Are meat analogue and in vitro meat the future of cat food?



I would be off-topic again if you assume I should exclusively be talking in this blog about homemade cat food recipes, but the importance of the subject brings me to talk about it here anyway, and if you want my oppinion, I think all what has to do with cat food should be going in this blog, and all that interests cat owners to a lesser extent.

Let's first introduce In-Vitro meat, this is laboratory grown muscle tissue or culture meat, it is animal tissue that has never been part of an actual living animal.
You can also think of it as a meat tissue without a nervous system, which means eating it does not inflict pain to any living animal.

More information on in vitro meat can be found in this wikipedia page.

Meat analogue on the other hand is not meat at all! it is made of vegetable ingredients such as soja and beans, and treated to taste and smell somewhat like true meat. Some call it mock meat, faux meat, imitation meat, or meat substitute. It is believed to be already in commercial production in a form or another and used in many products such as luncheon mixed with real meat.

We already don't know (or not sure) wether vegetable meat is good or bad for cats, what we know is that they like it, and I myself give it to them regularly, it gives them at least some vitamins added to a good amount of fat, but we don't know how they actually process this food.

As for in-vitro meat, I am just waiting for it to arrive to feed it to my cats and even to eat it myself, it is real meat, no catch, it a considerable advace of science that we need to take and use, it is not even genetically modified (at least for now), there are no ethical problems associated to it, and even if humans are culturally not ready for it yet, I can certify it is the future of cat food, in some years when it will be more available, I hope to be the first out there to post an in-vitro meat based homemade cat food recipe.

Until then, I wish you happy cat feeding.

2 comments:

  1. Great post! I wrote about it on my cultured meat blog. Keep up the good work! :)
    http://culturedmeat.blogspot.com/2010/04/cultured-cat-food-now-thats-culture.html

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  2. I can see that you are an expert at your field! I am launching a website soon, and your information will be very useful for me..
    Thanks for all your help and wishing you all the success.

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