Forget loaves and fishes; soon there’ll be a new way to feed the 5,000. According to the learned journal Tissue Engineering, methods being developed to grow human tissue in the lab could soon be used to grow animal tissue too. Imagine — throw a few stem cells in a Petri dish, put your feet up for a few months and, hey presto, steaks all round.
As with all you-couldn’t-make-it-up scientific breakthroughs, this one’s been bubbling under for a while. In 1912, Alexis Carrel, a Nobel prizewinner, cut a piece of heart muscle from a chicken embryo and stuck it in a dish with some nutrients. He continued to feed it and when he died 32 years later it was still growing. What happened to it then is hazy. Perhaps they ate it at the wake. In 2002 Nasa (inventors of the amazingly pointless space pen) managed to make a small piece of fish tissue.
But what are the advantages of in vitro meat? There’s no blood, so those of us who like our rib-eye rare will be a bit disappointed. It will also have no fat, and if you think that’s a good thing you deserve to eat nothing but lettuce. Of course, it will be entirely suitable for vegetarians, since only the stem cells come from animals. I can see the advertisements now: “No animals were harmed during the making of this steak.”