V- Biofabrication and Your Handbag.

Imagine a world where you can walk around with your fashionable leather Gucci Bag, or trot through Manhattan with your stylish leather boots…without the guilt and shame of knowing you are wearing the hide of an animal…once alive, breathing, and birthed solely for its hide and meat, before put to death.  Well, it is a very feasible future.  An economical one.  And a much more sustainable one.

Scientist Andras Forgacs spoke at a TEDTalks, explaining biofabrication as a very humane, sustainable and sizeable new industry. His imagination started with re-creating leather, but the method can easily be used to include meat production and it’s future.

What are animal products made of?  They are simply a collection of tissue.  And what is tissue made of?  Cells.  So it makes sense that biofabrication can easily extract cells and use them to grow biological products, such as tissue.  A.K.A.  Leather.  It is a complete reinvention of how animals products, such as leather wallets, shoes, belts, handbags, etc., are made.  And Andras Forgacs is doing just that.  He is reinventing the way we produce animal products.  Which would eliminate the cruelty of factory farming, the cost of such production, the pollution in causes, and the stress our planet and environment endures based solely on animal production for goods and food.

Look at this….real, cultured leather:

And why do we need to change the way we are currently doing things?  Because our planet is going to SH**T, and fast.  Factory farming is the worst culprit of pollution and un-sustainability.

Let’s take a look at what goes into producing ONE quarter pounder hamburger:

 

And that’s not even including the animal’s waste or the methane emissions from its digestion.

And then there is this:

onegreenplanet.org, explains :

“According to statistics pulled together by FARM (from U.S. Department of Agriculture reports), nearly 10.2 billion land animals were raised and killed for food in the United States in 2010, a 1.7% rise from 2009 totals. Globally, the number of land animals killed each year for food has exceeded 65 billion.

Here’s a breakdown of which land animals were killed in the U.S.:

• 91% were chickens raised for meat
• 4.5% were chickens raised for eggs
• 2.5% were turkeys
• 2% were cows, pigs, other mammals, ducks and geese

The 10.2 billion animals raised and killed for food accounted for 98% of all land animals abused and killed in the U.S. An estimated additional 200 million land animals were killed in biomedical experiments, by hunters, by furriers, in pounds, or as “pests.”

In addition to all the unnecessary death of land animals, approximately 53 billion aquatic animals were killed for food in the U.S. in 2010.

Per-person, an average American meat-eater is responsible for the suffering and death of 28 land animals and an estimated 175 aquatic animals per year, totaling over 15,000 individual animals over a 75 year lifespan.

Based on January-August 2011 USDA slaughter numbers, it is projected that the number of land animals killed in 2011 will increase an additional 1% from 2010 numbers.”

So what if none of this slaughter, and earth destruction needed to exist?  Imagine a world that eliminates the cruelty of animals for food consumption and human goods/products.  An earth that would be stronger, and substantially more sustainable.  Andras Forgacs sees this kind of future.  It can be done.  Let’s do it!