(Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)
Would you eat meat that was grown in a lab instead of fresh from a farm? Following a recent statement by the Food and Drug Administration, and summarized in an article by The Guardian, lab-grown meats are now legal to sell and considered safe to eat.
Upside Foods, a California-based company makes these synthetic foods by taking living cells from chickens and growing them in a lab without actually killing any animals. It’s also not just this company that the FDA is interested in approving selling this product. There’s supposedly other companies out there that they’re having talks with, who even want to do the same thing with a wider range of meats, like seafood.
So far, Singapore is the only country in the world to legalize selling lab meat, and companies are wondering how American consumers will react to this new type of meal.
Well, let’s ask them!
Isla Hinkley, a freshman at Hampshire College, is all for eating lab meat.
“I absolutely would. It seems like a cool technology, and it would help the environment and ethical treatment of animals so much if we switched to it.”
Hinkley also brought up a good point about how the lab meat would affect the economy: “I’d like to know how much energy making a cow’s worth of new meat uses compared to raising and slaughtering and slaughtering a cow, and how many jobs it would add compared to the thousands of people who work in the meat industry.”
This guest post is in partnership with True Star Media.