Space Meat; Growing Beef 339km Above Earth - Nick Hwang

Growing meat? Beef does not come from plants, it is taken from a dead cow! Or so this is the way it has been for thousands of years. However, now, due to revolutionary advances in science, most of those hamburgers you eat in a restaurant will be produced synthetically in a lab, and no, it is not an imitated meat or veggie burger, it is legit beef! But how is this possible? How can an animal’s muscle tissue be grown like a plant in a lab? 

This process starts by taking stem cells from muscle tissue of a cow, then providing these cells with amino acids and carbohydrates, which causes the cells to multiply and grow, forming actual muscle tissue. This means that you will still be able to gorge down that delicious burger without the guilt of knowing that a cow was butchered to make it to the plate. 

The brilliant concept of lab grown meat started back in 2012, and recently, as of September 26, 2019, the first lab grown burger has been produced in outer space! This is a huge step forward for the meat industry and may possibly become more prevalent in the near future. The process of lab grown meat requires less water than feeding cows, quality is much easier to control, and less methane gas would be released into the atmosphere because of the reduced number of cows. The meat itself is also cleaner, being grown in a sterile environment with little to no bacteria as opposed to livestock, which can contain antibacterial drugs or other bacterium.

Although the world has gone as far as to grow beef in space, there are still many flaws and downsides to the production of and the technology behind lab grown meat. One of these flaws is that we are many years away from producing this meat in high quantities, which means that the production process is quite expensive. However, the cost of production has dramatically decreased since the idea had first been introduced, which means science burgers are coming soon

Sources:

Smithers, Rebecca. “First Meat Grown in Space Lab 248 Miles from Earth.” The Guardian,  Guardian News and Media, 7 Oct. 2019,            https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/07/wheres-the-beef-248-miles-up-as-first-meat-is-grown-in-a-space-lab.