Still catching up on all that email (!)…

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Jul 10, 2006 2:44 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: Discover Magazine on lab-grown meat — July 2006 edition

The July edition of Discover Magazine has an article under “Blinded by Science” headed, “The Way of All Flesh. Bringing home the bacon may become a thing of the past when we can grow our own.” (p 28.)

It opens with a discussion of a proposed meat machine, and suggests that “in the future we’ll be sprinkling a few ’starter cells’ into our meat machine before we go to bed and adding a cup or two of ‘growth medium.’ The next morning we’ll awake to an appetizing, fully formed lump of pork or beef or poultry, ready to be fried up with breakfast…”

It tells us that this new meat will be healthier for humans:

“The steaks and chops we use to fill our faces will have the fat content of mere salmon. Nor shall we submit any longer to disease. Salmonella, mad cow, E. coli . . . these will be consigned to the dustbin of meat history and the name pool of heavy-metal bands.”

The article suggests that some vegetarians will be thrilled:

“Ingrid Newkirk, founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, informs me that she has been following Dr. Mironov’s career and the glacial progress of the ‘lab-grown meat’ movement since its inception. Newkirk is salivating in anticipation of the day she finally gets to eat a chunk of meat that nothing had to suffer to produce-not least because the flesh won’t contain the vast quantity of ‘rectums and nose-skin bacteria’ she assures me I’ve been eating a lot of.”

It continues:

“But Newkirk is the right sort of vegetarian: the rational sort. She concedes that not all of her pale fellow travelers share a commonsensical enthusiasm for the coming revolution.”

It then goes on to discuss, in amusing detail, the kinds of vegetarians the author imagines won’t be pleased, those whose “decision not to eat meat was inspired less by the contemplated suffering of animals than by the contemplated prolonged suffering of parents forced to cook two sets of meals….”

You can read the whole article on line at:
http://www.discover.com/issues/jul-06/departments/blinded/

It presents a fabulous opportunity for letters about the current methods of bringing meat to dining tables.

Discover takes letters at editorial [at] discover.com

Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Shorter letters are more likely to be published.

Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi
You are encouraged to forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts but please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

—————————————-

(Crossposted at easyVegan.info.)