So, I have a question for all of you. Would you eat fake meat?

I read a story the other day, and I linked to this on my website, so if you follow me there you may have seen it. (Here is the link on my website, and here if the original story)

A few days ago there was a story that said this company has started producing fake eel meat. If you're not familiar with eel in Japan, or unagi, let me tell you, unagi is considered kind of a delicacy in Japan. Everyone loves it. There's a long tradition of eating unagi and it's really, really, really good. If you've never tried it, I can't recommend it enough.

But it has been overfished, and so it has started to disappear. In fact, eels are now considered to be endangered. The Japanese habit of eating them is only one factor in many that is driving them to decline. Because of that endangered status, there are a lot of restrictions on the fishing of eels. As a result, the price of unagi has skyrocketed.

In an effort to combat this, many eel farms have arisen, primarily in China. As a result, most of the unagi you buy at the supermarket in Japan is from a farm in China. Now I'm sure you all know about fish farms and have a bad image of them. They don't exactly result in the most healthy fish in the world. Those fish are usually given a lot of hormones to help them grow. They're also given a lot of antibiotics because there's a lot of disease that spreads through these farms. So this isn't really stuff that you want to be eating.

(It does bear mentioning that not all fish farms are like this. Some do try to raise the fish as naturally as possible. But in any farm, disease is a big problem, so antibiotics will almost inevitably be involved. And remember, antibiotics that fish consume end up in us when we consume the fish.)

Anyway, with all that out of the way, you can see that lab-grown unagi might actually be a boon to Japan. And lo and behold, we have this company now producing unagi in the laboratory. Unagi that they say is pretty good and tastes just as good as the real thing.

They've taken their lab-grown unagi to a vegan restaurant in Tokyo and had them make a number of dishes using it. Like this one.

Anyway, with all that context, I ask you again, would you eat lab-grown meat?

There is also of course the argument that this isn't entirely vegan since lab-grown meat uses animal cells, even if it doesn't harm the animal. As I understand it, this is a hotly debated topic in the vegan community, if it would be acceptable to eat for a vegan or not.

The deeper argument of course is that something has to be done about the global meat industry. There's many studies about how our current, the way we produce meat in the modern world is not sufficient to supply every country. If all of the developing countries start to demand meat at the same level as developed countries do, well, there's just simply no way to deal with this. Our system already has some cracks around the edges. All of these factory farms that we read about and we get disgusted with, like for example, chickens are caged their entire life, in dark rooms, barely able to move. Most of them go crazy and try to peck each other to death so they have to be restrained even more. Disease is rampant, so they're feed a constant supply of tons of antibiotics. We just kept alive long enough to get nice and plump for them to slaughter so we can eat them. Yeah... factory farming is not exactly an ethical business.

And there's other problems as well, but I'm sure you all know of them so let's move on.

There are a few proposed solutions for dealing with these problems. One is that we eat more insects. Supposedly insect protein is actually quite healthy and it's definitely more abundant. Of course there's the ethical issue on eating insects as well, so the vegans would still be angry about that.

Another proposed solution is laboratory grown meat. And that brings us back to the article.

It seems like this meat is ready and it is set to start to appear in Japanese restaurants next year in 2025.

So back to my question, would you try lab-grown meat?

Would I? Yeah, I guess I would. I usually eat vegetarian most of the time. My wife is vegan, so automatically I eat that way most of the time. But even when I go out alone, I usually stay away from meat; I generally follow the Buddhist idea not to bring harm, so I do try to limit my damage when I can. But I also won't refuse meat and I so will eat meat sometimes when it's already being served by others (not when it's specifically ordered for me, which I will refuse when it's not impolite to do so). So this is all to say that debate in vegan circles I mentioned above on if lab-grown meat is acceptable or not wouldn't really influence me here. Suffering is removed (depending on how these cells at the beginning of the process are obtained, I suppose) so I'm ethically ok with it. There is just the idea of eating a lab-grown thing to get over.

But yeah, I guess I would try it. I'm not saying I'd add it to my permanent diet, but it might be interesting to try.

Would you?

Let me know in the comments.

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.