The Guardian published the article Artificial meat? Food for thought by 2050 yesterday and I'm gonna have to say "I don't think so." The problem is the way we do - and have done - agriculture since it's beginning. Annual plantings of grain have desertified hundreds of millions of acres since it was discovered. The Green Revolution made plantings of these types of crops more productive than possible through manual labor so statements like "little more land is available for food production" and "extra carbon dioxide in the air from global warming, along with better fertilisers and chemicals to protect arable crops, could hugely increase yields and reduce water consumption" is only true from that incredibly short-sighted perspective. Annual crops and our reliance upon them is what has been destroying our planet and will continue to destroy it long after The Carbon Age.
To grow food as if the Earth matters, as if people matter - as if life matters - requires Us to change our relationship with our food. It has to become an integrated part of Our existence. Life must be respected, if not revered, and we absolutely must use the best that science has uncovered regardless of how many people need to change their perspectives, of how much learning must occur to change our place as destructive killer apes into caretakers.
Bending life to fit our needs must be replaced by stewarding life and partaking of what it would give us freely.
