Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. Albert Einstein

      You may have read the news this week that the first artificial meat will be produced later this year.  It is called "in-vitro meat" and is created in a laboratory from thousands of animal stem cells.  The first pork sausage will be produced in about 6 months, the first hamburger in a year.  Scientiests think it is inevitable that the world will have to resort to in-vitro meat in the near future to feed the world's burgeoning population as livestock production methods are unsustainable.

               http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8733576/First-artificial-burger-to-cost-250000.html

    Let's set the moral and ethical arguments aside for now, as they are far too complex for me.  Let's just consider the animal welfare and environmental effects.  Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University, who is leading the research,  says that using synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat production by up to 60%.  Hey, lets reduce the environmental footprint of meat production by 100% by just not eating meat!  We will also solve many of our health woes in the process.
     This new form of meat production would also decrease the number of animals being slaughtered for food.  That is a good thing, but if we all just stop eating meat we would decrease the number of animals being slaughtered for food to zero.  That would be a great thing, and so much simpler and less costly than using stem-cell researchers to produce meat.  Remember Einstein....let's make everything as simple as possible.
     Albert Einstein was possibly the greatest scientist to date, and was a vegetarian in his later years, although he had supported the idea for a much longer time.  In a letter he wrote shortly before becoming vegetarian he said that he "had always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience."  He also stated that "Nothing will benefit health or increase chances of survival on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."  I believe him.