The future of sausage is upon us

Via Paul Krugman, it seems as though lab-grown meat is one step closer to becoming a reality:

SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.

...

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.

I'm a huge proponent of lab-grown meat. Most people's initial reaction is one of disgust, but when you think about it meat grown in a petri dish can't possibly be more revolting than present day factory farm conditions. Moreover, you get the ethical bonus that there is no cruel treatment of animals (in fact, on this last point, I've often wondered why we don't try to genetically modify livestock to have essentially no brains, so as to alleviate animal suffering...this may seem horrifying at first, but how could it be more horrifying than torturing sentient creatures?).

But probably the biggest bonus is ecological: livestock, especially cattle, have a huge impact on the environment and on the climate change situation. Many people assume that when you talk about the carbon footprint of cows, you're mostly talking about cow farts, but that's only a part of the problem. First of all, most of the methane that cows are emitting come from burps, not farts. Second, though, a lot of the impact from cattle comes from the fact that feeding people cattle is a very inefficient way to use arable land, because you are using a whole bunch of arable land to grow crops to feed to cows instead of people. Or, if you're not giving feed to the cattle, you're burning down huge swaths of rainforest to create land that they can graze on--and, of course, the elimination of trees causes there to be more carbon in the atmosphere.

Anyway, it seems to me that a big win in the fight against climate change might be this ability to produce meat in an ecologically sustainable way--especially considering that beef is catching on in the developing world (in places like China).

(PS: I think envisioning things like sausage and gelatin and--I don't know, broth--rather than, say, a drumstick make the whole lab-meat idea far more palatable.)

More data

Nothing gets by you guys! Patrick--who remains curiously astute after knocking back a few--rightly gets to the heart of the matter, which is the comparative greenhouse gas intensity of different kinds of foods. Luckily, the study (pdf) underlying the Ezra Klein post has a chart that captures precisely this information:
(You may need to click the image to read it without squinting.)

Now, I'm not any kind of trained statistics person but I'm pretty sure that by "normalization by X" they mean the greenhouse gas (GHG) output expressed as a rate of "CO2-equivalent emitted per X". So for example, the second dataset means that red meat results in about twice the amount of GHG per dollar as chicken/fish/eggs--i.e., $5 worth of red meat has the same footprint as $10 worth of chicken/fish/eggs.

I imagine the measure we ought to be most interested in is the GHG per kCal figure (third dataset), since we are trying to figure out how to lessen the GHG impact of our diets regardless of cost and, er, food weight. Viewed this way, cows are definitely the biggest culprit: red meat looks to be about 2.5 times more GHG-intensive per kCal than chicken/fish/eggs, and dairy is slightly worse than chicken/fish/eggs as well. So the biggest gains, it seems, can be had by replacing most of our red meat with white meat or vegetables, and replacing dairy with...not dairy.

(Note: some greenhouse gases affect the climate more than others--hence the generic unit of measurement "CO2e", or CO2-equivalent.)

Anyway, in case all that wasn't very clear, here's the abstract to give you the main idea:

Despite significant recent public concern and media attention
to the environmental impacts of food, few studies in the
United States have systematically compared the life-cycle
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with food production
against long-distance distribution, aka “food-miles.” We find
that although food is transported long distances in general (1640
km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average)
the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the
production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S.
household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption.
Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle
GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail
contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range
in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-
intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary
shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average
household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.”
Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories
from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a
vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying
all locally sourced food.