THE FUTURE OF FOOD: SCIENCE FICTION OR NATURE? - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 169

and urogenital tracts. 61 The most common causes of death among cloned animals in the first week of life
are internal hemorrhaging, digestive problems, hydrocephalus, and multiple organ failure. 62 As MIT bio-
logy professor Rudolf Jaenisch says, “You can't tell me that 95 percent die before birth and the other 5
percent are normal.” 63
And if that doesn't ruin your dinner, consider the newest headline-grabbing idea for feeding the planet.
Eighty-seven-year-old Willem van Eelen wants to grow meat in petri dishes quaintly referred to as biore-
actors. Van Eelen is someone you might refer to as a character: he was born in Indonesia when it was ruled
by the Dutch, and his father was the doctor who ran the leper colony. During World War II he spent sev-
eral years as a Japanese prisoner of war. He told Jeffrey Bartholet of Scientific American that he became
obsessed with food when he was starving in a war camp, where prisoners would eat raw dog if a stray one
ventured over the wire. Van Eelen studied medicine at the University of Amsterdam, where a professor
showed the students how muscle tissue could grow in the lab. 64
This was of interest because most of the flesh that humans like to eat comes from muscle tissue. Most
news reports on the subject of test-tube meat use Winston Churchill as a celebrity endorser. He wrote in a
1932 topic that the most popular parts of meat would eventually be man-made using a suitable medium.
Van Eelen kept the dream alive, acquiring patents, using his own money, and eventually getting a Dutch
grant for research that funded a consortium to work on the project. 65 Meanwhile, across the Atlantic a
NASA grant had provided funding for Morris Benjaminson, who used strips of muscle from a goldfish
kept in a liquid bath of blood from unborn calves to produce meat. 66
Van Eelen no longer has a kooky identity, as a range of scientists and animal rights groups pursue his
passion. 67 Multiple teams are pursuing the idea of culturing meat, including the University of Technology
and the University of Amsterdam, both in the Netherlands. In the United States, the Medical University of
South Carolina is trying to find a cost-effective way to grow meat. Vladimir Mironov, who was trained in
Russia, is a well-known tissue researcher and has been attracted to the idea for many years. The scientists
working on test-tube meat seem to have an idealistic view that it can replace factory farms.
But even if synthetic meat could be grown in a test tube, there is no assurance that the process provides a
food that metabolizes in a way that is safe and provides a nutritional benefit. Even more suspect for public
health the potential that the processing used and the chemicals necessary for flavor create toxic properties
to the test-tube meat. Rather than moving us toward a local and more sustainable type of food production,
it puts food back in the laboratory.
Only the largest corporations would have the capital necessary to acquire the patents and to build the
processing plants that would be essential to mass-produce test-tube meat. And like all processed food, it
provides one more opportunity for large corporations to control the food system and to put profits before
people's health.
Jim Thomas, who has written extensively on technology and food for the environmental group ETC,
sums it up: “If test-tube meat hits the big time, we will likely to know by its appearance in a Big Mac or
when agribusiness buys the patent-holder.” 68
These technologies are about making money, not feeding people or providing an economic base for the
vast rural areas of our country, or for that matter the world. Factories and laboratories can never replace
farms. This type of industrialized food production relies on a host of chemical components used to mimic
the taste of real ingredients. The genuineness of real food grown on appropriately scaled family farms can
never be replaced by concoctions dreamed up in corporate boardrooms and created in laboratories. Our
food system is already too far out of whack, as the profit motive has fused with science to rely more on
chemistry than nature to process and manufacture food products.
Imagine the outcome if the science fiction food that corporations, the science establishment, and govern-
ments are funding is commercialized. If their strategy is unchecked, biotechnology of the future—artificial