I have mixed feelings about this.  With all due respect, while I might personally agree with the notion of “stop eating animals and not having to worry about the correlating issues” – I don’t feel it’s realistic or fair to expect that people would do that on a wide scale basis.  Before I was vegetarian – there wasn’t any amount of influence, sentiment, or persuasion that could modify my behaviors until quite honestly - I was ready on a personal level.  I would imagine that most individuals tend to operate in much the same fashion.  If life were simply about logical choices – everyone that loves animals would be vegetarian, no one would overeat, people with high blood pressure would stay away from high sodium foods, people with diabetes would stay away from sugar, etc – but alas, the fact is we’re human and sometimes these choices are very difficult for some of us – even in spite of our best interests - thus equating with it being such a personal decision.  My freedom of choice was not taken from me and as such – I’d have a hard time projecting the same onto another.

Another way to express this would be – to me, telling someone that’s not a vegetarian that they should avoid the hazards by simply not eating meat, is about on par with telling someone to avoid getting pregnant by abstaining from sex – while at the same time not offering any alternatives.  So, while I think it’s *great* to state the obvious (that avoiding meat can potentially help to stave off many different afflictions), that in and of itself is not enough.  While it’s great to tell someone not to get pregnant by not having sex – the fact of the matter is …they will still have sex – as such, we have varied other alternatives in place to prevent pregnancy for people that may *insist* on behavior that we may *insist* they *resist * :)

So with that perspective in mind – if society was able to come up with a “meat alternative” that was essentially and for all intensive purposes well…”meat” – but without the suffering of animals – I’m having a hard time finding the downside to this, except…

I admit to being confused about the source of the meat.  It seems the source would be taken from other slaughtered animals.  This leads me to wonder if there would always need to be some type of “slaughter” for the “bionic meat” (heheh) to exist or if some, complete and total humane method might exist in the future?

For the time being however, if the source was a slaughtered animal – which led to mass produced “bionic meat” – I would believe that would lead to less animals being slaughtered on a wide scale basis and I have to think that’s a good thing.