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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."
eww
Wasn't there a Science Fiction story in which a major plot element was a large hunk of chicken flesh grown to feed a community?
Anyone else remember this, or is it a product of my imagination?
Getting closer to the "single-celled protiens packed with amino acids" that the guys from the Matrix were eating..
.. As long as it has a zesty orangle flavor, I'm all over it.
Why don't we just skip all this inbetween crap and go straight to that?
Is it just me, or will this become the next generation's goatse.cx?
"Don't click the link to the growing goldfish muscle!"
"^^ GOLDFISH MUSCLE LINK ALERT ^^"
Well, whatever. I just ate. Thanks Slashdot.
qslack.com
GROW YOUR PENIS 16% BIGGER IN JUST A WEEK WITH THIS NEW HIGH-TECH CREAM DEVELOPED BY NASA blablabla
:).
The scary part about this is... you know it will happen
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
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.
One has to wonder also, how will this fast food, if this is a way to lower prices another cent, i'm sure a few places will try this out at one time or another... ewww
I would be able to eat that meat in fasting! Seriously, TOFU is good but those eat-healthy-dumbheaded make it unsalted! I want salted tofu! Mushroom food is good too.
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
They should give the astronauts all the spam we have down here. There's plenty.
/This only looks like a sig.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Smells like fish....tastes like, crap?
Why don't the astronauts just drink the "nutrient-rich liquid" and save some effort?
And how will these astrounauts replenish this supply of 'nutrient-rich liquid'? I don't know how long one vat will keep a piece of goldfish flesh growing, but you're gonna run outta nutrients sooner or later. There are some things you can't get from recycling your own feces. Let's face it: any manned long-term space missions are gonna be munching on algae steak.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Maybe one day, this would allow the poor poor vegetarians out there who choose their diet based on moral objections to killing animals able to eat a big juicy steak. Now those smug bastards won't be around longer than us when we all keel over from cardiac arrest at age 55.
Just imagine giant cubes of laboratory-grown chicken meat, sliced into perfect cubes by machines and then battered and fried. Chicken McNuggets are abandoned in favor of Chicken McCubes. If they were cubes, the fast food industry could make packaging for them to fit perfectly in.
"We need the packages to hold 10 cubic inches of smeat."
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
I thought if you made a large trip in space, having cattle would be like a biosphere. You would grow plants and tend animals, which would also keep you sane doing routine chores.
And wouldnt you want to have the ship spin, so you can have some artifical gravity? Then you could slaughter the animals, and not worry about the mess.
BTW, slaughtering might sound bad, but doesnt stop you from eating at McDonalds.
Spam 2.0, another white meat.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
They need to sell it as an injectable solution for people to grow their muscles..
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Did anyone else think of Chicken Little when reading this story?
*shudder*
The last thing I want is to end up in a world like Mitch Courtenany.
Forwarded mail follows:
From: bigwhopper@yahoo.com
Subject: Increase your penis size by %16 in one week!!
Ever take a shower? Now you can give your penis a bath, and have it grow 16% in one week!! How does it work? We don't know! But we're all REALLY happy around here!
WARNING! Don't leave penis unattended. Potential side affects include: Better Sex, Longer Sex, and mothers no longer saying "There's plenty of room in the crotch."
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Aren't there limits to how many times an animal cell can divide, before it just stops dividing, lives out it's life and dies?
IANAB (I am not a biochemist), but there have been different articles on this subject over the years. Wouldn't that be an impediment to large scale implementation of this?
Just asking....
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Anyone who reads a.r.k will see this as pepsico finally admitting that they have Animal 57
This is freaking creepy. Maybe less creepy than Quorn, which is made from slime mold (mycoprotien) but it's far too creepy for me.
+++ ATH0 +++
Amazing device turns grass into meat!!!
This is an inefficient way to deliver nutrition to those very short of space and resources. Slabs of dead fish muscle fed in nutrient baths are not going to give you anywhere close to 100% efficiency in conversion. This is the same thing as generating a pound of beef from 30 pounds of grain fed to a cow. It's wasteful and stupid.
Yeah, beef tastes better than grain, hahaha. Enjoy your colon cancer.
Night
The CNN article makes it sound as if this technique produces no waste whatsoever. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but won't these muscle cells be generating plenty of waste as they use up the nutrients provided to them. Granted, you won't have fecal matter to dispose of, but you're still going to need to filter the cell waste out of this serum that the muscles are grown in...
This presents a serious problem. Since they started with fish muscle tissue, you might assume that the resulting "tissue" was fish, but since it was grown in "a vat of fetal bovine serum", would that make it beef?
What to serve, red wine or white?
So THAT'S how Jesus did it! Now I'm all anxious for the scientific procedure that shows us how to turn water into wine!
-Craw
When burgers are dropped on the floor, the meat is usually thrown away. Maybe instead they will break them up and put them into the 'Burger Vat'.
Oh well, the food can't get *that* much worse, can it?
Waiter, can I get a lab-grown fish chunk, a side of Genetically enhanced tomatoes, with some lab-grown pigs feet, and and order of bug-resistant corn, and a diet coke. YUM. =)
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
People are vegetarian (and vegan) for lots of reasons. Cloning clearly would not help solve any of the health problems associated with meat-eating.
It does seem to help solve a lot of the ethical problems, although there are definitely animals being killed to research the technology, as well as initial animals that are killed to begin the meat farms.
Most likely, the crossover between the animal rights crowd and the anti-food-modification crowd is large enough that there won't be much of a decrease in veganism/vegetarianism.
The real question is:
What do you get if you let the meat continue to grow?
With 16% growth in 1 week, I wonder what you'd have in a year? A huge blob of "living" meat, or something similar to a complete fish?
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Eww
Sorry. :-) I couldn't resist...
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Okay, so you take some fish up, and it gains in mass by 14%.
But, you also took up a bunch of cow abortions, which lost the equivalent mass, if not more.
So, where's the savings? Seems to be they'd be better off shipping up 14% more freeze-dried goldfish.
During launch, you put in a big box full of ice. After launch, you tie the fish to the outside of the spaceship (like beer, when ice fishing), melt the ice to use as drinking water, and collapse the box into a corner somewhere.
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
researchers finally got up the nerve to try some... and it tastes like chicken.
without having to bring along actual animals and fish into space.
Fish aren't animals?
Why bother.
I'm all for growing meat in vats instead of having to grow a whole beast and then processing it, but it seems there is a big problem with this particular method: It requires a bit vat o growth medium that is itself not so easy to supply.
The NewScientist article states "..immersed them in a vat of fetal bovine serum, a nutrient-rich liquid extracted from the blood of unborn calves"
Certainly an easier to obtain growth medium is needed for general use in growing food.
For NASA's low volume needs it's OK to rely on big vats of this stuff.
I've seen ads for this stuff in various biotech rags, and I do know that it is used in bioreactors for growing up batches of genetically modifed microbes, but I doubt we'll be able to cheaply grow meat at home as needed with technique.
Eventually we will all be doing it that way as it is theoretically cheaper and can provide a consistently high quality meat. Only thowbacks and meat snobs will insist on meat from whole animals!
Though NASA's probably one of few orginizations I'd expect to actually enlarge my penis 16%
Maybe then they could fund ISS! =]
Shouldn't the title of this be Lab-Grown Fish Chunks - It's what for dinner as they're made from goldfish? /leave nit-picking mode
Video Game cheats, hints a
Next time you buy some mcnuggets, take a good look at them. You might notice that they only come in three different shapes. Chicken McNuggets are actually made out of smaller chunks of meat, which are then "glued" together using a special enzyme. (You may have noticed that the grain of the meat inside a mcnugget goes in all weird directions).
:)
At any rate, the point of all this is that they're not likely to start making them cube-shaped. They could do it now--they just don't, because it betrays the fact that their meat isn't entirely natural. Go fig.
"SMEAT, its whats for dinner!"
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I thought it was pretty cool, anyway.
Method of processing duck feet
So, what happens when we can vat-grow large amounts of meat from small pieces of human flesh? Will human flesh become an item on the menus? Eh, it'll probably taste like chicken -- everything else does.
They say that this chunk of tissue was kept in a nutrient rich liquid. I don't understand. The tissue would then be composed of the nutrients in this liquid. Therefore, consuming the tissue would be the same as consuming the meat. However, it would much less wasteful to consume the nutrient liquid rather than the meat - which people would desire to cook and of course, would not be as well digested.
:)
So for a space mission, you're talking about bringing a few thousand liquid tons of nutrient to produce a substantially lower quantity of food. Am I getting this wrong?
Why not just consume this nutrient liquid directly - something I'm sure a human body would digest better than meat. Space travel requires practical designs. I'm sorry the astronauts will not get a juicy Texas steak every now and then.
Why bother.
let's just hope it doesn't start smelling like fish. ;)
Then you may no longer have a penis
The only downside I can see is that the potential for the genetic diversity of our food/meet supply could get dramatically smaller. But overall I think the benefits are worth it,
Although, I guess know people could just clone gorilla/lion/spotted-owls for meat and not feel bad about eating it.
Therefore, consuming the tissue would be the same as consuming the meat.
Yes, obviously this is true. I meant to say "consuming the tissue would be the same as consuming the liquid."
Sorry... my revision skills are lacking... but no more than CmdrTaco's.
Why bother.
But using raw sewage as a nutrient solution has its drawbacks. That's why they cook the shit out of everything at taco bell. I mean this both literally and figuratively.
What's next? Growing a chicken heart in a vat?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Mmmmm... vat grown meat.
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.
The only goldfish I'd ever eat are the little cheesy crackers made by Pepperidge Farm... Otherwise its like eating Carp, nasty bottom muck feeding fish. I'd say stick to freezing your meat if your planning to go on a long trip into space... I see less of a sanitation risk to that than dealing with fluid to grow meat in.
If it was me, i would call this stuff:
.. if it was freeze dried it would be:
Meat_0.85-BETA
and
Meat_0.85-BETA.tar.gz
lol!!!!!!!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Because yeast tastes wrong, and mushrooms are cheaper. When quoting bad science from movies, the thing that goes after the close-quote is [sic]. Yeast, incidentally, is eukaryotic (big cells, like what we're made of). Blue-green algae, an even faster growing variety of slime, is prokaryotic/bacterial (little cells, such as cause diptheria and the beubonic plague.) Although we (almost entirely) share our genetic code with bacteria, after the code is used to generate protein sequences, the proteins undergo post-processing which is very different, so a given gene (a sequence of DNA that codes for a particular protein) from, say, a Cow, may not "work" in yeast and probably will not "work" in blue-green algae; i.e. the gene will not produce the same result-protein as in Bessy.
Actual meat has blood cells and blood vessels; it has proteins (with distinctive scents/tastes) which are unique not only to animals, but to animal muscle tissues (likewise liver or kidney, if that's your taste). It contains a highly distinctive mix of small molecules. It has a texture which it is difficult to duplicate (even ground), especially if you start out with powder or ooze. If you want to know the state of meat-texture duplication technology, from powder, buy a can of Hormel chili and see if you can differentiate the meat and the textured vegetable.
Anyway, you could clone the proteins into a yeast or a mushroom (see above). You'd have approximately the same chance of success either way. However, mushroom's already form tissues, which single celled organisms (yeast, pond scum) don't. Ground, textured, flavored mushroom products don't taste a whole lot like meat, but the approximation of the texture is pretty good.
Now, Yeast or Algae is easier to cultivate in (say) hydroponics. So, if you wanted to duplicate the (much derided, unfairly to my mind) nutritional properties of meat, and did not concern yourself with taste or texture, it would be the way to go. However, the post-processing to texture it into something meat like (instead of a slime, powder or slurry) would, almost certainly, take up more space than the extra support facilities to grow a mushroom.
The best solution, from a synthetic meat standpoint, would be a cube of fillet minion that just kept growing forever in a nutrient bath, complete with blood vessels and whatever components you throught your meat needed (not, for example, nerves). Tumor, it's what's for dinner. This is a (probably) technologically easier proposition that churns out beef grown in tanks. I presume that this is what the group in the article is moving towards.
Of course, trying to do any of this in space is pretty silly. It seems like a frivolous thing to use up weight/space on; unless the beef industry is willing to pay for the space program as an advertising stunt.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
There's also Quorn, which according to NPR is a popular european meat-substitute. It's made from fungus (not mushrooms, lower than that), and doesn't even require being farmed like soy beans. It can simply be made in a fermentation plant.
Sounded interesting, and apparently it tastes pretty good.
(Mmmm... Quorn Dogs...)
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Long a staple of sci-fi,coming soon to your dinner table. But what type of meat will give the best yield?
The story I remember best about this (can't recall title or author) was about a father and son from a colony planet trying to correct a bureaucratic mistake in the spelling of their world's name.
It turned out that regular barnyard animal tissue just took far more resources to grow than the tissues used by the medical establishment...and Earth was incredibly overpopulated.
(No it wasn't "Make Room Make Room" - which was immortalized in film as "Soylent Green". This was a short story and mostly satire)
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
I left some hamburger in the fridge for a couple of months in a "nutrient rich" environment (hamburger helper) and it grew to almost twice it's original size. I was not about to eat it tho. Hamburger helper is not supposed to be green and fuzzy......
YES! It was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw the headline. But, aside from vivid memories about Chicken Little, I'll be darned if I can remember what story it was from.
For those who don't know, "Chicken Little" was the term used in a SF story about an artificially grown hunk of meat. It was kept alive by being hooked to a device that kept it feed and growing indefinitely. Once in a while, when someone wanted a steak or whatever, you simply cut a slice off the thing.
Sounds like Science is close to catching up with fiction.
Soilent green is made of people!!!
:)
"Sure, just stick it out this airlock. The cold hard vaccuum of space will do the rest!"
(One problem with this approach is that when you're done with the space's cold hard vacuum, your hardness will vary inversely with your hardness' coldness :-)
This sort of research and experiments would apply to manned missions to other planets: Places the trip would be measured in years.
If I'm not a vegan (and I'm not) on this trip, and all I get is vegan food, no beef, chicken, or fish, I'm gonna' go ape shit. I mean, it's gonna' be one ugly scene. Sorry, but I'm making a big enough sacrifice (possibly even dying in the effort) to go on this 3 year journey to Mars. Come Saturday night, I want a goddamn steak. Period. More meat, for the meat eaters.
Also, (offtopic) a good way to keep the population from reaching 10 billion is to bomb Africa and South America with condoms. Maybe the odd instructional pamphlet.
Who did what now?
Just like the fantasy story where a scruffy revolutionary fed five thousand people with two fish and five loaves of bread.
If you just go to his website, all those questions and more will be answered. Be prepared though, the answers are completely dull and without controversy...
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/homepage.html
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
From the article...
He acknowledges that some diners might consider the current concoction unappetizing: fetal bovine serum, which is extracted from the blood of unborn calves. The liquid is a staple food for hungry cells in lab experiments. But there are concerns that the substance might transmit mad cow disease to humans.
Stick your dick in that. Also forget about any blowjobs.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Call me crazy, but instead of growing meat, why don't they just consume the nutrient rich liquid instead? seems to make more sense, but that is coming from a vegan, so meat (and dairy, honey, animal products/byproducts in general) are icky to me.....
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, not just chemistry, reality!
FLAMEBAIT? He answers the question then adds a truthful insightful addition... you should be dragged out and shot. please read up on some basics of Systems Theory it does make a lot of sense...
| I'd like to see NASA devote its (too scarce) resources to
:-\
| making plant-based foods taste fantastic in a space
| environement. It sure beats the thought of microwaved
| synthetic meat.
NASA spent several million dollars and years of research
to make a Pen that works in Zero-G...
the russians just used a pencil...
typical.
storm's nest
Why not just cut out the middle man (or fish):)? With stem cell research, couldn't one of our multi-generational space cadets just give up an arm or leg for dins and then regen the limb?
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
Actually it occured to me that Soylent Green
could be made of Astronauts in the future.
If they send three astronauts up but two
well fed astronauts come back... I think
we have our proof.
as a 13-year vegetarian for ethical reasons, i can loosely define ~my personal~ rules in this manner:
i will not eat ~or consume~ any product that contains animal or animal by-products that were killed for the sake of consumption.
accidental killing (e.g. road kill) or natural death (e.g. old age) are acceptable as food to me, but i haven't had the nerve or opportunity to scrape up some squirrel or raise my own cow.
i would love the opportunity to surgically remove a small t-bone, but alas, i can find no DVM's willing.
am i against the research? yes, there is killing. will i eat a lab grown fish stick? yes, if the killing has stopped--that is not likely.
neopets.com
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.
Nothing like tossing little "Kipper" on the grill after a hard days work at the office. Grew him this morning I did! Just hate the way they scream when you take them out of the vat though...
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
reading this - I just had a vision of some student rubbing this nutrient liquid all over his privates hoping for that 16% in a week....
but maybe im just sick....
When NASA could be bringing one of these to life!
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
"But because we didn't have the formula for SPACE MEAT, we made ours out of napkins"
What's next, the Scary Monkey Show on prime time? I mean, don't get me wrong, I love Invader Zim and All, but I didn't think it was REAL!
AGGGHHHH!
(P.S. I'm dancing like a monkey)
"Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.
It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides They bought eyes and genitals on the open market The eyes were green."
William Gibson Count Zero
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Imagine giant, lab grown sheets of leather. We can genetically engineer the cells to mimic the tanning process. Leather jackets and such will no longer cost 100-200 dollars. Cool :)
Technoli
"But live animals generate biological waste, and slaughter on a spaceship would be a complicated affair. By growing just edible muscle, Benjaminson's breakthrough eliminates those steps altogether."
I can see no reason why these living cells should cease to produce waste products. While we can certainly see an awful lot of correlation between human brains and waste products, the nervous system is not an organism's major source of biological waste.
The creation of biological waste products is just a fact of life. It happens in the simplest cells and it would certainly happen in these living, eating, growing tissues.
Without a circulatory system, how are these waste products going to be taken out of the "meat"?
Dear NASA,
I am writing to you on behalf of my client, the Fishing Industry Association of America. (FIAA) My client is higly concerned that your new method for growing fish chunks in the laboratory infringes on their buisness method patent for "a process for making human-consumable foodstuffs from biological material of aquatic origin."
We fear that your new technique is also a circumvention device under the DMCA. We can not allow you to continue to develop this "biological crowbar" which infringes on our intellectual property rights. Please cease and desist from this reseach, and turn over all material related to this research to my client, or we will be forced to take more serious action.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
John Dewey, Senior Partner and lead council for the FIAA.
Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe, Attorneys at law.
Screw men on mars. I wanna see Fish In Space.
Now that's offtopic.
314-15-9265
What about Beefamato? It's the beef juice cousin of Clamato and the only thing I've ever found to sound more disgusting than Clamato itself.
I've never tried either I have to say, but I'm not going to either. To quote Jules: 'sewer rat could taste like pumpkin pie but I'm not going to eat the filthy mutherfucker.'
Goldfish my butt,
Remeber Soylent Green,
There was also Soylent Red and some other colors I dont remeber,
This is the first step, Soylent GOLD !!!!
Soylent-Green for the masses
Its people my god, SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE !
Does this mean human self cannibalism is a profitable possibility, they say the meat is kinda sweet and all.
Seriously, Do you want to eat something thats GROWN in a "nutrient rich" (thats the people part I bet) , this is just so wrong to my pallete, mind, and sense of what is natural I cant see it.....
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
But is it kosher?
I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
Sorry, but that's an urban myth. See this for more information.
"Source... The Final Frontier" -- keepersoflists.org
Dude, this is like living spam.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Everything tastes like chicken!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Seems like a Rudy Rucker book where beings are created from gene-tweaked molds and algae and the flesh is sold at fast food restaurants.
Freeware
which makes me wonder, if this nutrient rich mix makes muscle grow, what's the difference between this nutrient bath, and a carcenogen? (which ultimately causes unchecked tissue growth)
more importantly, would you want to handle this "food"?
moox. for a new generation.
Actually, NASA is already experimenting with contemporary vegan cuisine. This article describes the project. Another example of how space research creates technology fit for every day use: they're working on an automatic tofu-making machine.
I would imagine it's because that meat is higher in energy, pound for pound. With spacecraft, weight/storage considerations are of paramount importance.
OK let's think about this. You want to provide the maximum amount of food per weight in space. The ideal solution is nothing but canned chili. Obviously this provides 100% weight devoted to food. Chemicals for growing meat are extra; the conversion is not 100% efficient.
But the balancing consideration is the psychology of eating. The main thrust of this research is to provide food that maintains psychological well-being on a long trip.
Offhand, I'd say that green plants would be much more pleasant than a mutant extra passenger, a blob of vat-grown flesh that I'm sure I'd grow to hate.
The researchers should start by examining which foods are nutritious and can be grown in space with solid efficiency. I doubt that meat is one of them. Water used by plants is ultimately recycled; plants implicitly clean the air.
Won't McDonalds sue NASA for infringing on their secret for hamburger patty production now?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I read this news story and had about 10 simultaneous reactions...
This is cool, or no, it's gross, or no, its distrubing, or no, its a god send, or no, its the end of the world...
The big question is how does it taste?
"Sig free in '03!"
SEND THEM U-HAULS!
Not Food.... not money... U-HAULS. They live in a place where NOTHING GROWS!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Will they will grow chicken nuggets in the shape of dinosaurs, and fish that is square.
Get a free ipod.
Place the humans into the nutrient rich broth.
It's probably more efficient.
Any activist vegetarian could probably give you a full lecture about the relative efficiencies, probably in terms of acres/hectares required to feed humans different diets.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Mmm... Soylent Green...
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Really, we're used to freeze-dried diets, Tang and total isolation from the rest of humanity!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
My brother only eats cheese, hamburger, and bread (and has the colesterol to prove it). I really do think he'd starve unless he could freeze-dry McD's or something.
AMCGLTD.COM. Where cats, science fictio
It would be so right, meat grown on trees.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
As a vegetarian (although I rarely eat dairy) who eats almost all organic foods... I can't think of anything more disgusting.
:)
Well, I probably can
Scientifically it's interesting, but I think this money is spent better other places.
Why not just feed the nutrient rich liquid directly to the astronauts?
Listening to self righteous Vegans is nearly as bad as having to put up with the bollocks spouted by the wilder christian sects, endless moronic repetition that we are all destined for hellfire because we are catholic, protestant, gay, black, white, jewish, hindu, moslem, having sex before marriage, single mothers, shopping on Sundays/whatever.
You cannot rationally argue with these headcases, its a religion, an article of faith, they are fscked in the head every bit as bad as members of the LCC, CoS, Moonies or any other cult.
The nonsense that we cannot be meat eaters if the planets population reaches [INSERT LARGE FIGURE HERE] has been repeated by their ilk for well over 150 years now. I believe the figure originally started at a billion and has to be adjusted up each time the the past assertions have been exposed as utter bollocks.
Any person who would take the rantings of Peter Singer seriously should be made to pay dearly for advocating the fascism of the 'animal rights' movement.
No animal tested drugs, no medicines, no welfare benefits paid out of taxes raised by folks and their businesses you would destroy in the name of cute little animals, for you or any hellspawn you breed.
You want to condemn the world back to a medieval hell where a simple infection ment death, its only fair that you should be hoisted on your own petard and try that road yourself first.
The cure for the comfortable urban middle classes who make up the vast majority of proselytizeing Veganism (Note I did not say vegetarian), is to be dumped say for 18 months onto an Ant/Artic island full of 'Ohhh So Cute' seals/penguins armed with nothing but a blunt hatchet.
Homo-Sapiens, like a lot of members of the ape family is an omnivore, live with it.
Curmudgeon
"Meat is not unhealthy."
Meat (or any other inanimate thing) _can't_ be "unhealthy", or "healthy". What you're saying is that "Meat is not ill", which is wrong. The correct word is "unhealthful".
I think it is gross but ... hey what if something bad was to happen .?. it is a way to get more meat .. but yea .. i agree that is gross .. i kinda see the whole tofu thing .. yeah that seems like a better thing to do .. but my scientific side feels this is interesting .. but my logical food side sees this as gross ... hmm ... which will win ? my food side or my scientific ? ... ahh food won !!! YUCK THIS IS SICK ! WHAT WILL THEY THINK OF NEXT !!?!?!?
Yours Truly, Wes -- Owner
I was thinking the same thing. Guess we've both got sick minds. I suppose the only real worry would be that if some deranged person acquired a taste for it, they might get the urge to try the real thing (One instance of cannibalism and that stuff is off the market so fast it'll make your head spin).
Steve Varley suggested something similar in The Ophiuchi Hotline, except that they were growing meat on trees there (including an illegal human variety).
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
A college?
Why does this not surprise me?
Have you seen the kind of stuff they serve to you in college cafes?
Yuck!
Magius_AR
This is straight out of Pohl & Kornbluth's "Venus, Inc" story from, I think, the late 50's. There was a giant hunk of chicken culture sold as "Chicken Little".
I have no idea why NASA is even looking at this. The weight of the growth medium will necessarily always be much greater than the weight of the meat produced, so there is no reason to grow the meat in space. You might as well just ship out with the meat flash frozen and shrinkwrapped.
Let the common fools have their synthetic steak, but they'd better not assimilate The Keg Steakhouse and their Keg Size New York. Some things must be left sacred!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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Well, somebody may have said it before him, but he said it best. This reminds me of his excellent "ware" series of novels. I highly recommend them to anyone who likes Bruce Sterling or William Gibson or Neal Stephenson. Check out his website. Lots of interesting stuff. I think he brought up vat grown meat in Freeware. "Wendy Meat" still makes me laugh thinking about it.
;)
On a sidenote, I always though spirulina would be useful for growing food in space. Which sounds more distasteful, eating algae or vat meat?
Even if we ignore the cost of media components such as hormones and growth factors (requirements that can probably be engineered out at our current tech level), there are basic problems with the metabolism of animal tissues (requirements that cannot be engineered out at our current tech level).
Probably the biggest stumbling block is that animal cells lack the ability to synthesize many amino acids, and even some of the ones that can be synthesized require other amino acids as the starting material. So, you end up needing protein to grow protein. From an efficiency standpoint, you'd be much better off just drinking the growth media.
In the case of growth factors (hormones, cytokines, etc), a change in one or two proteins can take care of things. For some growth factors, you can even see this happen spontaneously if you serially passage cells repeatedly. The problem with amino acid requirements is that you'd need to engineer in whole new metabolic pathways, which is much more difficult. Probably one of the most sophisticated examples of putting in a new pathway was in the example of beta carotene synthesis in "golden" rice. This was barely doable with something like three steps. I don't know how many steps would be required to cover all amino acids, but I'm guessing it would be several dozen at least.
A much better idea is to use lower organisms that can manufacture all 20 essential amino acids already. A good example is Quorn, a fungal meat substitute that is already available. To grow Quorn, all you need is water, ammonia, some minerals, and a carbon source such as glucose. The fungus can synthesize all necessary amino acids from carbohydrates, with the ammonia supplying the necessary nitrogen. What's more, it can be grown in a continuous process (as opposed to batch), which you can get a huge amount of a small reactor.
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I am not a biologist, can someone please explain where the cell waste would go if there is no blood system taking wastes away? Or maybe there is no waste -- there's no digestion and the cells process the nutrients without waste (beyond CO2). Krebs was a long time ago.
not that it matters to me, i'm vegan and since the research involved slicing hunks of flesh from living animals i'm not interestd in the product.
fear is the mind killer
Female Prison Rape in NY
It means that someday I might be able to eat a hamburger without feeling sorry for the cow.
...which would imply that men eating East Asian diets have a greater tendency towards growing breasts and developing scrotal cancer.
They don't.
This is pure B.S. diet pseudoscience. What fucks you up is red meat and saturated fat, the cause of 'Western' diseases such as bowl cancer and cardio-vascular diseases.
Wouldn't it just be easier to have the astronauts drink the 'nutrient-rich liquid' and save a step?
When can they grow up lumps of me? Cannibalism is kinda frowned upon these days, but this could be the next big thing!
Vat grown protein has been around since before the mid 1980's. Scientists (and Pythagoreans) are already able to produce yeast/fungi based meat substitues, so why would NASA want to waste its time and money on vat grown muscle tissue.
If they want to grow tissue in vats, why don't they work on organ tissue, i.e. for transplants.
Figuring prominently in Larry Niven's (excellent) Known Space collection of books is a creature known as a 'Bandersnatchi'. This creature was genetically engineered to be big, easy to herd, and non-sentient. The brain of this creature was huge, since it was higly prized as a delicacy. May I suggest "Ringworld", and "World of Ptavvs", both by Mr. Niven. I would put a link to Amazon here, but it seems that people think I'm trying to get a referral. :P Go find them yerself.
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A: A beginner.
Come on, I know you're all smirking... ;)
-J
What NASA really needs to do to make space journeys livable is bring a master chef to the space station with a Progress ship full of raw ingredients and some space-adapted cooking tools. You can't stir ingredients together in a bowl, so you'll have to have a closed sphere with openings to add ingredients and a cranked stirrer thingy. You can't stir fry in zero-G, so maybe you can spin fry - have a hot cooking surface shaped like a cylinder & spin it so the food is held onto the surface by centrifugal force. You can't bake bread in zero-G and expect it to come out the same as it does on earth, so you may have to make bread spheres that "rise" outwards as they bake. The space kitchen is going to have to have a killer fume hood & ventilation. It also needs lots of fire supression (kitchen fires in a closed environment are BAD!!!)
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
I remember reading in various Cornell newsletters/newspapers that some people here are doing research on foods for space, mainly vegetable-based stuff.
A quick search turned up two articles: the first one, with photos, and a more recent follow-up.
Among other things, they're trying to develop taco-like things, carrot drumsticks, and some kind of chocolate substitute. Oh well, I don't think astronauts are expecting gourmet meals...
There was a celebrity chef programme in the UK where some bumpkin toff concocted a meal from afterbirth. Highly nutritious apparently. What do you yanks reckon of that? Might come in handy on a long Mars trip.
m l
Here are some recipes, including Plancenta Pizza:
http://www.gentlebirth.org/archives/etplcnt2.ht
This sounds suspiciously like a George Carlin-coined meme. But I digress...
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
I agree with you. Hopefully some day humans, as a whole, will be more sensitive to animals suffering and take futher steps to prevent it. Vegetarianism and veganism is an obvious first step. Humans don't need to kill the other animals to eat, so why do we do it when it causes them suffering?
Who would want to eat GOLDFISH?
OH NO! MR. FLIPPER! Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...
etc.
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
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# Read other people's messages before posting # describes what your message is about.
# Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illeg #
Lameness filter a;asdlf zxc,
DFn. asdfl . Wer. asdf. Lasdflk
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wser type User IDNickname or AC What steps ca
Now you could get real Penis enlargers
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I'm one of those poor poor vegetarians and have no desire to eat meat. I'm happy just eating plant derived food. I'm sure some vegetarians would eat meat if it didn't cause animal suffering, but many wouldn't because they have no desire to eat it.
I'm sure that most meat-eaters wouldn't eat human flesh even if it could be grown without killing humans. I (and I'm sure many other vegetarians) feel the same way about animal flesh.
Soylent Green....
does unused cultured muscle taste better or worse than muscle that has been used by the animal in question?
Are we sure they simply haven't found a tasty new use for Henrietta Lacks's eternally reproducing cells? Goldfish indeed!
I have been eating miscellaneous pieces of flesh laying around the lab for years now...
Igor - hand me that thing that looks like a chicken wing!
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
IANAV, but I think we're supposed to be more morally and ethically evolved than "animals." Case in point: We are animals, but when we speak about "animals," we don't intend that to include us. What is good enough for animals is not necessarily good enough for us.
Why do we still allow animals to kill each other? Well, once we have a Human society that is entirely vegetarian, then we can think about trying to impose that on animals. In a lot of cases, animals are not omnivores like us, so there's probably a biological barrier. Because we are so mentally evolved, I think we also have to question whether it's ethical to force our morals onto other species. Even if we believe it's wrong to kill other species for food, does that mean we should prevent other species from doing so, beyond defending our own species' lives?
But the biggest problem facing this idea is probably logistics. Try to get a tiger to eat a salad...
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
Mmm... multiFish processing.
Different body parts produce different proteins, the liver for example produces vitamin A (I think IANAB(iologist)). Would this fish meat produce the omega-3 fatty acids that fish contain and is a good brain food?
Or do we need specific parts of the fish to produce different proteins. So instead of taking a few slabs of meat, we chuck a few fish into the blender, add a packet of jell-o to help bind it together a bit and then chuck it in the fat.
While we're at it, why stop at grinding a few fish, we could make it more interesting by throwing in a cow, a pig, a few sheep.
We could even take it to the point where we could have a Naoh's ark in a can.
Thats why they're calling themselves strictly KFC rather than Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Its more like Kentucky Fried Lab Tumors.
Maybe it tastes close enough to fool you, but for many people the above is utterly false.
The fact is that if you're not poor, and you don't mind some work, you can now get a good, balanced diet without meat. This is good. It doesn't mean that some of us don't prefer meat though, and it doesn't mean that it's healthy to go vegetarian if you can't or won't spend extra time and money to make sure that your diet has enough of the right proteins.
Absolutely false. Ethical? Moral? Wtf are you talking about? Health - it's healthy to eat less meat than most americans do. That doesn't mean that no one should ever eat meat. Huge jump. Practical? It's quite practical, it provides not only a lot of protein (we don't really need a lot after all) in a small package, it's also a good mix of proteins - something often difficult to assemble from plant sources. It's not difficult to get, and most of us like the taste, at least if it's cooked right.
If you don't like it, that's just fine, but enough with the silly overdramatic oversimplified juvenile nonsense about how everyone who doesn't agree with your taste in food is unhealthy and immoral.
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