$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:Nice (Score:3, Interesting)
I like the concept of 100% taste-prep-whatever compatible meat being created without any harm to animals or the environment whatsoever. It's a net-benefit for society. Benefits animals, the land, and probably overall would help take a universal step-forward in our consciousness in a sort of "now we don't harm animals because we can avoid it" kind of way.
I just wonder how hard it will be to make that switch, even if the food pans out to be perfect. I mean, would "this was a real animal" honestly make a difference anymore? Would it be a delicacy? Would it signify class? Or would it be a thing that old people like us demand (real beef), but the next generation just takes for granted that you don't eat living animals, because test-tubes?
Re:Nice (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, the current cost is meaningless. I once had a £60,000 keyring. It was a prototype graphics chip - a one off, produced for testing. We had a few more made, each time with a few mods, before the button was pressed for mass production, at which point you could buy the whole graphics card for about £70 or so. That initial £60,000 it cost to tool up for each prototype was just a meaningless number - they were never going to be made individually so you have to factor it into the overall cost/profit formula later on. If synthetic meat catches on - and it's completely, totally obvious that it will (because at some point soon the choice will be synthetic meat or no meat at all) - the cost will rapidly undercut the cost of raising livestock.
Has been done before... (Score:5, Interesting)
Symbiotica did this before [tcaproject.org] in 2003 by growing tissue from skeletal muscle cells harvested from pre-natal sheep. And they ate the results.
There are two major hurdles with non-violent cultured meat for eating though:
1) Edible meat is a very complex tissue with muscles, fat, blood vessels, etc. and the precise relation of these cell types and their physical placement in the meat affects the taste and texture.
2) Most cell culturing media is not vegetarian - the nutrient baths are generally processed from living animals.
It sounds like this new effort is basically the same thing - culturing myoblasts and feeding them with fetal calf serum.
At the same time, I look forward to these challenges being overcome, and glad to see new funding!
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:2, Interesting)
But what if the stress or fear is what makes real meat taste so good?
Carnivores are evolved to eat freshly hunted and killed prey, not sickly weak prey unaware or uncaring that it's about to die.
You are a fucking asshole. (Score:3, Interesting)
Assuming the price comes down once the economy of scale kicks in, this would be a far less destructive staple than traditional meat.
You claim you have pangs of guilt for supporting the realities of the meat industry.
Yet you would reject the product unless it tastes nearly identical (and has additional nutritional advantages).
Basically you're saying, if it doesn't taste exactly like what I'm used to eating, I don't give a fuck how many billions of gallons of water are wasted raising cattle, I don't care how much pollution modern industrial farming produces, I don't care how many billions of animals will experience cramped, noisy conditions for their brief, unpleasant lives, I am going to continue to demand traditional meat.
Fuck you, you self-centered piece of shit.
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Don't care. (Score:5, Interesting)
> Of course, what you ARE going to have is a major backlash from the farming conglomerates who will see their profits vanishing.
Or they'll replace racks of chick-filled trays with racks of cultured meat once it becomes more profitable, if only as a premium high-margin item.
The big thing that's going to keep this from ever becoming cost-effective is the electricity it's going to take to exercise it by contracting the fibers over the course of their "life". Remember, most of what we call "meat" is REALLY "muscle", with incidental amounts of fat. Flabby muscle doesn't taste the same as exercised muscle. That's 90% of the reason why cows raised for meat are allowed to roam mostly out in the open instead of being kept in pens as veal. Pigs and chickens in close quarters will climb over each other and spend their lives trying to avoid getting trampled. Cows are just too big & heavy for that to work. They HAVE to be allowed to roam around for exercise. Otherwise, half of them would kill the other half long before they were old enough to slaughter.
As for opposition from "farmers", think about it for a minute. The poultry industry has basically perfected large-scale vertically-integrated corporate factory farming. The likelihood that any cultured meat could be even remotely cost-competitive with it is basically "nonexistent". That leaves beef, where there's a clear divide between ranchers and slaughterhouses. If ranchers decide it's more profitable to culture meat instead of ranch it, there's nothing the slaughterhouses can do about it. If slaughterhouses decide it's more profitable to culture meat than kill it, there's not much the farmers can do about it. More importantly, the states where ranchers are powerful aren't quite the states where slaughterhouses are powerful, so there's not going to be any kind of "united front".
The truth is, ranchers don't *like* sending animals to be slaughtered any more than the people who own the slaughterhouses *like* killing them. If they could cost-effectively get away with herding cattle into a robotic slaughter chamber, closing the soundproof doors, pressing the "go" button, and walking away to watch neatly-packaged meat emerge (regardless of the horrors that might occur inside the chamber), they'd do it in an instant.
Cultured meat will never replace good steak, and can't possibly be cost-competitive with factory-farmed poultry. That leaves hamburger & sausage as potentially-viable markets. My guess is that someday, nouveau-vegetarians will be able to enjoy guilt-free cultured hamburgers & sausage that's certified to be slaughter-free, and everyone else will eat hamburgers & sausage that are some cost-effective combination of ground beef/pork and cultured beef/pork.
We'll probably get to have some entertaining theatre when various sects of Judaism gets around to arguing about the 21st-century definition of "Kosher" in the context of meat that was technically never slaughtered, and might even see something truly perverse, like Kosher cultured meat guaranteed to be cloned from the cells of humanely-slaughtered animals (vs non-slaughtered animals), and a huge media orgy someday when Kosher cultured beef ends up getting served to a NewVegan who ordered cultured beef cloned from cells harvested from calves released into nature parks (where they're promptly killed & eaten by bears, cougars, wolves, and (in Florida) pythons).