineer Mark Post at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and his colleagues suggest it could also help feed the rising demand for meat worldwide.
The researchers noted that growing skeletal muscle in labs — the kind people typically think of as the meat they eat — could help tackle a number of problems:
Continue reading about Mad Science? Growing Meat Without Animals
by Tom Philpott via www.grist.org
Why isn’t the federal government seriously investigating the possible CAFO-swine flu link?
I’ve posed that question several times recently, most recently here. Now let me venture an answer.
The USDA is the federal agency tasked with ensuring that practices on farms, including factory animal farms, are safe. But it’s also the agency that exists to promote U.S. agricultural interests. In other words, the USDA has an inherent conflict around overseeing conditions on factory-style farms. For example, training a cold eye on the systemic safety hazards of factory farming isn’t likely to do much to promote the pork industry.
from the start of the novel H1N1 outbreak, the USDA has tilted decidedly in the direction of promoting U.S. ag interests. Even though virologists and veterinary scientists have been warning for years that large hog farms create ideal conditions for the generation of dangerous new flu viruses—as this Environmental Health Perspectives article definitively shows—-the USDA still isn’t systematically testing swine herds for H1N1. It continues to rely on a voluntary—and little used—testing program.
Nor is it doing much, from what I can tell, on the problem of MRSA, the antibiotic-resistent staph infection that claims more lives every year than AIDS. MRSA has been pretty definitively linked to factory hog farms—specifically the dubious practice of dosing pigs daily with antibiotics.
If the USDA has been limp in its attempts to examine safety conditions on factory farms, it’s been downright zealous in its efforts to promote the pork industry.
The latest: The USDA spent a cool $50 million on pork last week, in an explicit attempt to “assist … struggling producers.” That brings total 2009 federal spending on pork—the “other white meat,” that is, not pet projects for cronies—to $105 million. The latest $50 million worth of pork will be shunted into the National School Lunch Program, playing its traditional role of sinkhole for unwanted ag commodities.
Continue reading about Why the USDA Has No Business Overseeing Conditions on Factory Farms
This following release is from several years ago but remains a vitally important issue that consumers must continue to fight.
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Washington, May 3, 2007 – A coalition of consumer, environmental, and animal welfare organizations today announced the submission of more than 130,000 comments to the Food and Drug Administration from consumers who oppose the Agency’s proposed plan to introduce food from cloned animals into the U.S. food supply.
Citizens for Health, the Center for Food Safety, Consumers Union, Food and Water Watch, The Humane Society of the United States, the American Anti-Vivisection Society, the Consumer Federation of America and the Organic Consumers Association joined together to send a strong, unified message to the FDA that the public opposes the introduction of cloned animals in food. Today was the last day of a public comment period that began in January in response to the FDA’s proposal to allow products from cloned animals into the food supply. Members of the meat and dairy industries and several nonprofit organizations urged the Agency to take time to consider comments from the widest possible sample of Americans in consideration of the untested nature of cloning technology.
Continue reading about Americans Urge Agency to Adopt a Mandatory Ban on Untested, Cloned Food