$375,000 Lab-Grown Beef Burger To Debut On Monday 221
sciencehabit writes "If you take some scientists' word for it, the biggest agricultural revolution since the domestication of livestock is starting on Monday — in an arts center in London. At a carefully orchestrated media event, Dutch stem cell researcher Mark Post is planning to present the world's first test-tube hamburger. Its patty — financed by an anonymous billionaire — is made from meat that Post has laboriously grown from bovine stem cells in his lab at an estimated cost of $375,000, just to prove a point: that it is possible to produce meat without slaughtering animals."
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I'd be more worried about texture.
Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Good result.
Yes, it's expensive now. It's a prototype. Aluminum once cost more than gold.
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why it's a hamburger. The entire point of mechanically pre-chewing cheap meat is to destroy its tough, inedible texture. You can make a somewhat passable simulation of ground beef out of soy beans, for heavens' sake.
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, of course, I seriously doubt it will be as tasty or have nearly as good mouthfeel as a burger from a real cow, but this is a very important, early step in a long chain of necessary inventions to truly replace animals as a meat source.
However, if culture medium *does* matter, then that become yet another variable to tweak in producing the tastiest meat, and it's almost certain that we'll be able to improve on nature by, say, eliminating the taste of fear and stress in meat.
We'll also theoretically have the ability to grow sterile meat if we can use sterile inputs. Imagine meat that can stay vacuum sealed on the shelf with no refrigeration for months and still taste fresh!
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:3, Insightful)
You can make a somewhat passable simulation of ground beef out of soy beans, for heavens' sake.
No. No you cannot.
Re:Doesn't save animals (Score:5, Insightful)
Soon we'll have cow blood-donors.
But... but... meat is murder? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I admit I'm a heterotroph [wikipedia.org]. That means I eat things. There's no way around that. I'm not photosynthetic. I'm not chemoautotrophic [wikipedia.org]. It doesn't matter if it's plant or animal or fungus or various prokaryotes, I live thanks to the death of other living creatures. My heritage has been heterotrophic since sometime when the first eukaryotes started clumping together into multicellular creatures back almost a billion years ago, and some of them realized it was easier to raid other critters and burn it with oxygen than to grow their own. That choice was made a long, long time ago, long before I had enough differentiated nerve cells clumped together to enable me to make a conscious choice about it. Even if they're cultured cells sitting in a growth medium, I'm still responsible for their death. Even if I'm vegetarian, it's a formerly living plant that I'm eating. They die so I can live.
My main and almost only moral concern is that I don't eat other sentient creatures (obviously) and if I do eat reasonably intelligent creatures (e.g., pigs), that they are treated reasonably well during their lifetime until I decide to eat them. I'd sooner ensure a basic standard like that is strictly adhered to than waste $375k on a lab hamburger for the sake of the vain illusion that I'm not killing things to survive. I still am, even at that kind of cost and hassle.
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:3, Insightful)
You can make a somewhat passable simulation of ground beef out of soy beans, for heavens' sake.
No. No you cannot.
Yes you can. You might not like it, but as a carnivore who enjoys a cool center rare steak, I can tell you that a lot of those soy protein burgers taste okay. Do they taste exactly like hamburger? nope. But not everything in life has to taste like hamburger. Ice cream for instance.
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO, soy is at its worst when its trying to be something else.
Its sort of like the uncanny valley. If you come out and say "hi, Im tofu", its fine. If you try to be steak, everyone will know something is wrong (even if theyre not sure what) and it will taste terrible.
rRe: I wonder about the taste (Score:3, Insightful)
Since you try to sell them as meat substitutes he damn sure wants something that doesn't make him miss meat at every bit