abstract: In vitro, or cultured, meat refers to edible skeletal muscle and fat tissue grown from animal stem cells in a laboratory or factory. It is essentially meat that does not require an animal to be killed. Although it is still in the research phase of development, claims of its potential benefits range from reducing the environmental impacts of food production to improving human health. However, technologies powerful enough to address such significant challenges often come with unintended consequences and a host of costs and benefits that seldom accrue to the same actors. In extreme cases, they can even be destabilizing to social, institutional, economic, and cultural systems. This investigation explores the sustainability implications of cultured meat before commercial facilities are established, unintended consequences are realized, and undesirable effects become reified and locked in. The study utilizes expert focus groups to explore the social implications, life cycle analysis to project the environmental implications, and economic input-output assessment to explore tradeoffs between conventionally-produced meat and factory-grown food products. The results suggest that, should cultured meat be widely adopted by consumers, food is likely to be increasingly a product of human design, perhaps becoming integrated into existing human institutions such as health care delivery and education. Environmentally, cultured meat could require smaller quantities of agricultural inputs and land than livestock. However, those avoided costs could come at the expense of more intensive energy use as biological processes are replaced with industrial systems. Finally, the research found that, since livestock production is a driver of significant economic activity, shifting away from traditional meat production in favor of cultured meat production could result in a net economic contraction. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Civil and Environmental Engineering 2014

The purpose of this study is to display and analyse the barriers of problems that makes it hard to implement the capabilities approach created by Amartya Sen and further developed by Martha C. Nussbaum. The latter is used in this essay. With the help from normative analysis the three barriers and the solutions will be discussed. The barriers are: Human resistance against equality, meat-masculinity and the paradox of eating meat. The solutions put forward to these barriers are: Animal citizenship and animal rights, in vitro meat production and categorization of meat. The barriers and solutions are discussed with the fact that violence and wars are declining in the world and reason and intelligence is increasing, but there are still problems for implementing the capabilities approach. The conclusions of the essay are that there are problems in our society which makes it harder for the capabilities approach to be implemented. There are also solutions to these problems, which are all long term consequences and changes. The conclusions highlights some of the problems in our society and tries to give a guide to how we can solve them.

No description available.