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Lab-Grown Meat Chunks - It's What's For Dinner
jonerik writes "CNN has this story on a NASA-funded project being conducted at Touro College in New York. In the experiment, segments of muscle are cut from large goldfish and placed in a vat of 'nutrient-rich liquid,' with the fish chunks growing by 16% within a week. It is hoped that future developments will permit astronauts on long-term missions to include fresh meat in their diet without having to bring along actual animals and fish into space. New Scientist is also reporting the story."
This doesn't have to be for 'astronauts and the like'. How about hungry people right here on earth? I imagine these meat cubes would be easy to store and cook (due to the uniform size and shape) and no bones = no waste...
Do a google search before posting.
would any vegans care to comment on what your views would be on "hydroponic" meat? That is, meat grown from cloned cells and/or DNA, instead of that harvested from live animals. I think that hydroponic meat will be the wave of the future. "Growing" meat using livestock is simply not environmentally cost effective.
NO CARRIER
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration must approve the mutant meat before people can legally consume it, according to NewScientist.com, which first reported on it on Wednesday.
Does that mean that it is actually _illegal_ to eat crayons, glue, boogers, pieces of carpet, lead paint chips and dirt?
Time to start arresting some children if you ask me.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
I could go for that -- for non-steakeaters, the filet is a prized cut because it's tender. The filet's tenderness is a function of the fact that it's a muscle that doesn't get much use.
Before I commit to a lunch of vat-grown meat, I'd like to know how the hunks of meat develop a grain or texture.
Part of what makes "fish" meat good is the flaking and separation of the rows of flesh created by the intervening bones; likewise, the fibers of muscle that comprise the filet are organized in a grain. Steak are cut across the grain to allow any spices/marinades the maximum ability to penetrate the steak, and so that (after cooking), the chunks you cut off the steak are more easily-processed by the molars.
Cuts of meat cut cross-grain (i.e. steaks) are also perceived as more tender because the grain is parallel to the direction of the motion of your teeth, facilitating the work of your molars. (This also applies to your incisors; if you're hungry enough, skip the fork, and if you're really hungry, skip the cooking.)
I have no idea what kind of structure a large mass vat-grown steak (fish or beef) would develop, but I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to induce the cells to create their own structure by passing electric currents through the chunk as it forms, and/or to use a ceramic rod as a substitute for a bone to provide an initial alignment.
It seems to me that this is a promising idea. The various foods we like to eat are often made in the bodies of animals, but there's no reason that the cells that do it have to be in something with a nervous system. Of course, it couldn't have evolved that way, but the reason that meat is an inefficient food source is that it tends to wander around and look for food. We've just replaced the rest of the fish's body with a vat.
If this sort of research continues, we ought to be able to build what amounts to an ecosystem with the routing between various animal organs done with pipes instead of the rest of the animals.
I figure one day there will be a big market for vat-grown filet mignon at one-third the price of the real thing. Of course, it will probably be cost-prohibitive for many years
For many, many years. To get muscle tissue to grow in culture, it has to be fed all the hormones an animals other organ systems generate. That means purifying those hormones and growth factors from some other source and dumping them in the soup. Our lab supplements culture media with 10 ng/ml IGF-1 to get muscle cell growth, we can grow about 1 mg muscle under 3 ml media, and we have to change the media every 2-3 days. To get a dinky 1/4 pound of 'meat', your last incubation would need 300 liters of media, containing 300 ug IGF-1. IGF-1 runs about $10/ug, so (using current culture techniques, that'd be at least $3000 for meat with no texture and less flavor.
But me, the American who loves meat of all kinds and isn't planning on going to Mars, *wants* Mr. Astronaut to have nice juicy steaks whenever the fuck he feels like it.
A forced Vegan diet undoubtedly qualifies as 'cruel and unusual punishment', at least to anyone who isn't a blazing PETA fanatic. God knows, I'd probably flip out and eat a fellow astronaut if I didn't have any meat for three freakin' years.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I could go for that -- for non-steakeaters, the filet is a prized cut because it's tender.
Screw the traditional cuts of meat. Just by analyzing what makes meat taste good (as you point out in your post), we could make _even_ better tasting meats. It seems reasonable to me that in the future, meat the highest quality meats would be lab-grown.
I don't know about the whole vegan thing though, the culture has to be organic in some way so animals would still be killed probably...
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