WHERE'S THE BEEF?: Laboratory-grown meat is becoming a reality. Adventurous diners consumed the world’s first artificial hamburger patty in London last year.© ANYAIVANOVA/ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.
—Winston Churchill, former prime minister of the United Kingdom (1940–1945; 1951–1955), in a 1931 Strand Magazine essay that presaged the rise of test tube-grown meat
Just one in five Americans would be willing to eat meat that was grown in a lab. Men express a greater willingness to do so than women, and college graduates are around three times as likely as those who have not attended college to say this is something they’d attempt.
—Pew Research Internet Project summary of the “U.S. Views of Technology and the Future” questionnaire (April 17)
As an...
—Environmental advocate Mark Lynas, publicly apologizing for his two-decade-long anti-GMO stance in a speech at the Oxford Farming Conference (January 3, 2013)
If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
—Astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan, during a 1980 episode of Cosmos
If the food is there, you are going to eat it, but the pricing very much affects how you are going to feel about your meal and how you will evaluate the restaurant.
—Ozge Sigirci, Cornell University Food and Brand Lab researcher, in a statement about her recent study that found diners reported enjoying the taste of food more when the price tag was higher (April 29)
That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea—destructive not just of the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. . . . We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.
—Author and activist Michael Pollan, from the introduction to his book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008)
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