Artificial Meat

The future gets closer, again. 

Wired News: Test Tube Meat Nears Dinner Table

Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings within the next few years.

Would it be weird to eat a burger that you knew was not grown on a cow?  Would vegetarians start to eat meat again en masse?  I have a few vegetarian friends who aren't really opposed to killing the animals; they are most concerned with the health benefits of eating a vegetarian diet.  But then, what if they could genetically modify the meat to have more omega-3 than omega-6 (like fish)?  Asimov and other sci-fi authors predicted this kind of thing years ago, although for them food was made out of algea, not artificial meat.