Tissue engineering has progressed to a point where small amounts of meat can be grown from a single animal muscle cell. Although it may be a decade or more before we can expect this medium to be streamlined and tweaked to a level suitable for commercial mass production, some scientists say tissue engineered meat is the inevitable future of food production.

The upsides of this would be numerous: producers can control what goes into the meat, and there has been some speculation about making meat healthier by doing things like replacing Omega 6, a fatty acid, with Omega 3, which is better for us. Millions of animals every year would be spared from enduring a short, horrible life to feed us. The meat would not be contanimated by things like feces and dirt, an unavoidable part of modern meat production. The space and resources required to produce meat would be cut drastically and hopefully, so would the cost.

On the other hand, lots of people have a gut reaction of disgust and aversion when presented with the idea of meat grown in a lab. It certainly does not look like the meat we are used to, and the process of creating it is far from appetizing. Although it is genetically identical to 'naturally grown' meat, there have been no long term studies carried out and it is concievable consumers might experience unforseen side effects from eating tissue engineered meat.

If the technology was available today to put a tissue engineered steak on your plate, would you eat it? What if it didn't taste quite exactly the same, would the benefits be worth it? Do you agree with producers altering the chemical makeup of meat? Should lab-grown meat be given a different name so people know when they are buying foods that contain it, at a restaurant for example?