Animal rights group PETA recently announced a $1 million reward for the first person to make in-vitro meat (leading Bruce Sterling to dub them "People for the Ethical Treatment of Alien Lumps of Flesh).

While PETA's aim here seems to be to be to publicise their opposition to the consumption of animals (as shown in the quote below), there is another angle to this story which is perhaps more interesting for those interested in energy issues - which comes back to "the oil we eat".


...The link between oil and gas production and agriculture is one that should be well understood by now - and has been covered by a diverse range of writers including Dale Allen Pfeiffer (Eating Fossil Fuels), Richard Manning (The Oil We Eat), Stuart Staniford (Food To 2050), Sharyn Astyk (Is Relocalization Doomed ?) as well as my review of Herman Kahn's book "The Next 200 Years" (The Fat Man, The Population Bomb And The Green Revolution).

While I don't want to restart the debate about "reversalists", I think its worth looking at where a large amount of the grain we produce goes - meat production.