Is Cultivated Meat the Future of Food Safety or Just Another Lab Experiment?
When the cultivated meat industry calls its products clean meat, that’s not just a nod to clean energy. Food-poisoning pathogens like E. coli, Campylobacter, and Salmonella are fecal bacteria. They are a result of fecal contamination. They’re intestinal bugs, so we don’t have to worry about them if we’re making meat without the intestines.
Yes, there are all sorts of “methods to remove visible fecal contamination” in slaughter plants these days and even experimental imaging technologies designed to detect more “diluted fecal contaminations,” but we are still left at the retail level with about 10 percent of chicken contaminated with Salmonella and 40 percent of retail chicken contaminated with Campylobacter. What’s more, most poultry and about half of retail ground beef and pork chops are contaminated with E. coli, an indicator of fecal residue, as shown here and at 3:47 in my video The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Food Safety. We don’t have to cook the crap out of cultivated meat, though, because there isn’t any crap to begin with.
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