Salt Lake Community College dining services announced earlier this week that all of their dishes containing meat will now exclusively contain in vitro meat.
This change is made to appease the increasing amount of environmentally concerned students, as well as animal rights activists, pressuring head cook Diane Miller and her team to remove factory farm produced meat.
“I consider this a huge success. I’ve been writing letters to Diane since last semester and a couple of my friends and I have tried to protest the lack of plant-based options,” says SLCC Maggie LaPaugh.
LaPaugh has been vegetarian for eight years and was one of the key movers for the menu change.
“We now have means to please every student on campus,” says Miller. “We have been getting feedback from several vegetarian students asking for more cruelty-free options and now we have cruelty-free meat. Meat eaters will hardly notice the difference in taste and texture.”
In vitro meat, which is also called cultured, test-tube, or victimless meat – is an animal-flesh product that is produced through the replication of a single fetal calf serum. Once those fetal cells are extracted the need for the resources to produce meat are no longer necessary in the amount they once were.
“I don’t even really like the taste of vegetables, but now that victimless meat in an option, I might let myself be a test-tube-atarian,” says LaPaugh.
Max Jeraldo is an 18 year old SLCC sophomore and has always been passionate about the environment. It is a passion that often conflicts with his primal love for a juicy burger and his unrelenting craving for steak.
“Now that I can get meat at the food court that doesn’t require as much water or that generates as much pollution [as factory farmed meat] my vegetarian environmental friends will finally get off my back. I don’t have to feel guilty for eating food I like. I can affordably eat meat and be sustainable,” says Jeraldo.
This is very exciting for all students at SLCC and begins this April Fools Day on all campus.
