First Ever Public Tasting of Lab-Grown Cultured Beef Burger 303
vikingpower writes "Today, at 14:00 Western European Time (9:00 am Eastern), Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University (the Netherlands) will present a world first: he will cook and serve a burger made from Cultured Beef in front of an invited audience in London. The event will include a brief explanation of the science behind the burger. You can watch the event live, online. The project's fact sheet is to be found here (pdf)." The BBC is reporting that Sergey Brin is the mystery backer behind the project.
Ethical & Environmental (Score:5, Insightful)
I think lab-grown meat is the future. For quite a lot of people, meat is just too tasty to be given up completely. At the same time, it is an environmental disaster, with the United Nations estimating that animal farming has a greater effect on climate change than ALL of the worlds transportation (that is, cars, trucks, trains, ships and airplanes) combined. Some even say it's responsible for 51% of greenhouse gases emissions [independent.co.uk]. Additionally, factory farming causes billions of animals to suffer [vimeo.com], which is highly unethical. Lab-grown meat avoids both problems.
Until we can buy lab-grown meat, we should still go Veg, but once lab-grown meat is available, the abolishment of the mass factory farming is much more realistic.
Re:Zealouts and Luddites (Score:4, Insightful)
The price will go down eventually. Personally I look forward to meat without suffering for farm animals. Suffering for the animals is a by product of seeking to control costs, this will allow that without a nervous system that can feel suffering.
No exploding, just excited to see progress.
Re:Zealouts and Luddites (Score:2, Insightful)
The only zealot post in this thread until now appears to be from you :)
Re:Zealouts and Luddites (Score:2, Insightful)
The vegetarians will celebrate because they get to eat 'meat' once more without killing animals.
There must be some vegetarians somewhere that will, but I imagine the vast majority just won't care. Most who haven't eaten meat for a while just no longer care for it.
Re:Zealouts and Luddites (Score:5, Insightful)
Reports are, it tasted lousy, due to nearly zero fat content. Additionally, "real" beef has flavor overtones resultant from the feed the animal was raised on. Thus, corn-fed beef tastes different from grass-fed beef, even if both cows came from the same cows.
I don't expect vat-raised hamburger, much less steak, being commercially available anytime soon. . . . . simply because if it doesn't TASTE good and have the "mouth feel" of genuine beef, you're not going to get enough buyers to make it a commercial success. . .
Re:Zealouts and Luddites (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I think your hostility is unwarranted. Frankly, you come off much worse than the guy you're responding to. For one thing, disagreeing with someone is no reason to call someone an idiot.
That aside, anti-GM groups and vegetarians have a wide variety of reasons for their beliefs and actions. I know anti-GM people who have good, well thought out reasons, but I also know some who are just anti-science. I know vegetarians who don't eat meat because they're concerned about animal welfare, economic inequality, environmental issues, health issues, or some combination of those. I also know some who just don't like the taste. I also know some for whom it's a fashion statement.
Don't try to paint over everything with the same brush. There will be some people who are afraid of this meat simply because it was "grown in a lab" which makes it comparable to Frankenstein's monster somehow. Frankly, I'm a bit concerned about the meat because I haven't read enough about what they're actually doing to know that they're not doing something strange, dangerous, or unethical. At this point, it's just my own ignorance, but I'm not going to promote the whole thing and tell people it's fine when I don't actually know what they're doing.
Re:You would think. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
China's populations is levelling off but its standard of living is going up. Not every one lives in a house with electricity and plumbing but most people would like to. When larger fractions of their population start living the western life you can bet they wont want to farm their own foods. We are no where near feeding the world adequately, if this can be done cheap and efficiently than its a big step in the right direction.
Re:Zealouts and Luddites (Score:2, Insightful)
My hobby, cook up bacon when vegetarians are around and watch them look at it longingly and give me dirty looks at the same time.
I bet you think all those people giving you dirty looks when you smoke in their bedroom are doing it out of tobacco envy, too.
Re:Zealouts and Luddites (Score:2, Insightful)
I imagine it'll have a market among fitness buffs. If it tastes remotely meat-ish and provides the proteins that meat provides, and lacks fat as well, it probably doesn't matter too much if the taste is "good." If you've ever tasted the protein shakes that people buy in bulk at GNC, you'd understand- flavor is not the primary concern.
Re:dupe (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, I fail to see where morality enters into this argument at all...?
Humans are just another variety of animal on this planet, like the rest of them, we eat, sleep, shit, fuck and make new little copies of ourselves.
We just happen to be on the top of the food chain, and have a lot of choices on what to eat, picking from those lower than us on the food chain.
There's nothing morally wrong with eating something lower than yourself on the food chain, that's they way nature made all of us animals.
Somewhere along the line....people have gotten so abstracted from their food, they seem to forget this.
Please don't misunderstand, I like meat and I eat it.
But I'm not so abstracted from my food that I forget that it used to be a living thing, and that it's life was taken so that I could have nutrition (and useful byproducts like bone meal, glycerin, leather, etc). If we ever reach a level of technology where there are no health or taste reasons why a synthetic meat would be undesirable, I simply wouldn't ever buy meat that used to be alive.
We're a unique animal that need not be limited to the "natural." It's natural to piss and shit wherever, but modern sanitation sets up some rules about how piss and shit are handled so we don't contaminate our living area or food and water supplies. It's natural to breed and have women spending their childbearing years perpetually pregnant from potentially many different men, but we as a society calm things down a bit because runaway breeding is unsustainable. We've gone far beyond our evolved instincts.
Re:You would think. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd mod you up if I could.
So many of the anti-meat crowd are completely oblivious to how cattle ranching is primarily done these days. Managed intensive rotational grazing isn't the sought after ideal, it's reality for pretty much everyone I know who ranches and is holding on or doing well, and it's been that way for probably a decade or more now.
These idiots think cows are grown in vats and fed a steady diet of bubble gum and corn syrup in a 1920s style slaughterhouse.