In Vitro Grown Meat 'Nearly Possible' 260
Bruce66423 writes "An article at The Guardian discusses the prospects for food from radically different sources than the ones we're used to. 'Sweet fried crickets' anyone? Quoting: '... artificial steak is still a way off. Pizza toppings are closer. The star of the Dutch research into in-vitro meat, Dr Mark Post, promised that the first artificial hamburger, made from 10bn lab-grown cells, would be ready for "flame-grilling by Heston Blumenthal" by the end of 2012. At the time of writing it is still on the back burner. Post (who previously produced valves for heart surgery) and other Dutch scientists are currently working over the problem of how to turn the "meat" from pieces of jelly into something acceptably structured: an old-fashioned muscle. Electric shocks may be the answer. ... The technological problems of producing the new hi-tech foods are nothing compared to the trouble the industry is having with the consumers – the "yuck factor," as the food technology scientists across the world like to put it. Shoppers' squeamishness has turned the food corporations, from whom the real money for R&D will have to come, very wary, and super-secretive about their work on GM in America.'"
A matter of perspective... (Score:5, Insightful)
After encountering the notion in the Vorkosigan series and thinking about it a bit, the notion of lab-grown meat doesn't seem like a big deal. It's arguably more sanitary than an animal that's been standing in filth for its entire life, after all.
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You might be right - but it's your choice whether to eat that sort of meat, or not. I'm prepared to pay more - sometimes a lot more - for free-range meat. Doesn't have to be "organic", just not raised or fattened in pens or feedlots or cages.
Re:A matter of perspective... (Score:4, Interesting)
You might be right - but it's your choice whether to eat that sort of meat, or not. I'm prepared to pay more - sometimes a lot more - for free-range meat.
My guess is that this choice will go away very quickly once synthmeat becomes practical. It will become socially unacceptable to kill any actual animals for food at that point, even if the vat-grown stuff isn't as tasty at first.
Not saying that this will be a good or bad thing, just that it's inevitable.
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Clearly getting the meat to resemble its cell source will be the critical problem. Using something like a massive 3D Printer to build large masses of artificial muscle (using electrical stimulation to exercise it and give it real structure and density) and controlling its growth to include extra nutritional values for instance high Omega 3 content. This meat would be much healthier than the meat we eat now, and because it was grown in an antiseptic environment, there would be virtually no possibility of fo
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Speaking as a vegan (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't get the yuck factor.
To me a slaughtered animals is about as yucky as it can be. Even more so when combined with the slaughter house And even more so if you consider some things like the floors and skinn processing.
There's also the hanging of the meat and for instance things like hams which have hanged around to develop flavour or whatever for three (?) years and such. I guess they keep the flies out but it looks very old and "half-rotten" with black spots and ugly surface.
Imho something fresh rather than an old body stored long after death seem fresher and less discusting. Scavaging isn't my idea of fresh and little yuckiness.
Something grown in a clean environment (though of course the bodies of the animals are likely good at keeping themself clean except for some parasites and such) imho seem less yucky and if you've got some compassion for others that's even better.
What I personally wonder is if it's still grown in bouillon made of animals because then the difference isn't all to big. You still need to kill animals and use them in the process. But then again they likely could use some scraps to make that one to get better effectiveness.
For me personally there may still be some mental issue due to what it is even if no animal had to die and the cells wasn't grown on an animal based diet/medium. That may not make much sense though, and having a protein based staple for your diet would be very convenient.
Re:Speaking as a vegan (Score:4, Insightful)
To me a slaughtered animals is about as yucky as it can be.
Did you know there are no indigenous vegetarians? There may have been some, but they were probably eaten. Your distaste for what is one of the most natural processes on the world (before blood existed, there were predators and prey) would make you unfit to survive in the wild.
or me personally there may still be some mental issue due to what it is even if no animal had to die and the cells wasn't grown on an animal based diet/medium. That may not make much sense though,
You're hardly the only person I know who is grossed out by meat. To me, though, that's not just a mental issue, it's mental illness. We are omnivores. Actual predators often don't even wait until an animal stops moving before they eat it. They have no sense of nicety.
You've convinced yourself of something arbitrary and false.
The simple truth is that an animal has an immune system and a vat of meat doesn't, so from any logical standpoint, it's the vat-grown meat that's "yucky". Animals are self-cleaning and self-repairing. With that said, CAFOs are the devil's work.
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"Did you know there are no indigenous vegetarians? There may have been some, but they were probably eaten."
ROFLMAO
I have it on good authority that some omnivores eat other omnivores, too. I hear that long pig tastes just like pork! Way off topic, but I served with a guy whose grandfathers were headhunters. We asked him once if he ever ate another person. He said, "I don't know, I just ate whatever my mother gave me!"
It's unlikely that he did. In theory, at least, the last of the tribes in the Phillipin
Re:Speaking as a vegan (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is stupid when you actually stop and think about it. Dolphins rape each other, perfectly natural. Not good.
Re:Speaking as a vegan (Score:5, Informative)
So now you want to conflate eating meat with rape, and then tell me I need to study formal logic a bit more?
What he used is called an "analogy." Using an analogy is not at all the same as saying that two things are exactly alike. Rather, what he was trying to say is that just because something is natural, that doesn't mean it's automatically good. So no, he very likely wasn't trying to say that eating meat is like raping someone.
Re:Speaking as a vegan (Score:5, Informative)
In your second post you have used two fallacies again: the first was another straw man fallacy - GP gave a perfectly reasonable, though unrelated, example of the naturalistic fallacy and you have made an argument against some concoction of your own, where you've put the GP's example together with the previous topic. Your second fallacy is called an appeal to ridicule. Example: you used the appeal to ridicule fallacy because you are an obstinate idiot incapable of critical thought and resentful of those who are, the very idea that you have anything worthwhile to say is preposterous.
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So now you want to conflate eating meat with rape,
no.
and then tell me I need to study formal logic a bit more?
This is more and more apparent.
You used a fallacy (naturalistic argument).
He gave an example where this fallacy fails, which refutes using the fallacy.
You have now used a straw man in addidion.
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Carnivore teeth:
1) Tiger [earthtimes.org]
2) Baboon [nationalgeographic.com]
Herbivore teeth:
1) Deer [pugetsound.edu]
2) Horse [tumblr.com]
And finally, human teeth. [washington.edu]
We like to think of ourselves as "King of the Jungle", and we are. But that's not due to our physical power, but rather, to our brain power. Also - our teeth are much closer to the herbivo
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So laboratory grown meat is actually the cleaner stuff. And if they make it taste better than normal beef, as in, you can get a nice Kobe Beef-like steak in America, I'm sure not going to complain about it not being 'natural.'
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What he's saying is that human beings are omnivores, that by our very design we were built to eat meat (meat in this case includes insects, grubs, rodents, and a fair collection of reptiles... as well as domesticated herd animals and wild ruminants.) Its the price of having this big brain, it needed more nutrients than a primate could consume from leaf eating (watch how much leaf matter a gorilla has to pound down to function, and notice the size of that lower veg crushing jaw.) So we are build to mix up ou
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This would be a demonstration of the mistake of using a religious source of knowledge rather than a scientific, the result being that you have missed out on very important dietary opportunities. Those foods you call rotten, do those include fermented foods? Yogurt? Kimchee? Sauerkraut? Japanese pickles? Cheese? All of these foods in fact have fantastic probiotic value which has been demonstrated to support improved nutrient uptake, vitality, regularity, and a significant reduction of bowel relaated diseases
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Something grown in a clean environment (though of course the bodies of the animals are likely good at keeping themself clean except for some parasites and such) imho seem less yucky
Well, there's the problem right there: animals are self-contained systems. They have a circulatory system that filters out all kinds of bad stuff and keeps a delicate balance, they have an immune system that wards off bacteria, fungi and viruses. They move around by themselves.
I guess most people find the thought of some meat "living" in a petri dish revolting, but the actual "yuck" factor should come from all the chemicals needed to grow the meat.
Prevent infections? Add some more antibiotics and preservati
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Well yeah, that's why I mentioned them. But at least with livestock these things are regulated and random samples are tested in labs. And still there is abuse.
The difference is: you can probably do a lot of crazy things with "dummy" meat that you couldn't do with live animals because you don't have to consider their organs (brain, liver, heart) or bodily functions. Large amounts of ethanol in the blood? Would put a cow in a coma, but no problemo for a living steak since it has no brain.
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Too bad that when it comes out, there will be more than the yuck factor. It will be justified. There will be (baseless) claims that any company involved in this is unethical. There will be (severely flawed) studies proving this meat causes cancer. Just wait. New technology, especially biotechnology, when some people find it 'yucky,' will have justification for the angst. That and its new, science is scary, labs are scary, there will be Frankenstein monster imagery, ect.
Vegetarian status of test-tube meat (Score:2)
Unless things have changed since the last time this story came around, the synthetic meat stuff is still grown using meat-based nutrients (chicken broth, etc.), so it's still not vegetarian even if you aren't counting the animal cells that were used to start the culture growing. So I still won't be eating it, unless they can feed it veggies instead, but even for carnivores, it'll be pretty much a lab curiosity unless they can do that anyway. (I suppose it's possible that they could get some economic benef
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As a vegetarian I keep things to myself and don't preach to anyone. Please ignore this moron vegan and remember that the silent majority don't care if you eat meat or not. Thanks.
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You may benefit from watching some nature videos. I think waiting for your dinner to be actually dead and unresponsive to stimuli is a rarity. As soon as the predator can bite a piece off, he's chowing down. Sometime during dinner, the prey actually dies. In the case of snakes, I'm not sure that the prey dies before it reaches the stomach. I found a king snake ingesting a copperhead several years ago. Because I was there, the king reversed the ingestion, the copper head lay there for a few seconds, the
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you know what they should call it... (Score:5, Funny)
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Godda...Fu...*sigh*
There is a hatred I cannot convey, while simultaneously congratulating.
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or: conned beef
Processed beyond recognition (Score:5, Insightful)
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I assume that lab-grown meat will also mean less by-products and environmental waste than the regular method, but alas, I'm not an expert in either area.
I'm not an expert either, but I'd expect at least methane emissions to be a lot lower since lab-grown meat doesn't have a digestive system.
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Lab-grown meat will require the energy and materials for nutrient baths, environmental controls, safety systems and the construction of expensive laboratory equipment versus sunlight and a ramshackle wooden fence and barn. I wouldn't expect the cownterfeit meat to be "environmentally cheaper" until the industry is well-developed, if ever.
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Gotta be less agricultural run-off from the lab...
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As far as AGW is concerned, methane is a strong greenhouse gas, but its half-life is short, so it isn't such a big problem.
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Errrr, there's a huge assumption in there that's unlikely to be fulfilled in real life. The current lab grown meat is in a research phase, and is therefore subject to clean room lab conditions where dollars/kilo are not a concern. You're assuming that the clean room conditions will extend to the mass market exploitation of the product: your assumption is that there will be no additives (really, really unlikely as yields are likely to be the biggest factor, and hence any yield enhancing agent you can imagine
Re:Processed beyond recognition (Score:5, Funny)
You know, you could grow perfectly healthly, perfectly clean, healthy animals with a 24x7 medical care and monitoring, a personal trainer and hospital level cleaning. We don't because at the end of the day it's the price that counts, not the quality.
You mean bonsai kittens?
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I don't understand the yuck-factor.
"Hunger never saw bad bread." -- Benjamin Franklin
Yucky food is the inspiration for fine home cookin'. Slaves in the US were given the throw-away parts of animals that their masters did not want to eat. So the slaves developed recipes with spices to make the yucky food very tasty. The same thing could happen with this meat.
If you are really hungry, you will eat whatever you can. If it tastes good, you will eat it, even though you think it is yucky.
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I don't understand the yuck-factor.
Here's mine. When a chicken goes wrong the problem is usually apparent, the chicken may even die before you kill it and be thrown away. But when you're growing it in a vat you're going to have to rely on testing. A problem in the middle of a batch might not get caught.
Nature has protective mechanisms. They evolved, they weren't designed in, but that makes them no less valid.
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And often times the dead chickens are included in the pile of live chicken in the mass processing.
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And often times the dead chickens are included in the pile of live chicken in the mass processing.
Yes, that is a fair point. I used to eat anything and everything that came near my face, but these days I am more selective. Foster Farms is as low down the scale of chicken processors as I'm willing to go, I don't eat KentuckyFriedCrap or MickeyDeeznutz or ToxicSmell etc etc any more. Sometimes if I am really desperate I will eat a six dollar burger, that's scary enough but at least it's still recognizable as beef.
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Not to mention I think this [wordpress.com] is relevant. A lot of people today have completely disassociated the slabs of meat found vacuum packed in the store from actual livestock. I don't mean that they don't actually know, they just don't like to think about it. I don't particularly like reminding myself that a rump steak is an animal's butt myself, but it tastes good. Same with sausages, try reminding people the skin is made of intestines and see how many friends you make. I don't think lab made meat would be a hard s
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Go buy a McChicken at the big yellow M. There's nothing recognizably chicken-ish about that product at all. The taste and texture is completely different from the chicken I tasted as a kid, when my grandfather would routinely kill and prepare his own chickens for dinner.
That's because your grandfather didn't grind the chickens up, make patties, batter and deep fry them. The fact that a McChicken doesn't resemble unground chicken isn't any different than the fact that a hamburger doesn't resemble a steak.
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I think the point was that McChicken is not all that much like real chicken and still lots of people eat it. It doesn't really matter if lab-grown meat won't replace what is served at Christmas dinner; if it can replace processed meat that's already a huge success.
One food may be ready now (Score:2)
Irony (Score:2)
What is ironic is that looking at current varieties of crops and farm animals, they have been cultivated to the point where they bear little resemblance to the original species. Also methods of generating new varieties include induced mutation, which is seen as OK by the organic lobby. Go figure.
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> which is seen as OK by the organic lobby. Go figure.
Speaking for myself and not for any organization or lobby, I've been annoyed by a seemingly recurring method to promote particular technologies like nuclear energy or genetic engineering.
Please let me take this opportunity to be on-topic and show how nefarious such method can be.
For instance, as of recently some dude figured he was "wrong" and GM is not bad, so he changed his view. Well, he might be wrong in opposing GM, but the other extreme (give a
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It's the same with nuclear energy: it's essential for medical use, but frankly, people don't know how to deal with nuclear reactors. It's not a Physics or Engineering problem -- it's a case of management incompetence. And I see no solution for that in the near future.
You can (and should) say the same thing about cars. Automobiles driven by incompetents kill more people every day than nuclear power has in its entire human history.
At least, ignoring one or two minor aberrations. [wikipedia.org] Though they did work as intended. . .
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"At least, ignoring one or two minor aberrations. Though they did work as intended. . ."
It's been more than two aberrations. But just those two aberrations had killed more people than car accidents over years in that era. Also car accidents are one-off incidents that don't have long term effects as opposed to nuclear where the long term effects aren't taken into account when figuring the body count.
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This. "Fake" meat requires fundamental science. That is, getting closer to the real muscle than any butcher has ever done. They will learn to create muscle tissue that is indistinguishable from tissue that spent its life on ancient forests.
"Fake" meat will be more real than almost all "real" meat.
Actually it's likely that once we get "close enough" that it'll turn out people like divergent varieties of meat which can only be produced through tissue engineering and definitely bear no resemblance to real tissue.
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Wait until someone inserts the GFP gene into these lab-grown burgers so kids can have fluorescent hamburgers [wikipedia.org] at McDonald's.
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Actually it's likely that once we get "close enough" that it'll turn out people like divergent varieties of meat which can only be produced through tissue engineering and definitely bear no resemblance to real tissue.
And they will be delicious.
Doesn't matter. (Score:5, Funny)
"Dr Mark Post, promised that the first artificial hamburger, made from 10bn lab-grown cells, would be ready for "flame-grilling by Heston Blumenthal" by the end of 2012. At the time of writing it is still on the back burner."
It doesn't matter if it's on the back- or front-burner, the important thing is that it's on the BQ already.
Absolutely disgusting... (Score:2)
On the bright side however, vegans can stop pretending their food actually tastes good! Oh... except those vegi burgers as they are tasty. Particularly when fried in bacon grease. ;)
Ethics for veggies (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably yes, as it's not a part of the corpse of an animal and presumably no animal has suffered or been exploited in its manufacture. But in practice no, because What's the Point!? I ate meat until my late teens and don't miss it at all. I enjoy a very tasty, healthy and nutritious diet and that's what really matters.
Re:Ethics for veggies (Score:5, Funny)
The only reason your diet is tasty to you is because you haven't had bacon in forty years. And if ever we needed proof that greys were replacing humans with pod people, that would be it.
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@ 1st A/C - my tastebuds are fine thanks, and are stimulated frequently
@ A/C No2 - As for the 'New Fruit', well of course I'd try it. I am a keen explorer of flavour and am more than willing to try new foods (provid
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@ A/C No2 - As for the 'New Fruit', well of course I'd try it. I am a keen explorer of flavour and am more than willing to try new foods (providing they are veggie ;) ) which is one of the reasons I never find food boring.
To quote your original post, "what's the point" in trying a new fruit? You said there was no point eating in vitro meat because you don't miss meat; presumably you also don't miss this new fruit, so what would be the point in trying it?
You seem to have said that the point of trying the new fruit is because you'd like to explore new flavours. I'm sure that, despire having had meat at one point in your life, you haven't tried all types of meat, so presumably the point of trying in vitro meats would be the s
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Well how do you define an animal? The meat will have to be alive to be grown in a lab, so you'd still be killing it before consumption (well most of us will).
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Well how do you define an animal? The meat will have to be alive to be grown in a lab, so you'd still be killing it before consumption (well most of us will).
The cells in a carrot are alive whilst it is being grown and when you cook it you kill it - what's the difference?
(Yes, plant cells and meat cells are physically different, but if neither organism has a central nervous system, is that ethically important?)
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I'm a meat eater myself, but I think the reasoning is pretty simple, how you define an animal is irrelevant, it's about how you define the spectrum of consciousness.
If a cow can experience pain and fear similar to our own then some people would consider it unethical to kill it so they can enjoy a juicy steak.
Some people are not ok with killing a cow but are ok with killing a shrimp, because it has a more basic nervous system and they perceive it as closer to an automaton than to a human being.
Still others w
Re:Ethics for veggies (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're a vegetarian for that specific reason it would be quite hypocritical to eat "animal-free meat" that was developed from the suffering of all those poor cuddly cows, mice and rats...
Seems like an extension of the sunk cost fallacy - if the cost has already been paid, refusing to use the product doesn't really make sense.
TBH, this is something that really winds me up about vegitarians - If you want to reduce animal suffering by not eating meat, or reduce environmental impact, then fair enough. But refusing to eat anything that has been grilled on the same bars as meat makes no sense - no extra suffering is going to happen because someone didn't wash the grill pan between cooking their bacon and your vegi-burgers. Similarly, flatly refusing to eat some meat that is only going to be thrown away if no one eats it is completely nonsensical. The best way to reduce your environmental impact is to use as much of the produce as possible, rather than refusing to eat left over meat and grilling up some vegi-burgers instead!
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I'm not a vegan or vegetarian, but not cooking veggies on the same grill as the meat seems reasonable to me. When I'm with vegetarians, I always ask, and to be honest I'm a bit surprised when they say they don't mind that their veggies have been simmering in animal fat.
After all, I would be grossed out at the idea of eating bacon that was cooked on the same grill as human flesh. Sometimes our instinctive gut reactions are related to our ethical beliefs.
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Chicken Little, your time has come (almost) (Score:2)
No, not the disney Movie but the SF novel from 1952.
The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl (w/CM Kornbluth).
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?bnum=1002 [technovelgy.com]
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The rest of the novel has already come true (except in a lesser venue) but instead of the congressman from Exxon, it's the congressmen from BP, Monsanto, Halliburton...
My vision (Score:3)
I'm still dreaming of a steak tree - doesn't have to move, grows on sunlight, doesn't need the highly interdependent energy intensive support infrastructure of industrial society, tastes delicious.
The downside would be that trees normally take a while until they can procreate, delaying breeding attempts. The other thing might be that the global greenhouse pickle we got ourselves into would rather favour movable trees, much like the ones seen in Lord of the Rings, due to the rapidity of the climate changes and weather extremes persisting for longer durations. Maybe cows with chlorophyll would be a better idea. Oh no, wait - cows move around to harvest stored energy from the grass, their own surface would never be enough at the puny photosynthesis efficiencies! They might get maybe a 1-2W assuming 100W average insolation.
Well maybe I could settle for beans with beef taste and some additional proteins.
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The predators would probably already exist, the tree might be more sensitive to any of them because of its newly developed steakiness, which might divert energy normally used for defending it.
My ultimate worry was more about the annual nomadic future we might be forcing plants into due to climate change though.
Chinese Faux Meats (Score:4, Informative)
This technology isn't really needed. Chinese Buddhists have been making faux meats for centuries. They are quite good.
There are also newer, Western faux meats that are quite good. Check out brands like Gardein and Beyond Meat.
Throughout most of human history, meat in the quantity Westerners are used to has been quite rare. The result are ethic cuisines thousands of years old that use little, if any meat, for tasty, complete ( and healthier ) nutrition.
The article contradicts itself (Score:2)
It first blames monsanto for creating a scare because of its out of control actions, then argues for less control by governments.
The simple fact is that if you don't have excessive restrictions, business WILL abuse its freedom, anything from DDT, tobacco, countless medicines which turned out to be worse then the disease.
The whole reason GM food is distrusted is precisely because the US government reduced restrictions and Monsanto went wild, the article even calls it Dr Frankenstein. How can you then argue
Really curious what a "moral" Vegan thinks about (Score:3)
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I don't believe they're cloning entire animals, though. If the entire reason that someone is a vegetarian is because they don't want to support animals being slaughtered, then this should resolve that concern. I suppose they could also think that eating meat is entirely wrong, but I don't see why that would be.
I'm anxiously awaiting it! (Score:2)
Although I am known for my odd eating habits, picking bland and healthy over sweet and tasty.
Can you beat the current meat machines? (Score:3)
We've already got a machine which produces meat. It's almost fully-automatic; it gathers a large proportion of its nutrients on its own, eliminates the waste products, and in the process exercises the muscle tissue to produce the desired texture (though some external work is typically required before harvesting to "finish" the meat). It requires no electricity or other energy input aside from the nutrients it gathers. In short, the cow sets a pretty high standard for meat machines.
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Sure, and the horse sets a pretty high standard for transport.
doomed (Score:2)
If all they can come up with is using electric shocks to make muscle, this process is doomed.
First, it's ignorning the fact that muscle built that way is by stressing and damaging muscle fibres (now we have to invent superhard "tendon" like material to attach the muscle fiber to some solid framework to create stress and then take those fake inedible tendons out later) and allowing the muscle repair processes to make more muscles out of muscle satellite cells. Next, it takes alot a big contractions to creat
Bleck! (Score:2)
Blah. Ugh. Lab grown meats are produced in chemicals that I don't want to be eating. It takes more energy to produce lab grown meat. It is worse for the environment than the grand efficiency of pasture raised meats. Lab grown meats are about centralized control by a few big corporations and government bodies. They're not healthy. They're garbage.
meat as jelly might be the way to go (Score:2)
Gelatin is already prominent in food production, for example. It's possible that meat jelly could create similar structural effects while enhancing nutritional content.
The yuck factor? Really? (Score:2)
Has the author ever seen a slaughterhouse? Huge animals hanging from bleed rails, their throats cut, blood gushing out of the gaping wound, snot and saliva hanging down from their mouths and noses, secretions on their eyes?
Ever smelled a cow, or a pig?
Now, don't get me wrong. I like fried chicken strips. Salami. Bacon. Steak. But after it's cleaned and well-prepared.
If someone wants to educate themselves, they can just go to youtube or liveleak and type in "cow slaughter" or "pig slaughter" and compare whet
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how would you not tell the consumers?
label it as "not-pork,not-beef,not-vegetarian,not-meat, mystery fun product!"
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So that's where Jimmy Hoffa went!
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People have no idea the absolutely unbelievable amount of agricultural and hydrological resources the world pours down a veritable black hole to make meat. Put it this way: The amount of grain and water it takes to raise the meat eaten by Americans alone could feed everyone in the entire world.
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The amount of grain and water it takes to raise the meat eaten by Americans alone could feed everyone in the entire world.
Most of the grains we feed to livestock aren't worth a shit to humans from a nutritional point of view. I wish every stupid hippie who propagates this bullshit would go out, pick up a couple bales of alfalfa, and try actually surviving on it. Doesn't work so fucking well, because you're a human and not a goddamn cow.
Look, out in your back yard all that grass? Goats can get fat eating that stuff. So do us all a favor and next time you feel like spreading this type of FUD, go cut your lawn and put the trimmin
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Not true and you could also grow other crops.
True for areas which isn't suitable for farming grains though.
Re:why not use meat (Score:5, Interesting)
Regardless, you can't deny that the biological growth process is staggeringly inefficient from an energy in / energy in biomass standpoint. There's a reason why prey:predator biomass relationships tend to fan in something like 100:1 per level. It's possible given a large effort to farm a whole bunch of meat, but we're doing severe damage to water tables, river systems and everything within 100 miles of the Mississippi river delta due to farm runoff, a significant part of which is making feedstock for animals.
And no, I'm not confused about why I have sharp front teeth and I enjoy a good steak'n'taters as much as anyone. I simply see a situation whose energy/resource consumption is a Bad Idea (tm) in an era of imminent resource constraints. We should eat meat, but a whole lot less would be much healthier.
Re:why not use meat (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the meat eaten in the US is beef and chicken. What do we feed most of the beef and chicken? There's some forage, sure. But the majority of it is corn and soy, grown on commercial farms. This is particularly true in large-scale commercial lots where the overwhelming majority of our meat is produced.
And I hate to burst your bubble, but alfalfa doesn't come falling out of the sky into fully formed hay bails. You have to plant it, fertilized it, and harvest it like all the other crops. That requires arable land, water, gasoline, and labor costs that could easily be used in a much more efficient way than producing meat, which was the GP poster's point.
But I guess having a understanding of basic economics [wikipedia.org] makes us stupid goddamn hippies.
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Beef Is grown in New Mexico on range land, 1 acre per cow. Beef is grown on a high corn diet in other parts of the country. Beef is grown in Europe on a different diet. A rumen is an amazing thing. So if we decide corn is bad for some reason then the government can put a massive tax on it and beef cows will eat something else and meat will be more expensive in the store. Simple economics.
If you add enough taxes and costs to a farmers input costs because farming is "bad" then maybe laboratory meat will be c
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When you say "corn and soy", do you by any chance mean silage?
How do you feel about eating some good old green silage?
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If we can't get enough meat, but the what is needed to raise it could feed everyone anyway, why go to the meat route anyway? Probably would be cheaper to have as food additives whatever we can't get or assimilate from vegetables.
You will still need to have cows and chickens, at least for milk and eggs, it could be luxury meat, but for normal, widescale food, probably vegetables (even lab growing them) could be the way,
Anyway, if labs can grow meat, they could grow/sintetize "pure" food at a potentially
Re:The Japanese eat anything.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason Japanese people are so short and have yellow skins is because they have eaten nothing but fish and rice for two thousand years... If we eat McDonald's hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years we will become taller, our skin become white, and our hair blonde
Due to the heavy impact of the press and TV on the Japanese, this helped a lot. Price as a reason? For your information, for the price of a cheeseburger you get here in Japan a very decent and cooked traditional Japanese meal (Ootoya [wikipedia.org] TBT, Yoshinoya [wikipedia.org] ...).
Back to the story, Japanese will not eat "anything", unless TV endorses it. If TV comes to that and you want to compare this "new meat" to something: compare it to the western hamburgers - and certainly not to the traditional Japanese food that has been eaten in Japan for a very long time.
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The Japanese really do eat just about everything. Live, dead, cooked, raw, they'll eat it. Even rice ground into powder and reconstituted into a rubbery paste (mochi).
Sounds better than the crap "we" eat: the waste meat parts ground into a rubbery paste (mechanically recovered meat).