Lab-grown food is about to destroy farming – and save the planet | George Monbiot

"(Genetic engineering) faces our society with problems unprecedented, not only in the history of science, but of life on the Earth. It places in human hands the capacity to redesign living organisms, the products of some three billion years of evolution.... Up to now, living organisms have evolved very slowly, and new forms have had plenty of

It’s a revolution in attitudes, which is both encouraging and disturbing. On the one hand, attitudes are entirely under our control; they don’t require any fantastical technological breakthroughs. On the other hand, we have so few social precedents for such a broad, deep and international change, especially for one that needs to be so quick. It wou

This might sound like science fiction, but the world’s first clean hamburger was grown from cells—and then eaten—in 2013. It cost $330,000. Four years of research and development brought the price down to $11 per unit, and within another decade industrially produced clean meat is expected to be cheaper than slaughtered meat. This technological deve

Monocropping, excessive applications of nitrogen fertilizer, addiction to insecticides, rainforest depletion, land degradation, topsoil runoff, declining water supplies, even global warming—all these problems would be considerably less severe if global consumers treated meat like they treat caviar,