Peta offering $1 Million for "test tube" chicken.

While I disagree with much of Peta's tactics and actions, I am with them on this one.

The details:

PETA is offering a $1 million prize to the contest participant able to make the first in vitro chicken meat and sell it to the public by June 30, 2012. The contestant must do both of the following:

• Produce an in vitro chicken-meat product that has a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh to non-meat-eaters and meat-eaters alike.
• Manufacture the approved product in large enough quantities to be sold commercially, and successfully sell it at a competitive price in at least 10 states.

Judging of taste and texture will be performed by a panel of 10 PETA judges, who will sample the in vitro chicken prepared using a fried "chicken" recipe from VegCooking.com. The in vitro chicken must get a score of at least 80 when evaluated in order to win the prize.

According to Peta.org, In vitro meat production would use animal stem cells that would be placed in a medium to grow and reproduce. The result would mimic flesh and could be cooked and eaten.

I am a vegetarian. I am 27 and have not eaten chicken for nearly 4 years and all other meat since I was 12 or 13. I am not sure if I would eat this new meat but I am sure meat eaters would. This would help our world so much if someone could make this.

Some facts about the effects of eating meat on the environment:

• According to the Sierra Club, producing one pound of grain-fed beef requires about 16 pounds of wheat and - as staggering as it sounds - 2,500 gallons of water. Furthermore, millions of acres of forest have been cleared worldwide to make room for the large areas of land needed for cattle grazing. In the United States, more than 260 million acres of forest have been cleared to grow crops to feed animals raised for meat. An acre of trees disappears every eight seconds.
• Livestock is fed more than 80 percent of the corn and 95 percent of the oats grown by American farmers. The world' s cattle alone consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people - more than the entire human population on Earth. Link to Article
  
• A recent report prepared for the Senate Agricultural Committee concluded that animal waste is the largest contributor to pollution in 60 percent of the rivers and streams classified as " impaired" by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The report states that food animals produce waste at a rate of roughly 68,000 pounds per second. Link to Article
• Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer estimates that a 10-percent reduction in U.S. meat consumption would free up enough grain to feed 60 million people. Some 40 percent of the world' s grain harvest is fed to livestock, while nearly a billion people go hungry each day. Link to Article
• According to CNN.com,90 percent of all large fishes have disappeared from the world's oceans in the past half century, the devastating result of industrial fishing.

Learn more:

Article-Why Eating Meat isn't Natural.

Summary of Article

• Human anatomy is much more similar to herbivores than carnivores.
• Meat consumption unquestionably promotes heart disease, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, and every other major degenerative disease -- the opposite of plant-based diets.
• Physical performance is superior on all-plant diets.
• Making one contrary point does not magically invalidate all the other evidence as soon as it's made.

YouTube Video from the Humane Society of the United States on Factory Farming.

Photos/Videos of Factory Farming from the Humane Farming Association

Environmental Impact of Factory Farming