There’s no question today that environmental awareness is in. Companies, many of them long detractors and opponents to environmentalists, are rushing to associate their products with the green movement. But perhaps no lifestyle choice has been so long associated with eco-friendliness as vegetarianism.

The two have far more in common than just their shared roots in the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and 70s: vegetarians can avoid having a share in the environmental waste and insanitary conditions created by confined animal feeding operations and other forms of factory farming, while the law of trophic levels reveals the inescapable inefficiencies involved in raising food stock plants as feed for food stock animals.

The problem is, however, humanity has developed a real taste for meat. Since human ancestors began scavenging carcasses between 2 and 1.5 million years ago, the evolutionary repercussions have been staggering. Meat provided a ready source of tissue-building protein, energy packed fats, and trace elements such as zinc and selenium. Even outside the Western ideal of a “meat and potatoes” meal, ability to bring in protein has long had a significant impact on social status.

So is it possible to have your meat and eat it too, so to speak? Well, animal rights group PETA certainly hopes so, as earlier this year it offered a big fat payday to the first person to create artificial meat with a not-so-artificial taste, and sell it at a price point roughly equivalent with current real-meat offerings. Though several news magazines and bloggers feel that the technical requirements of the prize are either prohibitively expensive or unrealistic, the announcement has gotten lots of press, and gotten more than one eco-conscious meat eater wondering if it could really help them reduce their impact and their guilt at eating dead animals.

Much to PETA’s delight, no doubt, a recent explainer column in Slate asserts the the new meat will almost certainly lead to a lower-impact McNugget. By eliminating the problems of methane from animals, nitrogenous waste from manure and guano, disposal of inedible parts, clearing land to create pasture, and planting, fertilizing, growing, harvesting and delivering feed to animals, any artificial meat would represent a dramatic reduction all sorts of environmental impacts, not just greenhouse gases. Conversely, lab grown meats—at least the speculative implementations of laboratory technologies that would grow meat—require only water, glucose, a small amount of electricity.

So as out there as it may sound, and as frosty as he initial consumer reception may be (who else out there remembers the welcome Olestra got?), lab-grown meat as science currently understands it could turn out to be a tremendously useful and humane resource for satisfying our dual desire for filling meals and a healthier planet