Leather and meat without killing animals? By 2030,
Sound zany? “[T]his is not so crazy … What’s crazy is what we do today”, Forgacs says. “[W]e raise and slaughter billions of animals to make our hamburgers and our handbags.”
It’s clear why we need to move away from the current system of abusing and killing animals for food and clothing: by 2030, he predicts, it will take 100 billion land animals to provide the world’s population with meat, dairy products, eggs and leather goods if we continue in the same destructive fashion. That’s no good for the planet and even worse for the animals involved.
As the researchers work to perfect the techniques for synthetic meat production, environmentalists and animal rights groups are debating whether lab-grown meat can be a kind of killer app that will eliminate the need to kill animals – or a waste of time and a distraction from the ongoing campaigns to reduce our meat consumption.
“Why go to this much trouble and expense to replace a foodstuff that we simply do not need?” asks Lynne Elliot, chief executive at the Vegetarian Society. “Wouldn’t it be simpler, cheaper, and more sustainable to just stop eating meat altogether?” “It’s all a bit daft really, isn’t it?” read one typical comment. “They should spend all those billions it’s going to take to get these things into supermarkets on a massive advertising campaign telling people ‘just eat broccoli.’ It’s sustainable, cheap, and doesn’t taste half bad tossed in a bit of garlic butter.”
