Lab Grown Chicken Excites Many But Is It Ethical?
This article from I fucking love science (IFL) is currently making the rounds on social media with a mixture of happiness, shock and a little bit of skepticism but not nearly enough. Put the brakes on before you start thinking this is anything worth backing as a vegan and lets dive into the facts.
Cultured or lab grown chicken meats are not ethical at all if the process is anything like how they make the cultured “beef” and from what we’ve researched it must be grown like “beef” and “pork”.
The “beef” (and “pork”) uses “Fetal Bovine Serum” (FBS) which they get at the slaughterhouse from “dairy” cows when they either abort her baby by pulling out with a metal cradle device or cut them out while gutting on the slaughterhouse floor. They then pierce the calves beating heart with a needle and drain the blood into a bag and allow it to coagulate. This is the base for all lab grown meats so far and I’ve followed Memphis meats for a long time and their research (“supermeat” is a scam).
The process for obtaining stem cells for chicken lab grown flesh would be no different and would likely require a lot of baby male chicks to produce all using the same process. Memphis meats claims that their process at the moment is a twenty three to one ratio, that is to say that they can produce 23 pounds of flesh to every one pound of “resources” aka dead calves.
On top of it still hurting non humans and requiring fetuses to produce, there’s also the issue of cholesterol still being present which is the only way nearly to have a heart attack or heart disease outside of being a vegan that consumes tons of oils anyway, although that doesn’t cause arteriosclerosis to the artery walls but uses a similar process. This would also still cause all the same cancers, obesity, strokes, Alzheimer’s, etcetera so there’s just no advantage to this over plant based meats that will soon be out to market full scale that taste exactly like flesh.
Impossible Foods created the impossible burger and chicken using a plant based heme. Heme is the substance in blood that gives flesh the flavor people are used to which is why when mixed with other ingredients their burgers and chicken taste exactly the same and carnists couldn’t tell the difference in side by side comparisons to the “real” thing.
Bottom Line: Plant based meats are the future, the technology is already being deployed with replacements that tasted exactly like the flesh versions and they’re 100% vegan with no needles piercing aborted calves hearts on a slaughter house floor. Vegans don’t support lab grown / cultured meats.
