PETA Offers X-Prize for Artificial Meat 1130
Bored MPA writes "The Times reports that PETA is to announce plans on Monday for a $1 million prize to the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012." PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk addressed the controversial decision by saying, "We don't mind taking uncomfortable positions if it means that fewer animals suffer." An unexpected and pragmatic move from an organization that has a strong base of support from pro-organic vegans." The question I always had about this- if they can take one sample from one animal and clone it in a vat and feed this world, will the vegans be ok with that?
Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
They are unpleasant already (Score:3, Insightful)
If they are at all awake they will either realize that the whole world is designed around the idea of one thing eating another. (Or they might decide that God screwed up as they watch the lion take down that gazelle...)
Remember if they weren't intended to be eaten they wouldn't have been made out of meat!
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:4, Funny)
"Negative, I am a meat popcicle."
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:5, Insightful)
Kudos to PETA for offering this prize. It's one of the first reasonable things I've ever seen to come out of that organization. I might not even have gone vegetarian had this existed at the time; I would have just switched. Not sure I'd eat vat meat now, as I've grown accustomed to a vegetarian diet and see no reason to switch back, mind you.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, when you consider that PETA's ideal world would ban honey, pets of any sort, circuses, seeing eye dogs for the blind, and most importantly they would totally stop all animal testing in medicine which would cause the medical field to practically grind to a halt. I wouldn't put it past them to put cells above the person they came out of, these people would rather a person died from diabetes then get insulin which was created by use of animal testing.
Unless your name is Mary Beth Sweetland.
Re: (Score:3)
Thanks for breaking the issues down for me, I didn't realize things were so cut and dry!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Answer -- an incredibly insignificant amount compared to that which is produced by factory farming...which is responsible for the environmental damaged cited above.
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Without agriculture, humans would never have developped any modern science. Only scientific applications to agriculture freed up enough cultural labor to apply science outside the realm of feeding everyone.
We ate meat before agriculture, and we eat meat now. And every last one of the vegans posting here (and even Ingri
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not all that shocking seeing as how the latest culprits of the "american obesity epidemic" are refined sugar and starch. Second to that are hydrogenated oils, which are made from vegetable products and can be best thought of as a form of "synthetic lard" since it fills the same role in cooking.
In short: calories and fats with no vitamins and/or minerals (salt doesn't count) are the real culprit here. Hummus and pita on the other hand still has some rudimentary nutritional value to it thanks to the chick peas and olive oil.
So you can still be a strict vegetarian and develop metabolic syndrome. Odds are your tubby vegan friends are having plenty of doritos and pepsi along with their beans and rice, or think that "corn-on-the-cob, biscuits, rice and potatoes" is a well balanced meal.
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:4, Informative)
Silly person, picturing that vegans and vegetarians must just eat a lot of greens or whatnot
** It's a big surprise to a lot of people that the most protein-rich foods are vegetarian, as most people associate "protein" with "meat". Look up the protein stats on, for example, tempeh or gluten. I could give you a big long list of a couple dozen common vegan foods that contain more protein per unit mass than the most protein-rich meats.
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:5, Insightful)
From wikipedia:
"Vitamin B-12 cannot be made by plants or animals[5] as only bacteria have the enzymes required for its synthesis"
"The total amount of vitamin B-12 stored in body is about 2,000-5,000 mcg in adults. Around 80% of this is stored in the liver[2]. 0.1 % of this is lost per day by secretions into the gut as not all these secretions are reabsorbed. How fast B-12 levels change depends on the balance between how much B-12 is obtained from the diet, how much is secreted and how much is absorbed. B-12 deficiency may arise in a year if initial stores are low and genetic factors unfavourable or may not appear for decades."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12
As a side node, I'm not a vegan. But B12 deficiency takes *years*, and does not happen overnight because you stopped eating meat. Hell, you can eat termites or even dirt with B12 bacteria and you'll get enough B12.
Freaking FUD about stupid B12.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This largely due to a misinterpretation of western societiey's Christian legacy. I googled around for "fish on friday" and dug up this:
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/52049 [answerbag.com]
The real reason why christians do this is still kind of open for debate.
In short, it comes down to a old tradition of "abstaining from eating meat during fasting"
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:4, Informative)
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. Rubbish. You could argue that humans need *animal protein* or equivalent synthetics. But not meat. You can be perfectly healthy on a Vegeterian diet which includes dairy products but no flesh (red meat, polutry or fish etc.) (I did this for 10 years with no supplements etc. and cycled 100's of miles and was very healthy). The problems occur with Vegan diets where you eliminate all animal products.
However, one of my colleagues who is vegan says that you don't need supplements; there are specific types of nuts and stuff which contain the relevant nutrients. He seems perfectly healthy.
Note that I have no moral axe to grind here since I now eat quite a lot of meat and enjoy it.
As for your statement that 'there is no meat replacement' surely the whole point of this prize is to grow something in the lab which is nutritionally and taste equivalent to meat? And if they suceed, there *will* be a full 'meat replacement'
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:4, Funny)
You say he seems perfectly healthy; I say he's nuts and stuff.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The human body can convert ALA to DHA and EPA, how effecient it is at that varies, I've seen numbers ranging from 0.2 to 15.2%. It seems to be better at converting it to EPA because at some place I saw values of 5% mentioned for EPA and 0.5% for DHA.
The human body can also convert between EPA to DHA and DHA to EPA, but the former are much easier to do. Whereby EPA are seen as more important nowadays.
Together that makes me belive th
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:5, Funny)
We're omnivores (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Meat animals don't just grow themselves magically, they must be fed. And they're fed a lot of plants, for a long time.
So, when you eat some meat, you're effectively consuming many times that much plant matter, because of all the plants that were killed to feed that meat. Meat is fundamentally a very inefficient kind of food to produce.
A vegetarian, on the other hand, eats the plant matter directly, thereby requi
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:5, Insightful)
Totally unnatural - sending spaceships to the moon, or food cultivation (that habit that creates reliable food sources so you don't need handy scavengers like chickens and pigs, until we mass produced animal farming with buildings full of thousands of creatures packed in shit).
Those shows you are watching are highlighting certain aspects of animal existence. How about you go to the zoo and watch how the monkeys act naturally all day, and do a report on how we should be acting. Or look in an aquarium at the natural creatures and tell us how we should be acting, and emulate it yourself.
Sorry, I just find people who use your kind of logic a bit simple, but I guess if you want to justify your lifestyle and continue stuffing dead animals in your mouth three times a day, backed by completely natural factory farms and a host of ghouls who enjoy working in meat packing plants (I've known a couple of them) then just do it.
Personally (and I know you couldn't care less
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Talk about people being simple. Another vegetarian trying to take the high ground when their kind murders trillions of the most defenseless life forms on the planet, but i
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And when I say unnecessary, I mean animals used to be necessary to ensure a
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:5, Insightful)
I recommend any of the documentaries on the farming process in america.
If meat-in-a-vat became economically feasible, there are plenty of vegetarians who would eat it.
(details: it is easier for me, personally, to say "no meat" than to be picky about which meat I'm eating and where it is from, etc. It's just the easy line for me to draw)
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:5, Insightful)
If they are at all awake they will either realize that the whole world is designed around the idea of one thing eating another.
1) Simply untrue. By your logic, autotrophs don't exist. Unless you call absorbing light, hydrogen sulfide, methane, or whatnot "one thing eating another".
2) Moral equivalency. You are declaring eating any form of life as equivalent to any other. The ~99%** of people who find the concept of raising humans for meat abhorrent would disagree with you.
** -- I did specify 99% because on occasion, I have found people who find nothing wrong with this. Thankfully, they're rare.
Let's focus a little more on #2. What is so abhorrent about eating other humans to most people? Usually, it's some variant on the destruction of the self. Call it a soul, call it a conscience, self-awareness, whatever you will. Raising a sentient being and deliberately killing them for their meat when you don't need to is generally seen as abhorrent.
So, what's sentience? One ancient standard is the ability to reflect on one's own thoughts. Well, that standard certainly doesn't hold up as an argument against eating meat now that we know that even rats do that [sciencedirect.com]. So what's the cutoff point? Problem solving or reasoning ability? Chimps, depending on the task, often have the reasoning ability of a 4-6 year old. Parrots, 2-6 year old, depending on the task. Pigs, same general range. None of them have anywhere near the sort of *communication* skill that humans have, but communication is hardly a reason not to eat something, now isn't it?
From my perspective, the simpler the mind, the less of a moral issue there is. Sure, even plants have at least some forms of stimulus response; every cell in existence does. But none of it approaches the complexity in external stimulus-processing as a neural net. A change in light may cause guard cells to open or close a stoma, but you're just looking at a predictable biochemical cascade. That stoma will never, for example, "learn" not to keep opening and closing if you shine a flashlight on and off at it. It is this spark of intelligence in animals, particularly higher animals, that I find tragic to snuff out needlessly.
In a choice between the life of a pig and a human, which do I side with? The human, undeniably, indisputably, every last time. I don't fault in the least, for example, innuit cultures that traditionally survived on sealing; what choice, exactly, do they have? But in this world, I have all of the choices under the sun. I can choose to eat whatever the heck I want. Having that choice, I eat a vegetarian diet.
Of course, I know very well that not everyone will agree with me on this. But that's hardly the only reason. Most people have no clue how extreme of an impact eating meat has on the environment. A staggering, mind-boggling big [sciencedirect.com] impact. 1/3 of the world's non-ice-covered land is dedicated, directly or indirectly, to growing meat. Despite programs to abate it, we're losing 1,250 square miles of rainforest in Brazil per month to cattle land. Meat growing releases more greenhouse gasses than transportation (and no, we're not just talking about methane from ruminants; the energy aspect is the big portion, since it takes many pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat), plus huge amounts of water pollution (3/4 of the water pollution in the US, for example), as well as breeding antibiotic resistance.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No creature deserves to be cooped up a small cage, kept in filth, injected with cocktails of growth hormones, and then thoughtlessly killed before one another.
easy (Score:5, Insightful)
the only reason eating animals is a problem is suddenly because we evolved higher mental faculties like empathy, morality
luckily, we also developed science, which will soon give us meat vats, and we can go on with our carnivorous delights and not a single animal need be killed anymore
but if you try to ask people to give up meat just because the animals suffer, you have just as much success asking people to stop having sex because of disease and overpopulation
it is a compulsion, hard wired into us. do not underestimate it. it is deeper and stronger this compulsion than our higher faculties
so much as birth control and penicillin sidesteps the issue of disease and too many babies as byproduct of our love of sex, so will meat vats sidestep the issue of cruelty and our love of meat
but you are really insane if you think a nice morality lecture will stop people from eating meat just because its cruel. as if a "just say no to sex" because of disease and overpopulation approach would work
Re:easy (Score:5, Insightful)
The real moral issue is about suffering: do farmed animals suffer while they live or suffer while they die? If so, then farming is immoral. If not, well, then it's hard to argue farming is immoral. All things die. It may be morally wrong for humans to decide when an animal should die, but that's a much harder issue to resolve. What is easy to resolve is that animals should live comfortable, pleasant, healthy, hygenic lives and then be slaughtered instantly and painlessly without any prior fear or anxiety. This is readily achievable, though it is more expensive than growing animals in filthy boxes and pumping them full of drugs. Farmed in this way, it's pretty difficult to categorically condemn livestock agriculture.
Torture? Murder? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, perhaps it's in some ways distasteful, but - being omnivores - it's also part of our natural biological process. I'm sure this will cue the rant about vegetable and pill-based alternatives, but it's still not the way we're built to function.
You can't compare murdering somebody to the consumption of a food animal. It's not the same thing. And before you get into the "would killing be OK if we eat each other," that's also a no, as - except in cases of starvation - most mammals don't eat their own species either, and in many cases they don't kill each other except under a certain set of rules (territory, etc).
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:4, Insightful)
So, to answer your question, we are capable of not killing to eat, but you have to make the argument as to why. Thus far, I haven't been convinced of why we shouldn't eat meat; eat less of it, sure, but no meat entirely, not yet.
Also, it's hard to make the case that killing a human and killing a animal is the same thing. I'm not particularly religious, nor am I Christian, but my objection to that is more akin to what Silverback Gorilla's, male lions, and other animals do when they take over a group. They kill the infants of the former group leader. Most people for a variety of reasons don't consider animals, let alone other humans, "human". That is the basis for eugenics. While I agree that is reprehensible, it's still a fact. I think we have a lot of work to convince all people that all humans are "human," before your goal of equating animals with humans can be achieved. Still, I still can't see why we shouldn't eat cows, chickens, and things. I grew up near a farm, and maybe that's why I just don't see it; no matter how much I value human life.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:5, Insightful)
"Civilized to death"
"Civilized" is an illusion. It is a consensual illusionary construct of your social conditioning. We do need some sort of social structure so we can all get along, but when you start to think that there is some innate 'higher truth' in your view of what is civilized then you are stepping into fantasy world.
100 years ago we didn't have the weird idea that eating an animal was a tragedy. We weren't less civilized then either. (Watch some TV. After that if you still think we were less 'civilized' then you need to get off your high horse so you can be trampled...) We just had different social norms and we weren't so divorced from our food supply.
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:5, Interesting)
Who is *we* exactly?
Jainism [wikipedia.org]
Re:They are unpleasant already (Score:5, Funny)
With apologies to George Carlin
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
You can have my soylent green when you pry it from my cold dead ... ummm, on second thought ...
So, PETA's offering a million bucks. Chump change compared to what it's worth.
Anyone remember the sci-fi story with "chicken little" - that one piece of repeatedly cloned, vat-grown chicken flesh that was made into chicken breast, leg, etc.? If they could throw in some Octopus genes, everyone'd get a drumstick!
The Space Merchants (Score:3, Informative)
Animal apocalypse (Score:3, Insightful)
Isnt fake meat called... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Isnt fake meat called... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Isnt fake meat called... (Score:5, Insightful)
And if they can do this for seafood? Cloned lobster and crab meat? (Swordfish steaks.. nomnomnom.) Once in full production, the prices would likely be much cheaper than ocean caught meat. And no worries about pollution or mercury poisoning.
It would be great for wild animal populations, although bad for farmers and fisherman.
Re:Isnt fake meat called... (Score:4, Informative)
That will be one bland, inedible hunk of meat. Fat is where the flavor and tenderness comes from. Why do you think T-bones, delmnicos and strip steaks taste so good? They have ribbons of fat in them. Same goes for pot roasts. Loads of fat, loads of flavor. This is the same reason most pork nowadays is so bland. We've bred out most of the fat in pigs (except for the bacon portion).
Flavor also comes from the bones. Marrow provides the flavor and is used when making stock.
If we're going to manufacture meat from non-animals, I want my fat and bones. It goes along with my high fat, high sugar, high cholesterol way of eating. I want flavor! If I wanted blandness, I'd eat tofu.
If nothing else, PETA is getting better looking representatives [mainichi.jp] when at events.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Isnt fake meat called... (Score:4, Informative)
It's a non-issue anyway, since meals with a couple of vegetables often cover all the essential amino acids anyway (beans on toast is one often-cited example).
Re:Isnt fake meat called... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As with all these things, a balanced diet seems the best idea -- and a large amount of soy isn't balanced, just as the stereotypical American diet isn't balanced. Unfortunately, there are people who go crazy and decide to feed very young children soy milk, soy baby food, etc instead of a decent diet, just like there are mums that give their kids cola in a bottle.
Cloning Tissue or Whole Animal? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cloning Tissue or Whole Animal? (Score:4, Funny)
Might be worth it.
Another use: (Score:3, Funny)
"Here is that pound of flesh you ordered..."
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No fucking way! That's outrageous!
It would never be the same as the original.
hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:hmm (Score:4, Funny)
Is this an acronym for "People Eating Tasty Animals" ?
Re: (Score:3)
Vegans != Hive mind. (Score:5, Interesting)
Just like people who comment on slashdot, vegans have a wider variety of opinions & reasons to arrive at their dietary choice. Trying to ask them collectively what they think about something like this is useless.
It would be like asking the slashdot crowd "would you buy Microsoft products if they open sourced them"
For those who prefer car analogies, it would be like asking
For those who prefer car analogies (Score:5, Funny)
Silly. (Score:5, Funny)
I can't recall the comedian, but someone once noted "Why do vegetarians need to make their food (tofu pups, veggieburgers) look like meat they simply wont eat? You don't see monks keeping blow-up dolls just hanging around."
While... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:While... (Score:5, Insightful)
When the GM meat gets out of the tank and starts humping un-gm'd cows, I'll have problems with it. Otherwise, hell, if it tastes good, I'm there.
Eat the PETA members (Score:4, Insightful)
We have hunger, diseases, war... and all these people want to do is to get everybody to stop eating animals. Considering that it was likely the consumption of large amounts of animal protein that allowed humanity to evolve rather rapidly in the last stage of our evolution, I find PETA's goals rather ironic.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
PETA isn't against taking animal life (Score:5, Insightful)
As for abortion, it's highly ironic that many of those who get riled up by killing of a pre-human lump of cells are just fine with their government getting into a non-defensive war and driving up food prices around the world through it's subsidy of corn based ethanol. There's this weird paradox in the pro-life movement that unborn life is elevated to sacredness but actual humans living on earth already who have memories and consciousness can be chucked aside without protest.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Answer to your question (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If it for health reasons
Health reasons? There's plenty of meat that's quite healthy for you. Most fish is low in saturated fat and cholesterol. Chicken is pretty OK. Buffalo tastes very similar to beef, but has lower saturated fat. Vegans are vegans for political reasons. These are people that don't eat gummi bears because it contains ground up bones, and don't wear anything that has leather in it. I've heard of extreme wack-jobs that won't eat honey because we've enslaved the bees. It ain't just ab
Re:Answer to your question (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, probably not. As I understand it, all the techniques of "culturing" cells are directed toward making all the cells the same - if there are different types of cells in the culture, it is considered a failure. So "cultured meat" would be ALL muscle cells, with no fat cells or connective tissue. Which, while pleasing the health conscious, would be a culinary disaster - picture the toughest, driest steak on the planet.
One solution would be to culture genetically engineered fat cells with little bad cholesterol, and then grind it in with the cultured meat. So the choices would be hamburgers and sausages that probably taste worse than tofu, or real "once had hooves" meat.
I'm thinking that prize will remain unclaimed for a long time.
I really support this. (Score:3, Interesting)
If meat can be grown that doesn't have a central nervous system and so can't feel pain, I would feel much better about eating what little meat I do eat.
Careful with those cost specifications... (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably not ... (Score:5, Insightful)
They're not very rational. They'll probably demand you release the sample from its captivity.
All kidding aside, I'm a veggie myself and have a hard time being sympathetic to the vegan cause -- it's just so unrealistic.
Free farm animals will only result in the demise of the particular species
Current biological thinking is that domesticated animals were drawn into human habitat because their own habitat was taken over by more fit animals. Humans simply domesticated these animals, but otherwise they wouldn't have stood a chance in the wild. Following this reasoning, releasing farm animals would just condemn them to starvation, a horrible death.
Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly opposed to using farm animals as an industrial product, as this is what is common in bioindustry at the moment, but we're in symbiosis with these species
Re:a farm pig or a farm cow in the wild? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Torchwood did it (and did it, and did it..) (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems that Torchwood's writers aren't above using other's ideas to good benefit. The creature in that episode was suspiciously like Chicken Little [technovelgy.com] from Fred Pohl and Cyril M Kornbluth's The Space Merchants.
At last PETA and I agree on something (Score:5, Insightful)
Other than that, yeah, good show.. I'm a big fan of growing food in vats instead of animals on grain and parts of other animals.
For a start, it makes real permanent space stations all that more feasible.
Oblig. Neuromancer Quote (Score:3, Interesting)
at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which
he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the
whole thing.
"Jesus," Molly said, her own plate empty, "gimme that.
You know what this costs?" She took his plate. 'They gotta
raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't
vat stuff." She forked a mouthful up and chewed.
A real question (Score:3, Insightful)
What will we test to determine "fit to consume" when meat is grown in a vat?
yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Veganism is neither irrational nor difficult to understand; if you're making an animal suffer unnecessarily, vegans are against it. It's amazing to me how such a simple position seems to confuse people.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So, if an animal dies of old age, vegans wouldn't mind eating it? If a cow gives milk without suffering, vegans will drink the milk?
I can only speak for myself, but the quick answers are "yes, of course, but... why?" to the first, and "yes, of course, but saying that there's no suffering involved might mean a rather complicated situation."
I'm not a vegan so please set me straight if I'm wrong, but I thought that vegans disprove of anything coming from animals (meat, milk, eggs), regardless if the animal suffered or not.
I'm happy to respond, and I appreciate that you're going out on a limb and seem honest and genuinely interested. I can assure you that vegans, at least in theory, only disapprove of animals suffering unnecessarily. They might also take a slightly broader view of what animal suffering means than other
SO.. (Score:3, Interesting)
can they alter the meat as well? less fat? more protein? extra vitamins? or can large corporations make them more addictive?
"buy your McBurger, now with the latest McD meat profiling taste and additives"
A paradise predicted in "The Space Merchants" (Score:5, Interesting)
HHGTG (Score:3, Funny)
Instead of artificial meat, you breed a cow that _wants_ to be eaten, and will indicate so.
Why bother with artificial meat? (Score:4, Funny)
They'll fry up really nicely. And then we can start on the Chinese and the Indians. There's lots of them, so that's a herd that'll take a long time to cull out. In fact, we may never even need to eat the bony butts of east africa.
Just a modest proposal is all I'm suggesting...
RS
Nice idea, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've often had the same sort of idea - if a cow can take grass, water and energy and make steaks, why shouldn't we be able to do the same thing? Recently, however, I've decided that even if they figured out how to do it tomorrow, it would not be to our benefit. It would end up being like baby formula - a product that's been around for decades, keeps getting tweaked to add this or that nutrient or remove or reduce undesirable components, yet still can't compare to breast milk. Or it will end up being like margarine, touted for decades as healthier than butter until they discovered that trans fats in the margarine were much worse for you than the saturated fats in the butter.
If they could grow meat, they would be unable to resist the temptation to fiddle with it. Rather that simply duplicate the meat from a grass fed, non-corn finished animal, they would reduce the cholesterol, boost the omega-3's (or whatever omega is good for you right now), add beta-carotene, and fortify it with vitamin C and calcium ("a full day's supply in every burger"). Then, ten years later, there will be a report that eating too much factory meat causes liver failure. The food scientists will tweak the recipe, declare it safe and healthy and we're off to the races again.
I do think they'll figure out how to do it (the cow can do it, after all). I just think the food industry has a very consistent record that demonstrates their inability to improve on or even match what mother nature can do, despite all their claims that they can.
DD
Re:PETA? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What about human? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Funny)
For many of your dietary bretheren giving up the opportunity to sit in coffee shop wearing pantaloons and blurt out pseudo facts about how meat eaters are killing themselves and the planet and all the animals would be too much to bear. I think they would continue to oppose in vitro meat just to preserve that pastime.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I like a nice bloody steaks more than most people, but most of the time I won't eat meet like the poster above. Its not because I care for the environment or feel bad for the animals, but if I just keep the meat intake on the lowdown I seem to spend less time with stomach sickness related events (aka Montezuma's revenge which I'm prone too) and I can keep a h
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Most people just don't rank their health that highly. I am glad to see PETA finally doing something productive however...If your real goal is to prevent animal suffering, then this is
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Interesting... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
*RIP-SNARL-GNASH-TEAR-GRRR*
Another dead carrot...
Kinda sorta the point! (Score:3, Insightful)
This sort of contest provide direction and potentially takes some of the sting out of development.
The hope is that by 2012 a process will become available that McDonald's, KFC and the others can perfect.
It should be very exciting!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Then McDonalds, KFC etc. would have it perfected already!!
No, probably not and for the reason I will outline below.
Several years ago I remember reading an article in Wired title "Overcoming Yuk". I actually managed to find a link here:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/morton_pr.html [wired.com]
Now since I am currently at work and do not have time to read the full artical (This is slashdot, after all) I will mention what I took from it on my first reading, not what it actually says.
I understood it to be commentary on how the future of scientific advancement revolved aro