Meat without all the animal stuff

Consumers and their carnivorous pets devour gigantic amounts of meat. The “relentless growth in livestock production” cannot satisfy the insatiable demand. Dogs, bush meats, endangered animals are 'harvested' or poached from the 'wild' and sometimes even human beings. Meat 3 x a day confirms that top-dog position, and implies not being part of the world of starving grain-eaters. Social gatherings without the ritualistic incinerated slabs or sliced hunk are not worth attending.

One believes blissfully in the gently raised cow, by a loving family farm or even skillful cowboys rounding up delicious cattle fed on wild pastures and springs.

Cynical reason 'raises awareness' about the growth hormones, antibiotics in factory-logistics (aka farming), the state of sick animals and their feces that are making it into meat products. The deregulated "meat roulette", the associated diseases of aggregating in small, often unhygienic places. The long transports and finally the automated killing-factories. The suffering of the creatures.
Outside, 30 % of terrestial earth is devoted to livestock grazing. Motorised cowboys force the electronically tagged herds' meat-mass with 4x4s, snowmobiles and helicopters into the desired locations. Desertification follows, the water bodies and atmosphere are contaminated from this industrial production process. The territory yearns to be valorised for bio fuel and real estate purposes.Putting the nightmare of others aside – in our meatspace, meatbags engage in exchanges in the meat market which is defended by meat shields. Meatlifting a square watery chunk of meat molten on polystyrene out of a freezer, has detached us long ago from the presence of a warm blooded living organism in its biotope.
The next logical step is to grow edible animal muscle fibre in laboratories on an industrial scale. With molecular biological techniques a biopsy is taken from a living organism that has evolved for the last 500 million years. Outside the living being the muscular tissue is spurned into growth. Disembodied – the suffering of the individual creature is put to an end , as its muscle tissue, bathed in nutrition is grown into huge chunks or 'meat' for human consumption.
No more worries about a monoculture of grazing animals displacing bio-diversity out of a habitat. Let them eat meat without 'husbandry'. Away with nasty externalities such as environmental burdens, food, drugs and warehousing for stock. The costs of slaughtering and last but not least, the burden of 'human resources' expenditures.
“Environmentally concerned scientists”, agribusiness armed with a patent for the engineering of tissue are determined to rid the world of its financial, ecological, health and ethical woes. Revenue streams could be turned to rapids of a vertically integrated industry of life. With in-vitro 'meat production the ever-expanding human population can be supplied with laboratory-grown meat, if they can pay. Choices could be increased as consumers can decide whether they would like the animal muscle fibre in the form of sausages, burgers, nuggets or meatloaf mash up.

Contemporary cuisine is attempting to familiarise our senses to molecular gastronomy. The installation “Disembodied Cuisine” has already displayed the growing of “steaks”. Meat without animals, 'something from nothing' is the dreaming of some aspiring people.

A reduction in the consumption of animal matter, or for that matter any reduction in consuming, is off the agenda. Even if that behaviour requires three to four earths. The insatiable desire for more (of the same) is stearing this spaceship (of fools) into a diy geological and ecological epoch of this planet. Whether this anthropocene allows for any non human life to exist or is itself inhabitable by human beings needs to be seen.

Links:
“Disembodied Cuisine”, art installation
In Vitro Meat Consortium, "an international alliance of environmentally concerned scientists striving to facilitate the establishment of a large-scale process industry for the production of muscle tissue for human consumption.."
Future Food aims to inform and accelerate "the research into and development of cultured meat (in-vitro meat)"
Updates:
Eat less meat, G. Monbiot
PETA: "The first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices will receive a check for $1 million."
Dr Philip Thornton, Livestock production: recent trends, future prospects, Phil Trans R Soc B 2010 365: 2853-2867. 
The In Vitro Meat Cookbook, @nextnature,0814