Test-Tube Burgers Coming Soon 276
ananyo writes "A burger made entirely from lab-grown meat is expected to be unveiled by October this year. But costing in excess of $250,000, it's not going to be flying off supermarket shelves quite yet. The lab meat is produced using adult stem cells, which are then grown on scaffolds in cell-culture media. Because such lab-assembled muscle is weak, it has to be 'bulked up' by exposing to electric shocks. The researchers, based in the Netherlands, had already grown goldfish fillets in 2002, then fried them in breadcrumbs before giving them to an 'odor and sight' panel to assess whether they seemed edible." While I'm not overly enthusiastic about this Dutch attempt at growing burgers, it is a huge step-up from the Japanese effort.
Re:Question for the other Catholics (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this qualify as meat during Lent? Or should I just stick to my Filet-O-Fishes (or is it Filets-O-Fish) for Friday?
Since the whole point of abstaining from meat during Lent is "mortification of the flesh", you could probably go either way.
Re:Excited (Score:5, Interesting)
Mostly my opinion.
I don't have a problem with animals being killed for food per se. I have more of a problem with the way some of these farms are run / animals are treated. Also farming uses a lot of land, a lot of resources, and generates a tonne of pollution (all of which the lab solution might do as well of course).
Ultimately if a lab solution can replace the need to kill animals, I'm all for it (assuming as you said, it's just as good or better). If for no other reason than no longer having to listen to the animal rights people. I'm sure they will be replaced by an equally annoying anti-synthetic food group in time, but at least it would be a change in the whitenoise.
Growing meat... (Score:4, Interesting)
... at industrial scale that is both cost effective and as good/or better then the real thing remains to be seen.
Re:Excited (Score:5, Interesting)
The real question I have is how are they going to reproduce everything that's in the meat. I mean, the core stuff, fine. But there are a myriad of different stuff in meat, including bacteria of all kinds, microbes, all types of things. Sometimes we get ill because of it, but for the most part we ingest it just fine.
What will happen when nothing of that sort goes into our body anymore? Will we take "dirt pills"? I know people have been making Tannin pills to prevent from having to drink wine ...
This will be a sad day IMO.
Re:Using this technique (Score:4, Interesting)
I say make it an option and let people decide.
Personally, I'm all for it, but I recognize there is always a risk when something is untested. The same can be said for any drug. You can't tell what the effects will be in 30 years until, well, people have been using it for 30 years. You can make soem very good guesses (which is what will happen with the synthetic meat) but you won't really _know_ until a generation actually lives off it.
There's gonna be people who won't trust this stuff (and probably never will), and that's fine.
Glad (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Excited (Score:2, Interesting)
But there are a myriad of different stuff in meat, including bacteria of all kinds, microbes, all types of things.
Absolutely true at McDonalds, or taco bell. Ideally, however, the interior of raw meat is pretty darn near sterile.
Think about it, the interior of your bicep right now is either sterile, or red, inflamed, and in intense pain, correct? The interior of meat is actually much more sterile than the interior of vegetable matter, which is kind of interesting, especially organic vegetables which were bathed in fecal matter as a fertilizer.
Now the exterior of factory slaughtered meat is in fact generally filthy beyond all comprehension, ditto ground meat products, but I don' t think anyone has found a digestive or culinary advantage to intentionally smearing a layer of e coli fecal bacteria on their steak.
Not in my buns! (Score:4, Interesting)
On a continent that goes apeshit [bbc.co.uk] over Genetically Modified and other Bioengineered Crops, it seems unlikely this will gain any traction in the commercial market place, at least not in the EU [wikipedia.org]. On the other hand, the EU may take the stance that since this work was pioneered in the EU, it can't possibly be bad.
Now on Mars, or long space voyages this might have some appeal, especially Mars, where there is a possibility of finding water, thereby eliminating one of the heaviest component of any food product. Although unless making and transporting the necessary equipment and media takes up less room and less weight than a freezer full of hamburger this seems unlikely there as well. Chances are the growth media can be shipped dry as well, and reconstituted with distilled water from any source.
Even if the cost per pound could be brought in line with animal sources, it seems unlikely to be a rational method of food production here on earth, simply because significant portions of the meat supply would be put at risk by a simple power failure, or contaminant in the growth media.
The rest of this story will no doubt be filled with hand wringing posts over the amount of CO2 that cattle produce (something never attributed to Wildebeest herds), and how this will save the earth. The whole concept creates an intellectual conundrum for the Peta crowd. They would love to get animals off the farm, and this method presents a way forward, but having to embrace those huge corporations, and bio-engineering is probably more than they could stomach.
Re:Question for the other Catholics (Score:5, Interesting)
Now here's another interesting philosophical question. I eat a vegan diet for health reasons, mostly to do with the quality of food and how it goes from "animal" to "edible".
Is test-tube meat something that I would eat? What about an ethical vegan? (They don't want animals to suffer.)
meh... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know why but this concept gives me the creeps because we don't really understand all there is to know about genetics
No genetics involved here.
It's plain vanilla stem cells, which are grown on a media and produce muscle tissue.
It's exactly the same process which occurs naturally in a growing animal.
By creating meat in a lab, there is no way to be sure that it is exactly the same as nature intended it to be. In fact, our bodies may very well process it differently or it could be very detrimental to our health
From a dietary point of view, the only point in eating meat is to get proteins. There are some amino acid which are present in meat while being rare in most plants (that's why you can't improvise a vegan regime but need to follow a specific regime with enough specific plants which give you the otherwise rare and missing amino acids).
Everything else you get it from plants: including all the really important vitamins, and so one. Except some B vitamins which are absent in plants but present in yeast (beer!!!) and in animal products (milk).
So wherever you hamburger was vat grown, or grown on a real animal doesn't change much: You'll get what you need (protein) from both, and anything else you need comes actually from your side dish (vegetables).
If you want to be concsious about what you eat, you don't need to insist on animal meat. You need to eat more fruits and vegetables.
From a "food processing point of view", it doesn't mean much. Cooking food destroys (denaturates) most proteins anyway, so by the time it goes out of the grill, it won't be much different between vat grown and animal grown.
From a biological point of view, this is not simply proteins produced in a vat, this is real muscle tissue produced by actual stem cell, just like in a growing body. Under the microscope you won't see much difference.
Re:Question for the other Catholics (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Question for the other Catholics (Score:5, Interesting)
So it depends on where you want to draw the line. If you don't mind taking, say, 1/1000th of the life of a cow to eat a burger every week for the rest of your life, then it is fine either way. If you don't want any part of a dead animal on your hands, then you will have to go with the more expensive extraction method.
Of course, if you don't want ANY part in any animal death, you should know that pretty much everything you use has animal parts in it somewhere. Hell, tires are black because of carbon black sourced from charred animal carcasses.
Re:Question for the other Catholics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Question for the other Catholics (Score:5, Interesting)
Religion is a spiritual crutch for people who can't handle God.
Re:Using this technique (Score:5, Interesting)
Jewish rabbis get a prohibition on cheeseburgers from this lone (half-)verse:
Exodus 34:26b: Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.
From here, they have entire separate milk and meat dishes and can't have even chicken with cheese.
If you even applied logic to the verses themselves, there are already a great number of things that Jewish people could eat, but don't because a rabbi put a fence around the law.
Re:Question for the other PETA-ites (Score:2, Interesting)
Fuck off. :-)
All I did was pass on some information that might be useful in answering the question. PETA is a bunch of fanatics about animals. If they're okay with lab meat, odds are the saner types are as well. Information, not support. Nothing more, nothing less.