Modern Meadows- meat manufacturing
The other day I was reading Fortune magazine and on the cover was Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and the inspiration behind HBO Silicon Valley eccentric billionaire Peter Gregory. He was wearing what seems to be a typical leather jacket, but look again, and I quote (not verbatim): "...it's great to be wearing leather that's not from a dead animal..." Yes ladies and gentlemen, it's 'manufactured' leather. It's a grafted from the skin of a cow and 'printed' into a leather jacket. One of the companies he invested in, and I tell you he has a varied interest in interesting 'vertical concept'(read up on this guys) based companies; called Modern Meadows, is able to manufacture and print 'meat' through graft from the said animal. The concept is more Star Trek than real life, but it creates a vertical shift in meat production. Imagine, the best cut of meat 'cloned' each time. Animal rights activists infamous chant, "meat is murder" is no longer valid. Fact is, no animal is 'murdered' to manufacture meat. All put aside, comes my ethical concern as a Muslim. Being a Muslim, the question in my mind is, of course, is this halal? -I recalled an erstwhile tale my islamic studies teacher once told me: if a man travels through the desert with a camel, and slowly sears the animal bit by bit for sustenance, then the meat that has been consumed is not halal. You have to slaughter the whole animal in the name of Allah. So, based on this understanding, I conclude that it's not halal. But I can't conclude for sure whether it is halal or not since I myself am not an authoritative body on this matter. We'll just have to wait for Modern Meadows to explode to know for sure, which I'm sure will happen in the next 3-5 years.