Essential to seriously reducing greenhouse gases is one of these things: a voluntary diminution of meat in our diets or a lab-based version replacing the actual one. I’m a vegetarian for health reasons as well as ethical and environmental ones, so I won’t eat it anyway. But will carnivores accept a faux version it it looks and tastes pretty much like the real thing? Will it be as palatable to the mind as it is to the mouth? My guess is that epicureans will have a tough time with it, though fast-food junkies who don’t want to stretch their wallets will be amenable. (It’s a very expensive process right now but will likely eventually be cheap.) The opening of an article about futuristic farming from Jennifer Wang at Entrepreneur.com:

“Here’s a crazy idea: Combine 3-D printing and tissue engineering to ‘print’ animal products and tackle some of the planet’s biggest problems. Animal farming, after all, accounts for about half of all human-caused greenhouse gases, taking place on one-third of the available, non-frozen land on Earth. All to feed people’s appetites for 300 million tons of meat a year.

Enter Gabor and Andras Forgacs, father-and-son founders of Modern Meadow, a company they started in 2011 that may very well be the model for the farm of the future.

Five years earlier they helped start Organovo, a firm that makes human tissues for pharmaceutical research and other medical applications, and was a commercial spinoff of Gabor’s pioneering work at the University of Missouri in ‘bioprinting,’ which he describes as ‘extending biological structures in three dimensions.’ Modern Meadow’s output is based in part on this work. On a basic level, the process involves using 3-D printing to deposit clumps of cells into patterns of tissue. The particles fuse post-printing–similar to cell development in embryos. Unlike Organovo’s final products, which must be kept alive, Modern Meadow’s postmortem animal tissues are simpler to build and faster to market.”