You’ve probably seen the recent rise in calls from liberals for everyone to stop eating beef so we can save the planet or something. These demands aren’t so much to do with the health effects of red meat but rather the effect that the livestock industry supposedly has on the climate. (Those cows tend to fart a lot, you know.) But what if you’re worried about the impact all those heifers are having on global warming but you don’t want to give up your burgers and sirloins?

No problem. Some egghead in Israel has come up with a way to grow steaks in a laboratory. (National Post)

Aleph Farms has announced a world’s first: slaughter-free steak. The Israeli start-up’s cellular innovation apparently delivers “the full experience of meat with the appearance, shape and texture of beef cuts.”

Lab-grown meat (a.k.a. clean meat) is produced without killing animals, and while Aleph Farms is not alone in this pursuit, the company is breaking ground by replicating meat’s texture and structure in 3-D. Creating lab-grown ground meat is difficult enough, Didier Toubia, co-founder and CEO of Aleph Farms says, let alone making an entire steak.

“Meat is a complex tissue. This breakthrough includes various cell types found in conventional cuts of meat grown together outside the animal to form a 3-D structure similar to meat but using more sustainable, safe and ethical methods,” he explains in a video. “These first cell-based meat cuts demonstrate our capability of achieving our vision of growing steaks.”

Okay. I suppose we’d better take a look at the video to see what this guy is talking about.

Oh, come on, man. That’s not a steak. It’s a Steak-um.

Not that I’m opposed to Steak-um, mind you. I love them. But this meat is paper-thin. Plus, they’re saying that it took three weeks to “grow” the meat and the “steaks” cost fifty bucks each. If this is the cost of saving the planet, maybe the planet has been overrated all along.

If that isn’t enough to give you nightmares, you’ve got more to worry about than steak from a test tube. Another group of braniacs are currently working on gene editing cows.

The linked article describes one experiment where a group of cows was, “genetically edited to grow and look like males, regardless of their biological gender.” Wait a minute… are we trying to make better steaks or build a more LGBTQ friendly bovine society? Either way, once you start recoding the cow’s DNA, I’ll probably take a pass on the beef, thanks.