GuelphToday received the following Letter to the Editor from author Paul Shapiro, regarding alternative meat sources:
Owen Roberts is right that for many people, the idea of eating meat that's either made from plants or even grown from animal cells is very appealing ("Cultured meat isn’t weird…to a 14-year-old, January 13).
As someone who's eaten both kinds of "alternative meats" many times, I can attest that they taste very good. And that's certainly reason enough for me to eat them, but the fact that they require far fewer resources to produce than raising and slaughtering animals is another big reason there's so much demand.
In a world with increasing human population and all the environmental and food security pressures that involves, we're going to have to get a lot more efficient at how we produce protein for humanity. We used to rely on pigeons to carry our letters around; now we email. We used to rely on horses to carry us around; now we drive. We've relied on animals for meat for a long time; we're now inventing better and better alternatives that one day may no longer be considered "alternative" at all.
Paul Shapiro is the author of Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World
