Malnutrition, Hunger, and Finally Starvation

            Grim is the picture of someone starving to death.  As the body attempts to provide energy to the heart and lungs it literally eats its own muscle and tissues in a process termed catabolysis.  Victims of starvation are often too weak to sense thirst, and therefore become dehydrated.
All movements become painful due to atrophy of the muscles, and due to dry, cracked skin caused by severe dehydration. With a weakened body, diseases are commonplace. Fungi, for example, often grow under the esophagus, making swallowing unbearably painful.
The energy deficiency inherent in starvation causes fatigue and renders the victim more apathetic over time. As the starving person becomes too weak to move or even eat, his or her interaction with the surroundings diminishes.

            According to the World Health Organization hunger the single gravest threat to the world's public health. The WHO states that malnutrition is by far the biggest contributor to child mortality. Six million children die of hunger every year. Starvation is unacceptable in a society which has the resources to solve this critical problem. Are we to become known as the planet that died of starvation because we were too stupid or greedy to implement a solution? Or is the problem of starvation based on a ‘no money, no food’ attitude.

            A laboratory in the Netherlands may just have the answer to providing food for future generations. Imagine the reality of a yellow-pink sliver, the size of a corn plaster, as is the state-of-the-art in lab-grown meat and a milestone on the path to the world's first burger made from stem cells. A hamburger made from stem cells!
            In a recent online article, and according to Dr. Mark Post of Maastricht University, a complete burger has been created and will be publicly unveiled soon. Dr. Post hopes the Fat Duck restaurant in Berkshire, will cook the offering for a celebrity taster as yet unnamed. The project, funded by a wealthy, anonymous, individual aims to slash the number of cattle farmed for food, and in doing so reduce one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Dr. Post claims, “Meat demand is going to double in the next 40 years and right now we are using 70% of all our agricultural capacity to grow meat through livestock."
            It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the problems we face with food consumption and supply and demand. Below is a diagram of how the lab grown meat is grown.

 

 The inefficiency of cows and other animals in the production of meat, from farm to table, for a population expected to double in size is a problem. Post is focusing on making beef burgers from stem cells because cows are among the least efficient animals at converting the food they eat into food for humans.

"Cows and pigs have an efficiency rate of about 15%, which is pretty inefficient. Chickens are more efficient and fish even more," Post said. "If we can raise the efficiency from 15% to 50% it would be a tremendous leap forward." Post said he could theoretically increase the number of burgers made from a single cow from 100 to 100m. "That means we could reduce the number of livestock we use by 1m," he said. According to Dr. Post, “If lab-grown meat mimics farmed meat perfectly” – and Post admits it may not – the meat could become a premium product just as free range and organic items have.

            I am of the opinion that we should leave no stone unturned in the area of research for food supplies. No food, no life. I believe that in the future all food will be grown in the lab. I also promote the idea of lab-grown food. No longer can we afford to mine food from cows and other animals. What are we waiting on?