Growing meat in a laboratory

Here's the conclusion of Effect Measure's commentary on the recent scientific paper describing new methods for culturing meat:

Let's assume for the moment some untoward consequence doesn't come along to spoil the party. Will future generations look back on the twentieth century and early twenty-first as a time of high barbarism where gigantic industrial killing machines ("the food industry") were used to feed the ravenous maw of a world population out of control, spawning the seeds of mass extinction by zoonotic disease? Or will mass extinction via a "natural" population crash make the point for us?

Tigers and Strawberries has a long and entertaining post, essentially about what good-hearted people should do until such time as laboratory grown meat becomes a reality. For one thing, she says they should stop complaining that meat looks like it was once alive:

I suspect that I will never stop hearing that particular complaint, at least until humans figure out how to safely clone and culture animal muscle cells in vats, like they do in some of Lois McMaster Bujold's science fiction novels. I jokingly made reference to that last week, and then this week, was surprised to see a news story on the issue at Sustainable Table.

In her book several years ago, Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce and Agriculture: Who Will Produce Tomorrow's Food?, Columbia nutritionist Joan Dye Gussow had no patience with this type of industrial development. She would not have been surprised by this week's news.