Meat does not have to come from once-living animals. Meat can be grown from cells in a laboratory dish, where no living animal was ever involved. Commercially viable vegetarian meat isn’t far off.

The technology already exists for growing meat for hamburgers and sausages, using cells taken harmlessly from cow, chicken, pig, fish and other animals. Techniques for engineering muscle cells and other tissues were first developed for medical use, but some researchers are looking into growing edible muscle cells.

One method is to grow muscle cells on large sheets or beads, suspended in a growth medium. The sheet must be stretched, or the beads expanded, to “exercise” the cells as they develop. Otherwise you would be eating mush, like pink-colored Jello. Once the cells are large enough, they would be scraped off and packaged. If edible sheets and beads were used, the entire product could be eaten.

Science is still far from artificially reproducing an entire natural meat, such as a steak or a chicken breast. The problem with “growing” a steak, with its own intrinsic structure, is that blood vessels, fat, and connective tissue would also have to be produced. But the technology is there to produce something like a processed meat, such as a chicken nugget.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say they have taken a step towards solving that problem — thanks to work on creating replacement parts for human beings. The MIT team used a mix of cells to grow muscle tissue that had its own blood vessels. In this case, human tissue was implanted into mice, and blood flowed into the engineered muscle.

Bio-engineers at Touro College have cultured fish muscle cells in the laboratory for NASA. They even cooked their laboratory-produced fish and it looked and smelled like the fish you can buy in the supermarket. With a little bit of money and time they could produce something that resembles a fish fillet.

But would consumers accept these new treats? Some researchers argue that artificial meats are products of biotechnology, ultimately little different from everyday foodstuffs like wine and cheese. You take something that’s found in nature, and reproduce it in a controlled environment.

America’s powerful Food and Drug Administration would also surely have something to say on the subject. It has already barred from the market food products involving cloned animals until their safety has been thoroughly tested. Others point to the fate of genetically modified foods, disliked by the public in many countries. Without the right sort of promotional campaign, cultured meats could go the same way.

Many vegetarians gave up meat because they were concerned about animal welfare. The environmental benefits of producing meat in this way might convince many vegetarians to try this, once they were convinced it was safe. Others probably wouldn’t eat it because of a visceral feeling of remote connection with animals, they just wouldn’t be comfortable with it.