BIOENGINEERED MEAT

Current meat production methods have many health, environmental and other problems associated with them. A new approach to produce meat and thereby reducing these risks is probably feasible with existing tissue engineering techniques and has been proposed as a humane, safe and environmentally beneficial alternative to slaughtered animal flesh. Bioengineered meat has the potential to greatly reduce animal suffering and make eating animals unnecessary, even while satisfying all the nutritional and hedonic requirements of meat eaters. In the long term, tissue-engineered meat is the inescapable future of humanity. However, in the short term the extremely high prohibitive cost of the biofabrication of tissue-engineered meat is the main potential obstacle, although large-scale production and market penetration are usually associated with a dramatic price reduction. This book discusses the requirements that need to be met to increase the feasibility of invitro meat production, which includes finding an appropriate stem cell source, their growth inside a bioreactor and providing essential cues for proliferation and differentiation.