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product rich in omega-3 fatty acids. Food which once contributed to heart disease might now be used to prevent it. Consuming cultured meat products might even help to significantly reduce greenhouse gases. We could eliminate the burning of a lot of fuel currently required to transport livestock and meat products around the country by culturing meat products closer to the market place.

Production of hi-protein meat products from stem cells may also prove very beneficial with respect to human space travel applications. After all, we can't take a cow, chickens, or other animals into space to produce food, but we could easily culture stem cells taken from these animals in space, on the Moon, or even in route to and on the surface of Mars, providing food supplies that can be replenished. Since biosyntheses is a cyclical process, human waste could be recycled via bacterial decomposition into nutrients that could be acted upon by photosynthetic algae to produce carbohydrates. Ammonia recovered from human urine could be combined with carbon dioxide expelled by astronauts to form carbamate, an excellent fertilizer to keep the algae growing strong. Some simple plant life could also be sustained this way to provide fiber in the astronauts diet and simple sugars to feed the stem cell cultures. Is all of this possible? Yes, and stem cell cultured meat would be a key link in the chain of this seemingly perpetual life synthesis cycle.

When you consider all the potential benefits that augmenting and perhaps even replacing conventional meat production with cultured stem cell products, it's a wonder that we don't already have a Manhattan styled project under way to get it going. As for human's willingness to eat the stuff, if you considered what goes into today's processed foods, meat produced from stem cells, which after all is the way it is already produced in animals, might seam a whole lot more palatable. As I have pointed out already, meat produced in stem cell cultures would be no different than that grown in animals except for possible embellishments and improved sanitary status. Thus any aversion on the part of humans to eating such products would have to do only with the stigma which has become associated to the terminology "stem cell" as being somehow unnatural. But stems cells are natural and as for concerns about eating genetically engineered food, there is probably no humanly produced food available today, with the exception of fish from the sea that has not already been biologically enhanced to produce a more bountiful harvest.

I'm sure it won't be long before some entrepreneur capitalizes on stem cell culturing to produce a new hot dog, perhaps even one that will be tastier and healthier for you then the ones you find in your super market today. I should mention in wrapping up that the steer who got away was ultimately caught, but its human captures decided that if it didn't really want to be butchered then it shouldn't be, and instead it was put out to pasture, there to live out its days. What a humane act. Maybe if we were to start eating meat obtained from stem cell culturing a lot more animals could live out their lives naturally too.

Learn more about this author, John Traveler.
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