Islamic scholars consulted by a leading producer of cultivated meat say that the newfangled protein — which is grown from animal cells and doesn’t require animals to be slaughtered — can be halal, or permissible under Muslim law.
And the Jewish Orthodox Union this month certified a strain of lab-grown chicken as kosher for the first time, “marking a significant step forward for the food technology’s acceptance under Jewish dietary law,” as the Times of Israel put it.
For some vegetarians, it makes a difference wether an animal had to die in the process. It’s one thing to continously harvest milk or eggs from an animal which otherwise lives on
happily. It’s another thing to eat something which could only be obtained by slaughtering an animal.In the same sense, many hard cheeses like Parmesan or Gran Padano aren’t vegetarian either, because they use rennet.
Isn’t the vast majority of cheese now made with bacterial rennet instead of calf rennet? I remember reading that something like 95% of cheese now was made with that instead.
Would be nice to know, I’d like to read a source. On wiki, I got the impression the driving incentive is not to kill less calfs, but to produce more rennet, to ultimately produce more cheese. The German wiki quotes “Nur ca. 35 % der weltweiten Käseproduktion können mit Naturlab produziert werden.”, roughly “Only about 35% of worldwide cheese production can be produced with rennet from animals”. Technically still a vast majority.
It was from Wikipedia, and I was misremembering slightly - not 95% of all cheese, but of cheese made in the US. Which could be saying a lot about cheese in the US.