Does everything solve with technology?

Do you like computer-made food?

Once, in a process management class, at the production engineering course at Mackenzie, where I taught for a long time, I said to the class,

-I do not like chicken. It's not my favorite food.

Then a student asked me

-But why professor?

-Because these chickens are made by computer today. They do not taste anything, just anabolic and artificial protein.

Needless to say, it was a general laugh. Someone even amended: ah, it's a lie teacher, that chickens are made by computer...

I insisted: it's true, they are computer-made.

Ten years have gone by and here's the news: A refrigerator in the US produces chicken meat without killing a single bird.

Report from reporters Regan Morris and James Cook of the BBC News of San Francisco gives us some hope that we can feed more than nine billion people on Planet Earth in the year 2050 without having to kill billions of birds and other animals!

According to several studies, including those of the UN, the demand for meat is growing around the world and because of this there is an imminent crisis facing the growing appetite for animal protein on the planet. Could a chicken that sits on a farm in San Francisco be the solution?

In 1931, Winston Churchill predicted that one day the human race would "escape the nonsense of raising a whole hen to eat the breast or the wing, producing these parts separately."

Eighty-seven years later, that day arrived at Just, a food company in San Francisco, USA, where journalists tasted chicken nuggets made from the cells of a chicken feather. That is: chicken done, literally, by computer!

The chicken that served as cell donor was still alive, allegedly chasing a farm not far from the laboratory.

This meat should not be confused with vegetarian soy-based burgers, vegetables, and other meat substitutes that are gaining popularity in vegan supermarkets. No, this is real meat made from animal cells. They are called in various forms: synthetic meat, in vitro, laboratory-grown or even "clean".

It takes about two days to produce a chicken nugget in a small bioreactor, using a protein to stimulate the cells to multiply, some type of support to give structure to the product and a culture medium - or development - to feed the meat as it develops.

The result is not yet commercially available anywhere on the planet, but Just Chief Executive Josh Tetrick says it will be on the menu of some restaurants by the end of this year. "We do things like eggs, ice cream or plant butter and we make meat only from meat. You simply do not have to kill the animal," Tetrick explains.

Whoever tested the product ensures that the taste, texture, results are impressive. In some ways even better than the original nugget.

This is aimed at preventing the slaughter of animals and protecting the environment from the degradation of intensive industrial livestock and solve (will be?) The problem of how to feed the growing population without destroying the planet. It is hoped that by not being genetically modified this new "meat" will not require treatment with anabolics and antibiotics to grow.

According to the UN, the breeding of animals for human consumption is a major cause of global warming and air and water pollution. We slaughter 70 billion animals a year to feed seven billion people, says Uma Valeti, a cardiologist who founded Memphis Meats, a California-based cell-based meat company. According to Valeti, global demand for meat is doubling as more people get out of poverty. At that rate, he adds, mankind will not be able to raise enough cattle and chicken to satisfy the appetite of nine billion people by 2050. "So we can literally grow red meat, poultry or seafood directly from these animal cells," says Valeti.

Throughout its history humanity has developed the belief that everything can and can solve everything with the creation and development of technologies, but not always these same technologies could be safely used or created no more problems than those supposedly they would solve.

This news shows us that science fiction going forward, and increasingly, will not be as fiction as our favorite TV series have wanted or want to make us believe.

Are we on the threshold of a new era? From the creation of devices that will allow humankind food replicators, like the ones we see in every Star Trek series! Very soon we will just have to order a replicator a food, a drink, (a Raktajino, who knows?), And we will be served at once.

But, there will always be one more ... humanity is not in the same degree of technological development in every corner of the earth, and regardless of what our experts, heralds of new technologies, may wish to believe, there will be no such dream spread and technological equalization so early for a series of reasons: economic, social, political, etc. Apart from that there will be those who will not be interested in synthetic food, so I keep insisting, or we all grow together or the future will be darker than some who have already shown us many fiction films.

I am not a Luddite, I have not been and I will not be, but in these 44 years of living with IT I have always been quite critical, not skeptical, about the introduction of new technologies in unprepared environments to absorb and use them. Brazil is far from being an egalitarian place prepared for so many fantastic technologies, just see the result of the last world productivity ranking 2018, in which we fall year after year, and we are in the lantern. FGV study shows that country is in 50th place in the list with 68 economies. And productivity is not something that can be achieved only with technologies, but this is a theme for the next article.