By Lou Bendrick

Last April, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced it was sponsoring a one million dollar “X-Poultry Prize” for the creation of affordable, humane and “commercially viable” test-tube meat by 2012. This announcement, not at all surprisingly, piqued public curiosity (for starters, why is PETA endorsing anything with the word “meat” in it?).

Test-tube meat is also known as in vitro meat, cultured meat, victimless meat, vat-grown meat, hydroponic meat and, finally, shmeat. (Note to self: Be sure to apply for inevitable X Prize to rename this stuff.) Shmeat is grown from a cell culture (hence the in vitro or cultured prefixes), not from a live animal. These harvested cells are taken from an animal, such as a pig, and placed in a “nutrient-rich medium” that mimics blood. Once the cells multiply they are attached to a spongy scaffold or “sheet” (sheet + meat = shmeat) that has been soaked with nutrients and stretched to increase cell size and protein content.

This shmeat could, in theory, be harvested in vast quantities and used in minced meat products: burgers, nuggety things, or potted meat-food products, etc. While scientists (they call themselves “tissue engineers”) admit that growing a pork chop with a bone without a real pig attached is not likely, they also say that affordable, palatable minced shmeat might be available at a grocery store near you within a decade.

So… is this news great? Or gross? If it’s hard for you to tell, I assure you, you are not alone. When I first read about test-tube meat, I experienced psychological delight at its humanitarian prospects coupled with a simultaneous gag reflex at the thought of actually eating it.

To help you sort through your feelings, lie back on the couch while we examine some pros and cons of shmeat. (Most of these points are hypothetical, given that shmeat is in the experimental stages, but let’s take a novel approach and think seriously about a possibly harrowing technological advance before it becomes a widespread reality. Just a thought!)

Shmeat Pros

Proponents of shmeat say it might…

…Help meet the protein needs of a growing and protein-hungry world. Factoid to lose sleep over: In 2050 the world’s population will likely reach 9 billion.

Meanwhile, according to Jason Matheny, director of New Harvest, a nonprofit working to develop meat substitutes, “a single cell could theoretically produce the world’s annual meat supply.”

…Curtail the horrific animal suffering that comes with factory farming — hence the PETA endorsement. Unless we come up with other solutions fast, factory farming will likely expand to feed our future’s nine billion people. To underscore the point that factory farming is a living hell, PETA created the video Meet Your Meat, narrated by that hunk of shmeef-cake, Alec Baldwin.

…Reduce the environmental impacts of factory farming (by eliminating or greatly reducing the farms themselves). These factories (it’s wrong to call them farms) use an enormous amount of fossil fuels, cause lots of air and water pollution, and create vast clouds of greenhouse gases. “I actually think the carbon footprint of this will be around 10 percent of the carbon footprint of conventional meat,” Matheny told me. But what about those industrial-scale bioreactors that will be needed to make this stuff? “The nice thing about those bioreactors is that most the energy from their operation comes from the biological processes themselves, because things warm up when they’re growing.”

He added, “We could absolutely go without fossil fuels throughout the entire process and rely on solar energy or wind or geothermal or whatever.”

…Be healthier for you. Tissue engineers (a renaming X Prize is desperately needed for them, too) could manipulate shmeat’s fat content or add omega-3 fatty acids. Shmeat would also be free of the hormones, antibiotics and diseases (salmonella, E. coli, Mad Cow, etc.) associated with CAFO meat.

…Be tasty. The yuck factor may be temporary and overblown. PETA co-founder and president Ingrid Newkirk told me that she attempted to serve vegetarian hot dogs at a baseball game in Virginia just 12 years ago. The baseball fans recoiled and reached for the real ones. “Do you know what’s in a real hot dog?” she asked in disbelief. “Pig anuses, bits of their inner snouts, nipples, tail and fecal matter?” The point is that a food’s acceptance is cultural. “So it’s not really that there’s a grossness factor [to test-tube meat],” she insists. “It’s a visceral reaction to something new. A new generation will come along and not believe that generations before them actually ate the decomposing corpses of tortured animals.”