Just how stupid can you get?

There has been a flurry of articles over the last week or so about "synthetic meat"- first in the BBC's flagship science and technology magazine "BBC Focus", and now in the Guardian newspaper and the Daily Mail.

An animal converts resources into meat. A factory full of petri dishes could be used as a substitute for the animal, but obviously it would be even more inefficient. To claim that synthetic meat would "offset carbon emissions" is either a lie, or it just highlights the unthinking nature of the media. Perhaps I am missing something, Is the synthetic meat frenzy a joke? It certainly isn't a very funny one.

Much funnier is the fact that synthetic meat would inevitably require more factor inputs to produce ounce for ounce than normal meat. Sure, animals are inefficient, they convert less than 10% of the food you feed them into the food you get from them. But where exactly are you going to have all these synthetic meat making machines? In a farm? I didn't think so. It requires little more than an elementary knowledge of biology to realize that cells don't just grow from thin air. You have to feed them. Synthetic meat would be machine fed, and machines require energy and maintenance. You can't just feed the synthetic meat cultures with other synthetic meat, since there is always an energy loss, so doing so would leave you with less than you started with. Clever.

You're going to have to feed the synthetic meat with some sort of vegetable matter, which can't be grown in vats because it needs to photosynthesize out in the sun, so in the end you would be using just as much land to grow the food to feed the meat. Alternatively, your "growth serum"- essentially the food you feed the synthetic meat cells could be made from mined minerals, but they are finite resources, and making our food production system reliant on such things would axiomatically make the food itself a finite resource. There are no renewable sources of food for synthetic meat that do not subtract a greater amount from the overall world food supply than the synthetic meat generates. Some have described synthetic meat as more "ethical" because it does not involve the slaughter of animals. Fair enough, but since it deprives more humans of meat, it is ridiculous to call it ethical. WOW synthetic meat avoids the slaughter of real animals so it is "ethical" but it results in the starvation of humans! OH...

You might save a bit of land because the growing of the meat itself is done in a more compact way than the conventional rearing of animals on farms, but you presumably sacrifice the extra energy that a factory uses above a farm. Then again, most modern meat farms are practically factories. Synthetic meat surely isn't worth much attention.