PETA Offers X-Prize for Artificial Meat 1130
Bored MPA writes "The Times reports that PETA is to announce plans on Monday for a $1 million prize to the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012." PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk addressed the controversial decision by saying, "We don't mind taking uncomfortable positions if it means that fewer animals suffer." An unexpected and pragmatic move from an organization that has a strong base of support from pro-organic vegans." The question I always had about this- if they can take one sample from one animal and clone it in a vat and feed this world, will the vegans be ok with that?
Cloning Tissue or Whole Animal? (Score:4, Interesting)
Vegans != Hive mind. (Score:5, Interesting)
Just like people who comment on slashdot, vegans have a wider variety of opinions & reasons to arrive at their dietary choice. Trying to ask them collectively what they think about something like this is useless.
It would be like asking the slashdot crowd "would you buy Microsoft products if they open sourced them"
For those who prefer car analogies, it would be like asking
I really support this. (Score:3, Interesting)
If meat can be grown that doesn't have a central nervous system and so can't feel pain, I would feel much better about eating what little meat I do eat.
Oblig. Neuromancer Quote (Score:3, Interesting)
at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which
he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the
whole thing.
"Jesus," Molly said, her own plate empty, "gimme that.
You know what this costs?" She took his plate. 'They gotta
raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't
vat stuff." She forked a mouthful up and chewed.
Re:Answer to your question (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, probably not. As I understand it, all the techniques of "culturing" cells are directed toward making all the cells the same - if there are different types of cells in the culture, it is considered a failure. So "cultured meat" would be ALL muscle cells, with no fat cells or connective tissue. Which, while pleasing the health conscious, would be a culinary disaster - picture the toughest, driest steak on the planet.
One solution would be to culture genetically engineered fat cells with little bad cholesterol, and then grind it in with the cultured meat. So the choices would be hamburgers and sausages that probably taste worse than tofu, or real "once had hooves" meat.
I'm thinking that prize will remain unclaimed for a long time.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
SO.. (Score:3, Interesting)
can they alter the meat as well? less fat? more protein? extra vitamins? or can large corporations make them more addictive?
"buy your McBurger, now with the latest McD meat profiling taste and additives"
Re:If it was commercially viable (Score:3, Interesting)
Several years ago I remember reading an article in Wired title "Overcoming Yuk". I actually managed to find a link here:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/morton_pr.html [wired.com]
Now since I am currently at work and do not have time to read the full artical (This is slashdot, after all) I will mention what I took from it on my first reading, not what it actually says.
I understood it to be commentary on how the future of scientific advancement revolved around convincing the uneducated masses (that includes me with regards to biology) that certain things we found naturally repugnant were actually perfectly safe when done correctly. This is not to say I would trust companies like Monsanto with their atrocious record (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto) but if done by a party not driven purely by profit I can see this as being safe.
Unfortunately companies like Monsanto do nothing to convince people like me that the results of their research are safe when they try suppress news stories regarding the possible side effects of some of their products. See the section in earlier Wikipidia link on Related legal actions.
Re:Vegans != Hive mind. (Score:1, Interesting)
BUT for the "pure" vegans, at least in my country, there is a base they all share:
- Don't harm animals or pay people to harm animals
- Avoid the avoidable (in other words: BE PRAGMATIC!)
And the more sane guys understand the latter. There is just no point in not getting a specific job because you're not driving on the bus who has some material created from animal bones in it's tires. There's also no point in taking every piece of food to a laboratory and analise it.
Most vegans are, nonetheless, sorta picky here. They would e.g., even if interested, not buy or eat it, if any animals are held anywhere to make this cloning possible (which I assume should be the case).
In 20 years however, when not a single animal has to be used because all the genome material is already archived and all the former farm animals have already been gasified, I don't think any vegan would reject it for ethical reasons.
But many may think of flesh as disuisting, given the fact they got use to deny it before.
I'd eat it!
Re:Torchwood did it (and did it, and did it..) (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems that Torchwood's writers aren't above using other's ideas to good benefit. The creature in that episode was suspiciously like Chicken Little [technovelgy.com] from Fred Pohl and Cyril M Kornbluth's The Space Merchants.
A paradise predicted in "The Space Merchants" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
I like a nice bloody steaks more than most people, but most of the time I won't eat meet like the poster above. Its not because I care for the environment or feel bad for the animals, but if I just keep the meat intake on the lowdown I seem to spend less time with stomach sickness related events (aka Montezuma's revenge which I'm prone too) and I can keep a healthy weight.
And more of late, I've just been avoiding eating out and buying meat products because its been getting too expensive due to inflation.
If vat meat because viable I might eat more meat because it would be of course cheaper and hopefully less prone to e-coli related illnesses.
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
You can have my soylent green when you pry it from my cold dead ... ummm, on second thought ...
So, PETA's offering a million bucks. Chump change compared to what it's worth.
Anyone remember the sci-fi story with "chicken little" - that one piece of repeatedly cloned, vat-grown chicken flesh that was made into chicken breast, leg, etc.? If they could throw in some Octopus genes, everyone'd get a drumstick!
Re:Interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Depends... (Score:2, Interesting)
It depends on the type of vegan. Many will not be okay because they are abolitionists and believe that animals should have the right to be let alone, rather than made slaves for humankind.
Performing this kind of animal testing (which would no doubt have terrible effects on the animals) and keeping animals in labs for cloning is, to me, a terrible step in the wrong direction and is why nobody in the animal rights movement takes PETA seriously.
And finally, there is no way this could "feed the world." We have more than enough food to feed the world right now, we just waste it using inefficient farming (factory farming of animals being hugely inefficient) and the price would be too high for those in the third world, unfortunately.
Re:While... (Score:1, Interesting)
No, it's bad policy. Science refers to the theories explaining phenomena, engineering refers to using those theories in order to solve a practical problem. It is politics that determines how those predictions made by scientists/engineers are implemented.
To put it this way, if a structure breaks this would be:
a)A scientific problem if the scientists were wrong about how materials behave under stress.
b)An engineering problem if it collapsed because the engineers had designed it in a way that caused the materials to break in a manner as described by the scientists.
c)A policy problem if it was built and/or operated in a manner that engineers and scientists had predicted would cause trouble (Chernobyl would be a good example. Engineers and Scientists had predicted several problems and dangers with the design prior to the accident).
In the case of GM biologists and ecologists has pointed out problems with how it is done for a long time. That it is still being done is not a failure of biology or even genetic engineering. The failure is that it is being applied in a manner that we know can cause trouble. I.e, it is bad policy, not bad science.
Re:a farm pig or a farm cow in the wild? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:5, Interesting)
Who is *we* exactly?
Jainism [wikipedia.org]
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:3, Interesting)
This largely due to a misinterpretation of western societiey's Christian legacy. I googled around for "fish on friday" and dug up this:
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/52049 [answerbag.com]
The real reason why christians do this is still kind of open for debate.
In short, it comes down to a old tradition of "abstaining from eating meat during fasting". Somewhere along the line an exception for fish was made. Since fish were okay, one could (falsely) conclude from this tradition that "fish is not meat". IMO the way surf and turf prepare, behave and taste from one another reinforces this.
As a result, that's the kind of bias injected into the debate, and how strict vs non-strict vegetarians view one another and their meal. Personally, I think it comes down to how "huggable" your would-be lunch is, but that's just me.
Actually... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:3, Interesting)
Meat animals don't just grow themselves magically, they must be fed. And they're fed a lot of plants, for a long time.
So, when you eat some meat, you're effectively consuming many times that much plant matter, because of all the plants that were killed to feed that meat. Meat is fundamentally a very inefficient kind of food to produce.
A vegetarian, on the other hand, eats the plant matter directly, thereby requiring the deaths of only a fraction as many plants.
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, when you consider that PETA's ideal world would ban honey, pets of any sort, circuses, seeing eye dogs for the blind, and most importantly they would totally stop all animal testing in medicine which would cause the medical field to practically grind to a halt. I wouldn't put it past them to put cells above the person they came out of, these people would rather a person died from diabetes then get insulin which was created by use of animal testing.
Unless your name is Mary Beth Sweetland.