If you're like many protein-avid Americans, who've been longing for a cruelty-free way of eating that doesn't come saddled with the myriad health benefits associated with typical vegan diets, cultured or "clean" meat could be just the ticket.
"For so long, I've been desperate to find foods to eat that don't require animals to suffer and die," said 42-year-old Katrina Larson of New York City. "Besides vegan foods, that is."
Larson, who herself suffers from elevated cholesterol, explained that while she loves animals very much, she consider veganism elitist. But more critically than that, as someone whose fundamental concern is the animals, rather than her own health, Larson is determined not to become one of those annoyingly healthy plant-based eaters and have her ethics-based dietary decision impose health improvements she never asked for.
"For me, personally, my body is not a temple." she said. "My body, my choice."
For these reasons, Larson is holding out hope that cultured meat, grown in a lab from the cells of some animal who never suffered or died or was exploited in any way, will soon become available on the open market, thereby providing her a practical, workable, non-elitist means of eating compassionately, while also not tampering with her blood pressure or cholesterol or inflammation levels in the slightest and still providing her with at least as much, if not more, of the animal-based protein that's been proven to negatively impact all of these conditions.
In other words, as she put it, Larson aims to have her meat, and eat it, too. "Until then, unfortunately, I'm stuck with Tyson chicken."
And people like Larson are precisely the kind of customer "clean meat" proponents have in mind. Said Sally Hayes of lab meat developer New Flesh Initiative, "The facade of compassion and political correctness with no tangible individual health benefits, at an outrageously high cost - what could possibly be more appealing, or more American, than that?"
