Source: U.S Census Bureau, Expected Word Population from 1950 to 2050
The world population will increase by 2.5 billion by 2050. How are we going to feed the 2.5 billion more people in 2050? The UN says we will have to nearly double our total food production and we should adopt new technologies, however there are already one billion chronically hungry people, there’s little more virgin land to open up, climate change will only make farming harder to grow food in most places, the oceans are overfished, and much of the world faces growing water shortages. Prof. Sean Smukler from the University of British Columbia said, “Keeping pace with demand for meat from Asia and Africa will be particularly hard as demand from these regions will shoot up as living standards rise”. So how are we going to deal with this problem?
Here is the solution!
The first strips of muscle have been grown in a project to develop a new way to produce meat
Dutch scientists (Prof. Mark and his group) have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first laboratory-grown hamburger later this October. The aim of the research is to develop a more efficient way of producing meat than rearing animals. At a major science meeting in Canada, Prof Mark Post said, “synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%”. Moreover Oxford University study found that this process would consume 35-60% less energy, 98% less land and produce 80-95% less greenhouse gas than conventional farming.
How it works?
Image from misfit120.wordpress.com
To make the artificial meat, scientists take muscle cells from an animal and incubate them in a protein ‘broth’. This makes the microscopic cells multiply many times over, creating a sticky tissue with the consistency of an undercooked egg. This “wasted muscle” is then bulked up through the laboratory equivalent of exercise; it is anchored to Velcro and stretched. And researchers at Utrecht University have calculated that an initial ten pork stem cells could produce 50,000 tons of meat in two months.
Video from Youtube: euronews science: In Vitro meat
Anyone wants to taste the lab grown meat burger now? However, it takes nearly one year to grow one meat patty in lab, and biggest problem is, cost of producing the hamburger will be US$345,000! But Prof. Mark says that once the principle has been demonstrated, production techniques will be improved and costs will come down.
References
http://haysvillelibrary.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/world-population-update/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16972761
http://www.gizmag.com/lab-grown-meat/20625/
