Guilt over eating animals amid our inability to give it up is powering the birth of a new industry: [Recently], the Agriculture Department approved lab-grown chicken for sale in the United States, with celebrity chef José Andrés pledging to put it on the menu of his D.C. restaurant China Chilcano. Proponents argue that meat brewed from animal and egg cells in vats requires less land and water, and that it will one day be affordable, green and tasty enough to obviate the need to raise and slaughter animals.
Let’s hope so. For now, it is still more expensive to produce and uses enough energy to be of questionable climate benefit — though experimentation could yield improvements on both fronts. Other engineers are busy making plant-based proteins, though current offerings hold less promise for displacing meat consumption because they don’t actually taste like meat.
