Studies over the last few years show that 80% of of people are open to eating meat grown in bioreactors.
Why is this good news? Well one of the important advances with this meat is that it is thought that it could be created with a similar carbon footprint to lettuce.
As a result, this meat could remove the guilt and concern over eating meat do to its environmental impact. If would also remove the need to kill animals for many types of food.
Another important impact, could allow us to eradicate the need for any antibiotics to be used in livestock farming, which would greatly reduce their use in the world. This would allow them to be used for more important health concerns, and would reduce the issue of antibiotic irrelevance as bacteria will have less chance to develop immunity.
Work is progressing to create chicken and beef in this way. However, they are also working on creating Lobster tuna horse and kangaroo.
Animals such as tuna, are coming under increasing threat in the oceans of the world. As predators, this can have a significant negative effect on the seas that they are removed from. Furthermore, as more than 50% of the tuna fished mashed and tinned, this tinned tuna would look and taste identical.
Given that such a large proportion of tuna stocks are under threat, reducing the demand by 50% could make a huge difference. It is also likely that as with other animals, the meat grown in labs over the next decade could soon replace the more complicated steaks and joints potentially undercutting the whole industry.
It is thought that for many of these meats, lab grown meat will be cheaper than from the animal by the 2030.
What changes could this bring? Well in tropical countries, it would mean that rainforest no longer needed to be cut down in order to graze cattle – the leading cause for deforestation in Brazil. In the west, this move could if handled poorly cause problems. If farmland is no longer needed for grazing might it have housing built on it instead? A long-term thinking government might consider paying for farmers to plant woodland across their land? Giving the farmers the financial ability to move into new industries, while at the same time boosting the woodland cover by thousands of times.
Perhaps more important, European livestock rearing produces roughly 10% of European emissions, and some countries around the world have emissions from this industry nearer to 15%. Given that we need to cut our emissions dramatically in the next 14 years (the uk has pledged cuts of 78%) this 10%-15% could supply almost one fifth of the cuts we need to make – without requiring people to stop eating meat, which should therefore be easier to persuade people to make this change.