#23 Test Tube Meat
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Starting Point. Discuss the questions below.
Researchers believe that meat grown in factories, rather than on farms, will be a more sustainable and less environmentally harmful source of food. Live cattle and pigs are only 15 percent efficient at converting vegetable proteins to meat from the grass and cereals they eat.
Some biologists warn that cell culture is expensive and technically difficult. But others believe costs will fall to mass-market prices once the technology becomes more common. It has an expected initial price of €250,000.
Focus on Vocabulary. Match the words with the correct meaning.
Focus on Listening. Watch the video. Read the transcript below if necessary.
Transcript
There’s a lot of interest in organic sustainable meat production that’s good for the planet and good for you. But here’s one greener way to get your burger that you may not have heard of. In vitro meat. Here’s what you need to know. The world uses billions of animals for eat every year. And the act of actually raising them has a huge impact on the environment. When you have factory farms we do the united states they produce vast amounts of actual manure and waste that can create serious air pollution, water pollution, and create greenhouse gases that kick up climate change. And the demand for beet is only expected to continue to increase. … Essman suggests that we could need sixty percent more meat by 2050 for the entire world. So scientists have actually been looking at a way, instead of growing a whole animal the way you would in a farm, actually growing meats meat tissue in labs, what’s known as in-vitro meat. The idea base would be that you would take some stem cells from a pig from chicken from a from a cow culture it in a lab, and then grow it using a gross the serum that contains proteins, amino acids, sort of grow it in a scale, sort of add in some other ingredients, some fat, and actually create just just the meat itself. For vegetarians this is this could be a big change because you don’t have the issue of raising and then killing animals. In fact, peta that people people for the ethical treatment of animals, has actually put forward a 1 million dollar prize for the first scientist that’s gonna be able to produce a commercial, lab-grown burger. We have scientists who are getting very close in the lab to creating pilot projects. There’s a scientist in the netherlands, the mark post, who’s probably farthest along, who’s really only a few months away from creating what would be really the first lab-grown burger. From this that burgers gonna cost, right now hundreds of thousands of dollars, because it’s still very much in the pilot scale. So if we don’t want to change our lifestyle, and don’t want to change our consumption habits, we’re probably going to have to augment the meat we are growing now with something that can be grown in a lab. And the result could be good for the planet, good for the animals themselves, and potentially, good tasting. Provided those scientists can actually figure out how to make a lab grown burger taste like a regular one.
Focus on Comprehension. Answer the questions below about the video.
Focus on Speaking. Look at the pictures below.
After carefully considering the information in the video and in the pictures, which side of the argument do you favour? Pro-meat or pro-cultured meat? Being a meat eater or a vegetarian/vegan?
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