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I’m not sure which is the more offensive way to create meat. There’s the current “factory farm” method where masses of hormone-jacked, antibiotics-injected cows are kept confined in what can only be called bovine concentration camps while they’re fed genetically modified corn, then slaughtered without compassion and subjected to diabolical meat-harvesting machinery that turns a cow carcass into corporate profits. On the other hand, there’s the new method being touted across the media: Test tube hamburgers made from thin strips of meat grown in a nutrient vat laced with bovine fetus stem cells. Yumm!

The test tube meat strips actually pulsate and twitch during their laboratory growth phase, by the way, and they’re ultimately ground up with strips of test tube fat grown in a similar way to produce a fatty hamburger-like substance. This has been accomplished by Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who announced his team’s results at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) yesterday.

The “benefits” of test tube hamburger production are being touted as substantial, including:

 
-More efficient conversion of plants to meat.
 
-Less environmental damage.
 
-More humane than killing animals.
 
-Is the only feasible way to feed more meat to the world.