Why we need Cultured Meats funded for Research

We the undersigned have signed this petition because we feel raising animals for food is destroying our planet. We believe the following reasons are enough evidence to constitute our government taking action to stop the raising of animals for food. There are numberous warnings from many sources that raising animals for food is dramaticly effecting our health, enviroment and world hunger.

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Plundering the Land

An animal-centered diet requires up to 20 times as much land as a plant-based diet. The devastation begins with clear-cutting of forests to create pasture for cattle and other ruminants raised and slaughtered for food. Eventually the land is tilled to produce feed crops for animals. The insatiable demand for animal feed crops exhausts topsoil, transforming previously lush land into desert.

The demand for animal feed crops leads to the use of arid land that requires irrigation. Irrigation accounts for more than 80% of all water available for human use and leads to rising water shortages. Animal waste dumps more water pollutants into our waterways than all other human activities combined.

Wind erosion from animal croplands is the largest source of airborne particulates. Other pollutants generated by animal agriculture include ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, as well as methane and carbon dioxide, all of which significantly contribute to global warming.

In addition to destroying habitats, animal agriculture proponents shoot, poison, drown and burn tens of thousands of bison, coyotes, wolves, bears, prairie dogs and blackbirds because they supposedly compete with ranching.

We believe the following information on invitro (or cultured meats) is evidence enough to support the government backing this research instead of spending the billions of dollars on subsidizing the animal agricultural bussiness.

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Cultured meat has the potential to be healthier, safer, less polluting, and more humane than conventional meat. Fat content can be more easily controlled. The incidence of foodborne disease can be significantly reduced, thanks to strict quality control rules that are impossible to introduce in modern animal farms, slaughterhouses, or meat packing plants. Inedible animal structures (bones, respiratory system, digestive system, skin, and the nervous system) need not be grown. As a result, cultured meat production should be more efficient than conventional meat production in its use of energy, land, and water; and it should produce less waste.

Cultured meat contains the same muscle cells that form most meats.

Cultured meat is unnatural, in the same way that bread, cheese, yogurt, and wine are unnatural. All involve processing ingredients derived from natural sources. Arguably, the production of cultured meat is less unnatural than raising farm animals in intensive confinement systems, injecting them with synthetic hormones, and feeding them artificial diets made up of antibiotics and animal wastes. At the same time, the conventional production of meat has led to a number of unnatural problems, including high rates of ischemic heart disease and foodborne illness, as well as soil and water pollution from farm animal wastes

There is nothing in the production of cultured meat that necessarily involves genetic modification. The cells that can be used to produce cultured meat are muscle and stem cells from farm animals. It is possible, however, that genetically-modifying a muscle cell would allow it to proliferate a greater number of times in culture, and may thus make cultured meat production more economical.

It is possible to take a muscle biopsy from a live farm animal and culture the isolated cells. While some growth media contain animal ingredients, a growing number of media are animal-free.

In biomedical research, most cell cultures have used media made from animal blood. But researchers have now developed media from a variety of other sources, including plants and microorganisms.

Theoretically, cultured meat could afford higher resource and labor efficiencies, which could translate into lower costs, if cultured meat were produced at scale with an affordable medium.