Scientists Create Artificial Meat 820
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that scientists have created the first artificial meat by extracting cells from the muscle of a live pig and putting them in a broth of other animal products where the cells then multiplied to create muscle tissue. Described as soggy pork, researchers believe that it can be turned into something like steak if they can find a way to 'exercise' the muscle and while no one has yet tasted the artificial meat, researchers believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years' time. '"What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue. We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there," says Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University. "You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals." Animal rights group Peta has welcomed the laboratory-grown meat, announcing that "as far as we're concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there's no ethical objection while the Vegetarian Society remained skeptical. "The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust.""
Prior Art... (Score:4, Funny)
claimed by KFC.
(I'm joking)
Obligatory Transmetropolitan reference (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Prior Art... (Score:5, Funny)
Nobody's tasted the stuff yet?? (Score:3, Funny)
What, Eindhoven University doesn't have "student food service"? My alma mater would have served up the stuff in a New York minute along with the usual by-products, fillers, and cereals....
My Hope (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cheers for PETA (Score:5, Funny)
Soylent Green, perhaps?
PETA would be all over that, I am sure. As long as the "meat eaters" are processed first.
From a health perspective, it would be better to eat vegetarians. Economically, vegetarians also have the benefit of being cheaper to produce, and their environmental cost is lower. I believe PETA's web site can provide helpful information supporting those points.
Better Off Ted (Score:5, Funny)
Better Off Ted [wikipedia.org] Episode 2: "Heroes": Phil and Lem, of Veridian Dynamics [veridiandynamics.com], try to grow cow-less meat... Reportedly, the meat currently tastes like "despair".
Veridian Dynamics. We're the future of food, developing the next generation of food and food-like products. Tomatoes... the size of this baby, lemon-flavored fish, chicken that lay 16 eggs a day, which is a lot for a chicken, organic vegetables chock-full of antidepressants. At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy that people can't eat them, but we're not, because people can't eat them. Veridian Dynamics. Food. Yum.
Re:I, for one -- (Score:4, Funny)
Slig, it's what's for dinner.
Call me a p3rv3rt... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I am scared. I am intrigued. (Score:4, Funny)
In other news, (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I am scared. I am intrigued. (Score:5, Funny)
If there is one thing I am sure of, it's that the Japanese will pervert that into porn.
Re:My Hope (Score:5, Funny)
SOYLENT RED IS PIG!!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
save me some Soylent Purple
Re:I am scared. I am intrigued. (Score:5, Funny)
There's a Mitchell & Webb for that. [youtube.com] Favorite line:"There might be a few polar bears left if more people wanted one for breakfast."
Re:I am scared. I am intrigued. (Score:5, Funny)
Weak-kneed members of the public will have to be kept away from the giant culture vats, where hideous amorphous flesh lumps, studded with electrodes, thrash and strain
This is the best thinly-disguised metaquote about Slashdot I've seen in a long time.
Re:I am scared. I am intrigued. (Score:1, Funny)
How 'bout eating all the PETA people?
That would add a new sub category of meat too.
Re:I am scared. I am intrigued. (Score:4, Funny)
I just keep picturing the flesh walls in various first person shooters like Quake....
Think I'll be buying a double barrel in the next five years...
Not if we create chicken killing meat-bots (Score:5, Funny)
If we get overrun with chickens we can send muscle powered robots out to kill them. The meat needs to be exercised, so let's put them in robots programmed to hunt down chickens. Then we can blame all the chicken deaths on the meat-bots and then, in turn, hunt down the meat-bots and eat them.
But seriously, if the meat needs to be exercised, it seems obvious to have them do some sort of useful work. Of course, the best cuts of meat (the tenderloins and rib roasts that sit up high - which is where the phrase "eating high on the hog" comes from) do some, but not much work. So if the value of work that the muscle does offsets the price of the meat, we'd still have more expensive, tenderer cuts and tougher, harder working, but cheaper cuts.
Re:Computer! (Score:5, Funny)
Guess i'll order Tea, Earl Grey, hot to go with that meat then.
You can order that. However, what you will get is a drink that is almost, but not entirely unlike tea...
Re:I am scared. I am intrigued. (Score:5, Funny)
If people stop eating actual animals, we'll be overrun with chickens in a decade. Up to our friggin' ears I tells ya! We'll have to carve our way through with machetes while wearing goalie masks.
You say this like it's a bad thing.
McRib (Score:1, Funny)
This explains the return of the McRib.
Re:Not if we create chicken killing meat-bots (Score:4, Funny)
Perhaps it could be used to produce energy. I'm way out of my league here but I would imagine you could pump in proteins, oxygen and "food crud" to the meat and it's flexing motion could be used to produce electricity. Some of this electricity could be fed back to the system to provide the electrical stimulation the muscle needs. The rest goes to the grid.
Follow the white rabbit.
Re:I am scared. I am intrigued. (Score:3, Funny)
It would be much easier to breed some very stupid, ugly and disgusting pigs, which nobody would ever think of protecting and defending ... our current breeds are way too cute, especially when they are very young. Some vermiform and really dumb cows would be nice, too.
Re:My Hope (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Cheers for PETA (Score:5, Funny)
as everyone could have filet minion
Yes, I do think it would be quite nice to have a filet minion. He could cut up all the meat into edible pieces!
Re:Tasteless (Score:1, Funny)
As a foodie,
Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
My nightmare: realized (Score:4, Funny)
Hey Kids!
Sick of that boring old vat hamburger? Dive into Kraft's Ultracheese Burgernator! We genetically modified sentient meat into producing it's own cheese, which layers itself thick and rich with genuine Kraft-like flavor! We promise that it won't cause the zombie apocalypse!*
*Guarantees against the zombie apocalypse not guaranteed.
Re:Not if we create chicken killing meat-bots (Score:5, Funny)
We have such a thing. They're called "cows."
Your scheme would require some method to digest the "food crud" (a digestive system) and turn it into simpler compounds (a digestive system), some way to get those compounds to the cells and take away and process waste products (circulatory, filtering and excretory systems) and something to control it all (a nervous system). Once you do all that, you might as well just use the cow.
Re:I am scared. I am intrigued. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I am scared. I am intrigued. (Score:3, Funny)
Only very few animal type make up most of human consumed meat
You haven't been to china have you