Finally, we will likely have the chance to eat test-tube meat. Soon!

Wait, what? That grosses you out? Hah, really? C’mon! It’s only shmeat: lab-grown in vitro meat, and it’s not fake meat. It’s meatsie meat. Food Safety News describes:

In vitro or cultured meat is not imitation meat — like all those vegetable-protein products that don’t taste anything like beef or chicken. In vitro or lab-grown meat is animal flesh, except it never was part of a living animal.

Seriously, how does lab-grown meat not sound amazing? This is your finest Kobe steak marinated in Future and seasoned with a little bit of starlight. If you’re still not sold on it, check out this delightful little video to whet your appetite:

The thing is, meat grown in a lab already exists. It is here. Scientists, like anybody who ever creates anything that will change civilization forever, are merely deliberating on how to make the test tube meat “commercially feasible,” i.e., profitable. Food Safety News reports that there are approximately 30 labs around the world who have been at work developing in vitro meat. As labs have begun “attracting investments and research talent from around the world,” the possibility of shmeat on our shelves soon becomes all the more likely.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) likes the shmeaty future because they hope it will spare animals pain and suffering. That’s all well and good, but this could radically improve the quality of life for vertebrates more dear to our hearts: humans. Readily grown meat in untold quantities could change the concept of hunger in the future. Animals live, people live – everybody has cake. As you may predict, humans of today had mixed reactions about this delicacy of tomorrow.

The real question here isn’t whether shmeat will be created – it will be, if it hasn’t definitively been created already – and not even if people will eat it. The question is, will people like it? What a tragic irony that would be if we the people were so fatally attached to overly salty and steroid-bleeding meat that we find 100% pure, uncompromised meat to be so unpalatable that we simply reject it.

Wouldn’t surprise me, really.

Honestly, if it tastes like meat and smells like meat and has a texture like meat and is biologically identical to meat why wouldn’t you try this stuff at least once? Would you? Pipe up in the comments and let us know if you would (or wouldn’t) and why.