PETA Abandons $1 Million Prize For Artificial Chicken 191
sciencehabit writes "Don't expect an artificial chicken in every pot anytime soon. Since 2008, the animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has offered $1 million to anyone able to create a commercially viable artificial meat from growing chicken cells. But although scientists are making progress toward artificial hamburgers, even a 2-year extension from the original deadline of 2012 wasn't enough to lure applicants for PETA's prize."
Revolution in a year (Score:5, Funny)
They've dangled a $1 million prize in front of everybody, with an impossible deadline, and when science actually does start coming close to earning it, they kill it.
That's chicken.
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Do you have any citation for the taste claim? From what I heard, taste was actually pretty good.
Here's what I have (from wikipedia [wikipedia.org]):
There is really a bite to it, there is quite some flavour with the browning. I know there is no fat in it so I didn't really know how juicy it would be, but there is quite some intense taste; it's close to meat, it's not that juicy, but the consistency is perfect. This is meat to me... It's really something to bite on and I think the look is quite similar.
Shachar
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Do you have any citation for the taste claim? From what I heard, taste was actually pretty good.
No, that's not what you read. The taste was intense, but nothing was said about it being intensely good. The texture was lauded, but the flavor was only mentioned. English is not your strong suit. Don't try to interpret it for us.
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Vegemite has intense taste!
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'Bite' usually means an acidic or sour taste. That is not something most people are looking for in hamburger. Add in the fact that it has an 'intense' flavor and I don't see how you could say it was good.
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Lets be honest, if there's one thing PETA is very effective at, it's PR. If there's another thing PETA is good at, it's getting more money flowing.
Cat, the other white meat (Score:2)
As I sometimes say to my evil black cat when she gets a bit crazy and decides to sink her claws into me, "Cat, the other white meat." So far she hasn't worked.
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Try explaining to your cat what happened, or did not happen, to Schrödinger's Cat.
It might, or might not, work.
Anyway, the UK used to have some artificial food stuff called Turkey Twizzlers that were kinda sorta artificial. But celebrity twat chef Jamie Oliver made a fuss about them, so they got banned from school lunches. Kids seemed to like them with chips (fries), though.
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I don't think they were artificial in any way - not any more than any other food - they were just made from all the bits of meat swept off the floor at Bernard Matthew's factory and that offended the sensibilities of the do-gooder middle class who are always shocked and appalled at what the working classes eat.
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Or, because they don't think the working classes should be forced to eat the bits of meat swept off the floor of a factory because it's all they can afford.
Because, really: [dailymail.co.uk]
that's pretty nasty stuff.
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Not really. It's just a part and parcel of how "mission doc"'s work.
This pretty much sums it up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Why exactly other than a feeling that you don't like offal?
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It's not a question of me not liking offal (I don't eat meat, so I wouldn't eat it anyway).
Offal is organ meats, which still have nutritional value. But the blood, bone, cartilage, skin, beaks feet and bums ... that's not offal, that's awful.
I'd be less concerned about using gizzards and hearts than the junk they grind into a paste for these things.
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It's not a question of me not liking offal (I don't eat meat, so I wouldn't eat it anyway).
Offal is organ meats, which still have nutritional value. But the blood, bone, cartilage, skin, beaks feet and bums ... that's not offal, that's awful.
I'd be less concerned about using gizzards and hearts than the junk they grind into a paste for these things.
I'll pass on the blood pudding and black sausage, but some of that stuff is what jello is made of. And pork cracklings are the next best thing to bacon when it comes to meat candy.
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Exactly - gstoddart may very well choose not to eat any meat but the idea that because one considers a part of an animal "icky" implies that they are in any way fundamentally "bad" for human health is nothing more than bad reasoning - the same sort of bad reasoning that says slapping "organic" on a label makes the food fundamentally "good" for human health.
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As I sometimes say to my evil black cat when she gets a bit crazy and decides to sink her claws into me, "Cat, the other white meat." So far she hasn't worked.
(Cat) "Human, the other fish meat."
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Ah PETA... (Score:3, Informative)
Killing 90% of all the animals they take in while claiming to be an "ethical" organization. [dailymail.co.uk] The sooner the sink into the dustbin of history along with various other wingnut organizations the better.
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Quoting the daily mail should get you modded down, not up.
A-typical case of "boo hoo, I don't like the source," so I'll throw a fit over it even if it's correct. How odd that there's no shortage of other papers that have reported on exactly the same thing now is there. But don't worry, I didn't up the statistics. Rather I posted a singular story, but didn't directly apply it to one shelter. After all, even you could spend the 30 seconds to use google and find out that I'm still right.
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Quoting the daily mail should get you modded down, not up.
A-typical case of "boo hoo, I don't like the source," so I'll throw a fit over it even if it's correct. How odd that there's no shortage of other papers that have reported on exactly the same thing now is there. But don't worry, I didn't up the statistics. Rather I posted a singular story, but didn't directly apply it to one shelter. After all, even you could spend the 30 seconds to use google and find out that I'm still right.
The point is, that if there are more credible sources, use them. If a liar salts his lies with occasional truths, that doesn't entitle him to be considered a truthful source.
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To be honest, you'd be better off quoting some drunk who's living homeless on the street rather than the Daily Mail as the drunk wouldn't bother to twist everything to fit an evil agenda.
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The Daily Mail is an anti-source: facts uniquely found there are more likely to be wrong than right, so using it tends to count against your argument.
They got a lot of mileage out of that unspent $1m (Score:5, Interesting)
Science prizes are supposed to encourage development of things not yet commercially viable; this was a phony small tip for someone already successful. "Phony", because even if someone had the breakthrough needed on the day after this was announced, there's no way in hell that it could be approved for use and on market shelves in time to meet even the extended deadline.
And then there were the contest requirements, including full disclosure of ingredients and methods (trade secrets), carte blanche use of any- and everything related for PeTA's promotional purposes, rules subject to change without notice, and so on.
This was never a serious offer, just serious marketing, something PeTA mastered long ago. This "prize" retraction just got them some more free air time and, no doubt, some new members & donations... saith an older and hopefully wiser former member & supporter.
Re:They got a lot of mileage out of that unspent $ (Score:5, Insightful)
it wouldn't be paid out unless the contestant was selling a ton of the stuff in stores and restaurants across 10 states over three months... at the same price as real chicken.
Wow, you're not kidding. If you've got that, you've got revenue much higher than $1million, and are probably readying for a billion dollar IPO.
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Just introducing a couple rich guys who hate animal cruelty and a few scientists working on the problem will accomplish more than any prize.
Depends how big the prize is and what those people end up doing. Also, I'd have to favor the results-oriented reward over the process-oriented reward.
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Alternatively, they genuinely thought we had a meat replacement ready to go and were just refusing to use it out of pettiness or evil. Given the way PETA talk about their ideological opponents it seems alarmingly plausible to me.
Why, oh why ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Aren't chicken nuggets artificial enough already ?
Re:Why, oh why ? (Score:4, Funny)
*may have once been in close proximity to a real dead chicken.
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Oh, it's made from '100% real chicken'. It's just not "meat" in any sense most of us would recognize.
You take all the leftover parts, puree them, add fillers and binders, stick 'em back together -- it's just the parts of the chicken with little or no nutritional value.
They can still call it chicken, and it isn't artificial. But if someone gave you a pile of what it really is (either before or after they grind it up), you sure wouldn't eat it.
impossible (Score:2)
Efficency? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have trouble believing artificial meat would be remotely competitive in terms of nutrients use and various supporting chemical agents, energy inputs, costs of installation, maintenance and even the need for an artificial immunological system.
Chicken are incredibly efficient, and their eggs are even more efficient, this is reflected in the low price of the meat and eggs. Yeah I've had a philosophy that when fossil fuels aren't directly involved, cheaper is mostly synonymous with ecological.
It's possible that successful artificial meat on a massive scale would lead to more resource depletion and more global warming, in my mind. It would perhaps create incredibly resistant, "superbug" viruses or bacteria. I'm not terribly concerned with killing chicken in that scheme.
What certainly could be done is regulation to give way more space for the hen / chicken, small tariff on imports from countries that don't have a strong enough regulation yet. Yes, regulations, I hope that doesn't sound too evil and bureaucratic (weird how digiliently global regulations on IP are made up and applied yet libertarian corporate overlords don't bitch about them).
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A million bucks? (Score:2)
Well, yeah. Not that I'm sure a million bucks wouldn't be useful to SOMEONE.
But for the kinds of heavy-duty R&D and vetting required for food products? That's a drop in the bucket.
Quorn (Score:3)
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Quorn is fine just so long as you're not violently allergic to it [huffingtonpost.com] and realise that it's artificially fortified because it is naturally low on vitamins and minerals.
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hhah (Score:2)
Mock Bock??
Why the prize went unclaimed. The true story. (Score:2)
Already There (Score:2)
The chickens they mass produce today are artificial. They're so full of synthetic hormones and other chemicals they grow to 5 pounds or more in 6 weeks. I used to raise chickens when I was a kid and the average chicken breast in the store today weighs almost as much as an entire fryer from my flock used to. It's incredible. I flipped through a poultry catalog and they have things like "brandX." BrandX has to have special supplements in it's feed so their legs don't break because they weigh too much too
PETA is not the org to award this prize (Score:2)
You can bet that as soon as some inventor hands a plate of vat-grown chicken to PETA and claims the prize, that PETA's general membership will turn it down as being "artificial." The foodies will spurn it for the same reason, no matter how good the taste becomes, and will have loads of fun ridiculing it in the fashion-magazine columns and on their obscure little cable channels.
When such meats are made, they will appeal to people who are concerned specifically about the ethics of factory farming, and
Try McDonald's (Score:2)
Have they talked to fast food companies? I'm pretty sure some of the stuff they sell isn't really meat.
Chicken pot pie! (Score:2)
When we were young, Bernie's Deli was down the block
(Ooh ooh ooh ooh)
He made a great liver pâté
(You know he did, you know he did, you know he did)
But if there's one thing in this world that I like better
Than a corned beef on rye
It's Chicken Pot Pie
Chicken Pot Pie
(chorus of chicken-cluck imitations)
Keep your crummy appetizers
Don't want no turnip-flavored fries
Or mustard pizza squares
Sorry but they don't compare!
(chicken-clucks)
(instrumental)
He made a great tuna soufflé
Protest at Sturgis (Score:2)
They didn't really care (Score:2)
They've been brow-beating Americans to stop eating meat so those who were, in one way or another, influenced by that campaign turned to chicken when what PETA really wanted was for everyone to become a miserable vegan. I guess they missed the memo that explained that PETA stands for People Eating Tasty Animals.
Eat celebrities (Score:2)
There's a joke site about setting up a cloned-celeb-meat sausage co:
http://motherboard.vice.com/en... [vice.com]
What would we do with the real chickens? (Score:2)
Re:Wouldnt want it (Score:5, Insightful)
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People would also be willing to pay some amount more for artificial meat.
Some people. And some people, I'd wager much more, would not. After all, there are a number of artificial meat products already in the market. I think that it will take artificial meat being significantly cheaper before it will replace most of the meat from animals market.
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Re:Wouldnt want it (Score:5, Funny)
What the hell? There are a hell of a lot of vegetarians that don't eat meat for ethical reasons! There are also a lot of meat-eaters, like me, who have a sense of unease about eating animals but can stop because they are so delicious.
Re:Wouldnt want it (Score:4, Informative)
I knew a girl who was very skinny... she became vegetarian and almost died. She resorted to eating only fish and vegetables because vegetarian diet would kill her. That happened over years of research, support groups, health spa meetings, general fraternization with vegetarians and vegans everywhere.
Me, I didn't bother. My immune system fails and I start getting open wounds and sores out of nowhere if I stop eating meat--after two weeks! So fuck that.
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Or, you know, a typo. If you want to rail against 'could care less'ers, why not go find an actual example?
Re:Wouldnt want it (Score:5, Informative)
Who would want it? Die hard long time vegetarians (like me) abhor fake meats as much as real meats - they are disgusting the (almost) the same way.
I'm a vegetarian and I disagree. Some fake meats are bad, particularly the cheap rehydratable variety, but others taste OK. They are not my favourite option but if I eat with non-veg friends and the vegi option is a vegi-burger I will have it and enjoy it.
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I don't think the OP meant 'meat analogues' like soy or what have you. Most vegetarians have learned to deal with those, and some of them are pretty well done.
I think he meant 'fake meat' -- as in vat grown cells of animals which are somehow supposed to be a good thing and which some vegetarians suggest would be OK because there's no animal cruelty involved.
For me, the idea of vat grow
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Some fake meats are bad, particularly the cheap rehydratable variety, but others taste OK. They are not my favourite option but if I eat with non-veg friends and the vegi option is a vegi-burger I will have it and enjoy it.
Why is it that vegetarians go to such lengths to procure food that tastes like meat but doesn't actually contain meat? If a vegetarian diet is so great, they wouldn't try to make their food taste like meat.
You don't see the rest of the population whining because their steak doesn't taste like tofu.
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I think it'd be far more interesting for a company to start producing lab-grown long pork. That would start the real ethical debates.
You joke, but I can pretty well guarantee that once artifically-produced meat is a reality that someone's going to invent new types of it.
Consider the green ketchup they tried to sell.
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Re: Why didn't they leave it in place? (Score:3, Interesting)
What I'd like to know is, why does PETA hate chickens so much? You don't have to be a genius to foresee what will happen to the chicken species if we abandon them as a food source.
That said, being able to grow slabs of chicken breast in a nutrient bath at home would be pretty sweet, if it could be done.
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But who wants to eat some phony lab meat when they could be eating some tasty good healthy sea kittens!
Re: Why didn't they leave it in place? (Score:4, Insightful)
PETA appears to be against the mass exploitation of chickens. If 10bn chickens are killed annually for meat, and that reduces to 10m, they will have succeeded ... but the chicken would be far from extinct. Commercial chicken production could even stop completely, but people in rural areas would still keep chickens, as they have done for hundreds of years, for their eggs if nothing else (remember that dual-use nature of the chicken?) Chicken manure is also quite the asset if you're living rurally. And then you can sell the carcass to stupid town-dwellers who are prepared to pay high prices for the "real chicken" their parents used to talk about.
The chicken isn't going to go extinct just because we stop exploiting it for meat on a mass scale. Stop pretending that complex bio-economic systems work in binary. The choice is not "continue to exploit animals in their billions" vs "watch them go extinct", and only a fool would claim that it was. I mean, I fucking hate PETA, but I hate binary thinking more (and I use the term "thinking" reservedly). As for the idea that mass production of chickens has some kind of advantage in terms of bio-diversity - it's complete and utter propagandist nonsense, although I guess it kind of works if you close your eyes and ignore the species that already went extinct so we can have enough land to grow enough corn to feed 10 billion identical fucking chickens.
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PETA appears to be against the mass exploitation of chickens. If 10bn chickens are killed annually for meat, and that reduces to 10m, they will have succeeded ... but the chicken would be far from extinct. Commercial chicken production could even stop completely, but people in rural areas would still keep chickens, as they have done for hundreds of years, for their eggs if nothing else (remember that dual-use nature of the chicken?) Chicken manure is also quite the asset if you're living rurally. And then you can sell the carcass to stupid town-dwellers who are prepared to pay high prices for the "real chicken" their parents used to talk about.
The chicken isn't going to go extinct just because we stop exploiting it for meat on a mass scale. Stop pretending that complex bio-economic systems work in binary. The choice is not "continue to exploit animals in their billions" vs "watch them go extinct", and only a fool would claim that it was. I mean, I fucking hate PETA, but I hate binary thinking more (and I use the term "thinking" reservedly). As for the idea that mass production of chickens has some kind of advantage in terms of bio-diversity - it's complete and utter propagandist nonsense, although I guess it kind of works if you close your eyes and ignore the species that already went extinct so we can have enough land to grow enough corn to feed 10 billion identical fucking chickens.
What PETA is really against is humans. Otherwise they'd make themselves better informed about what the animals really want. If you believe PETA, all animals want to do is flee humans, and that's observably false. Even skunks have been known to move in next to human beings. Alaskan wolves show off their puppies to tourists, and don't even think of trying to do anything interesting around emperor penguins.
Case in point: veganism, which I'm pretty sure is almost(?) essential for PETA membership. Veganism is ba
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Actually meat won't raise your cholesterol. Or at least, it's unlikely to. In the last few years, we've found that most of what we thought we know about cholesterol to be wrong. Dietary cholesterol (that is, the cholesterol figure you see on food labels, as well as the cholesterol found in meat and eggs) doesn't actually raise your LDL (bad) cholesterol levels. What actually does is saturated fats, which are less likely to be found in meats than many vegetables.
In fact, the infamous 1986 to 2008 "Harvard St
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Sorry, but it sounds like you don't know how pervasive monocultures are in modern agriculture. Thanks to globalization, even peasants living largely without the benefit of industrialization grow whichever crop will earn them the most money. Just as an example, in Laos, one of the least developed countries in the world, state-owned Chinese corporations are creating huge rubber plantations at the expense of huge swaths of native ecosystems. The chicken exists because of its commoditization, and it will tak
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What I'd like to know is, why does PETA hate chickens so much? You don't have to be a genius to foresee what will happen to the chicken species if we abandon them as a food source.
That said, being able to grow slabs of chicken breast in a nutrient bath at home would be pretty sweet, if it could be done.
If you're not vegan, chickens are one of the most efficient ways of producing your own food. They don't need a lot of food, they can eat whatever they find in a pasture. They'll start producing eggs and do so for years (you don't even need a rooster), it's an excellent source of protein. You can keep two or three in a pretty small space as long as you can supplement their diet, and they'll still help keep the insect population down, and you'll have eggs every day.
So there is really no need for artificial
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PETA has this crazed idea that animals are better off dead than owned even if they have absolutly no chance of surviving wild. So that would be perfectly in character for them actually.
I think that is a misrepresentation - they would rather them not being born than being owned, though they go through hoops to define pets as companions rather than being owned.
Re: Why didn't they leave it in place? (Score:5, Informative)
No, otherwise they wouldn't go on massive slaughter-fests [petakillsanimals.com]. An animal PETA gets its hands on has an 84% chance of getting murdered within 24 hours.
Re: Why didn't they leave it in place? (Score:4, Funny)
No, otherwise they wouldn't go on massive slaughter-fests [petakillsanimals.com]. An animal PETA gets its hands on has an 84% chance of getting murdered within 24 hours.
To be fair to them they don't like it [peta.org] and only do it so that they can accept animals rejected by other shelters. I have mixed feelings on this, on one hand I think they should turn more away - but on the other hand if the alternative is the animals being dumped by the roadside or worse then maybe accepting and euthenising is best
Re: Why didn't they leave it in place? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I am sorry, I need a source other than PETA to believe that they don't like it. They provide no evidence that their claim is true.
You have a strange argument here. Its akin to saying that someone wanting to promote healthy living liked unfit people dying of heart attacks. Granted they are odd an extreme, but to say that they like killing animals - despite them saying the opposite - seems unjustified.
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Not defending them, but it's not murder unless they're killing humans. "Slaughtered" would be a better word to use.
legally yes ... but sometimes its nice to judge people by their own criteria [odditycentral.com].
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There is no way that artificial chicken meat, or other meat for that matter, will be inexpensive enough to displace the business of raising actual livestock. The research should be focused and funded by medical interests who would seek to grow human tissue. From there, methods can be derived and adapted to creating artificial meat. It makes no sense to attempt this PETAs way... not financially anyway.
Re:Fun exercise (Score:5, Informative)
Find some vegetarian, and ask them if they would eat meat if it came from artificial means. If they're the type that doesn't eat meat because they feel sorry for animals, they will get a really confused look on their face, say, "well, uh......" and say something very entertaining and random. That's not something they think about normally.
There are all sorts of motivations - environmental, concern for animals, religious, or ethical based on a relative valuation of animal lives that differs from the norm. All will have different reactions to this. Some may also have a yuck factor - just the same as many carnivores would have if offered a meal of cultured human tissue - and may say that though logically they can't object, they wouldn't want to try it.
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Wouldn't a human being who was a carnivore fall down dead from malnutrition pretty quickly? Everyone I know is an omnivore.
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Wouldn't a human being who was a carnivore fall down dead from malnutrition pretty quickly? Everyone I know is an omnivore.
Yes I meant omnivore - though on the carnivore question I don't know. I believe Inuits were traditionally carnivores for most of the year, so I don't think you would suffer from malnutrition quickly, if you ever would.
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Well now I'm clearly going to have to spend all afternoon looking up how the Inuit diet works, physiologically.
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Well now I'm clearly going to have to spend all afternoon looking up how the Inuit diet works, physiologically.
I've had a look too and some sites seem to say that to thrive on a carnivorous diet the chewing of raw blubber was essential as some vitamins degrade when cooked.
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Fat-soluble vitamins, maybe? I wasn't being facetious, I'm dangerously close to losing an afternoon on reading up on restricted diets here.
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Well now I'm clearly going to have to spend all afternoon looking up how the Inuit diet works, physiologically.
I can't imagine that humans are obligate omnivores. For the most part you need a more complex digestive system to live without meat - living only on meat should be a lot simpler. I'm sure there are meat sources of vitamins, and if not there are always pills.
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Inuit diets were up to 90% fat. High protein, low-fat diets are associated with "rabbit starvation", a phrase derived from a phenomenon of hunter-gatherers only being able to obtain rabbit meat and eating until they were distended but still being hungry due to inadequate fat consumption.
Gary Taubes writes about an experiment run in the 1920s where two men ate an all-meat diet. About the only consequence they could find from this was that one man's gingivitis cleared up.
He also writes about an anthropologi
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There was research into whether carbs were "essential"; that is, if the human body could not synthesize anything it needed instead of getting it from carbs. The result - carbs are NOT essential. You can get everything you need from being a carnivore. I can't find the paper right now, but it was written a long time ago by a doc that put people on different diets for 30+ days to find out what was/wasn't essential.
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I'm pretty sure one of the senior scientists in last year's artificial burger project was involved exactly because he was a vegetarian who wanted to eat artificial meat.
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Animal welfare is not a major concern for me (although I like animals and abhor cruelty), but I think I would
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Huh? When I was a vegan, I'd have immediately said 'yes' to that question.
On the other hand, one of the primary benefits of being a vegan was that I had to reevaluate my diet and make conscious choices. I suppose if artificial animal products existed, I wouldn't have had that benefit. Nonetheless, I'd rather they did exist. I would hopefully have learned self-control some other way.
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PEOPLE EATING TASTY ANIMALS
Fuck domain-stealing PETA. Fuck them right in their thieving, lying asses. #neverforget :p
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Guilty? For what?
I'm not guilty, I'm fed up. Yes I eat meat. Yes I know the animals were treated poorly, lived like sardines in too small cages, stood in their own feces, were transported thousands of miles without food or water to be brutally murdered with a hammer or worse, then cut open while still alive and so on.
Can I now continue my steak or did I forget anything you were about to lecture me with?
Vegetarianism seems to be some sort of messianic religion. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind people who don