Is Cultivated Meat the Future of Food Safety or Just Another Lab Experiment?
What about the human health implications of cultivated meat? I get the animal welfare, environment, and food security benefits, but what about “the potential for cultured meat to have health/safety benefits to individual consumers”? Nutritionally, the most important advantage is being able to swap out the type the fat. Right now, producers are growing straight muscle tissue, so it could be marbled with something less harmful than animal fat, though, of course, there’s still animal protein.
When it comes to health, the biggest, clearest advantage is food safety, reducing the risk of foodborne pathogens. There has been a sixfold increase in food poisoning over the last few decades, with tens of millions “sickened annually by infected food in the United States alone,” including hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of annual deaths. Contaminated meats and other animal products are the most common cause.
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