Islamic scholars consulted by a leading producer of cultivated meat say that the newfangled protein — which is grown from animal cells and doesn’t require animals to be slaughtered — can be halal, or permissible under Muslim law.
And the Jewish Orthodox Union this month certified a strain of lab-grown chicken as kosher for the first time, “marking a significant step forward for the food technology’s acceptance under Jewish dietary law,” as the Times of Israel put it.
I’m glad to see lab-grown meat clear another hurdle. The better and more common this technology is, the closer we’ll be to finally getting rid of the meat industry and factory farming.
It is a bit weird to think though that the eradication of factory farming is going to lead to a decrease in global cow populations. So based on raw numbers alone this is actually a bad thing for the species.
We should at least factor in how natural or pleasant their existence is. Or else a maliciously engineerd creature which spreads like crazy but is genetically bound to suffer immensely all their life is somehow preferrable over a local population of happy birds.
The species we use to harvest their products and body parts are often unable to survive naturally, some suffering from accumulated genetic defects, like being unable to support their artificially increased body weight.
If we don’t need to reserve pastures for human-cows, there might be a chance for natural species to grow their numbers again.
Not really. We had a similar reduction in the global horse population at the beginning of the 1940s. We used to have basically a couple horses per person there for a few thousand years. We still have plenty of horses, most even have better lives now. Hopefully we can finally make horse racing financially unviable so we stop killing so many horses for no good reason.
There are already people who have pet cows that they won’t eat when the cow dies. Those people will tend the smaller herds.
i dont care about the species, i care about individuals