Thursday, I watched people eat "steak chips," a crispy form of beef jerky that required no cows to die. Our lab-grown meat future is fast approaching, and those leading the charge say that the products they're making are more ethical than eating even a vegetable.
Modern Meadow's steak chips, which are grown in a laboratory using cells that are cultivated from a living cow (they can taken via a punch biopsy) and then allowed to grow in a laboratory, are "much less alive than a vegetable," Oron Catts, director of Australia's SymbioticA, an “artistic biology research lab,” said at a synthetic biology conference in New York this week.