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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."
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?
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.
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
Dunno, but I read a story once about a single fish and a loaf of bread expanding to feed a whole community...wait, that was the Bible.
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!
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.
Forwarded mail follows:
From: bigwhopper@yahoo.com
Subject: Increase your penis size by %16 in one week!!
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"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!!!
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?
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
It's a SF cliché; any number of stories refer to vat-grown meat blobs. Asimov, Heinlein, Bova, Niven, Pournelle, lots of folks have this in stories from the 1950's on, maybe before.
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.
Yes. I think the Title was The Merchant's War by Fredrick Pohl.
An advertising executive gets kidnapped and shanghi'd into working at a factory in a third world country where they tend to a great mass of chicken muscle, which is fed by a lot of pipes.
One of my favorites - it identifies what would happen in a world where advertisers were let run rampant.
Mythological Beast
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
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.
Though NASA's probably one of few orginizations I'd expect to actually enlarge my penis 16%
Maybe then they could fund ISS! =]
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
I believe that the Space Merchants was the sequel to The Merchant's War. That's the one where the advertising executive gets addicted to Moke cola and winds up stopping the fleet of ships attempting to addict Venus to various products. He spends a bit of time in a rehab camp, but it's the previous book where they first send people to Venus.
Mythological Beast
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
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.
Carp, actually, goldfish is a kind of carp.
I suppose now would be a good time to point out, however, that the only difference between carp and crap is a vowel movement.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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!
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
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.
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....
Then there's the really frikkin annoying "fact" taught by a local community college (I thought the guy telling me had taken bad notes, but it was in the professor's handouts) that "all deli meats are pureed into a thin fluid and packed into cubes", and are thus unhealthy (this is from a heath class. While many classic deli meats *are* prepared that way (dating back hundreds of years, so what's so sinister about it), I held out a piece of niceley grained and threaded roast beef and said "how do they get that texture back into the meat, then?". The guy refused to believe me, insisting that "the professor told him so". (FWIW, I went to a US college, and they aren't all that bad - but the so called "community colleges" seem to be of a rather lower quality)
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
"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.
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........
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.
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
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.
It's not SF, but I heard that the Carib Indians (the first settlers of the Caribbean islands) were cannibals. Since they didn't have refrigeration, and meat tends to spoil quickly in that climate, they would tie up their victims, and hack off non-vital pieces as needed, thus keeping their food source alive as long as possible.
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
Cutting off a pig leg kills the pig leg.
Pig legs are animal byproducts.
He clearly states we will not eat animal byproducts that are killed.
"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 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?
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".
Considering that tofu is nutritionally inadequate (there are essential proteins that you just can't get from vegetable sources), it's probably "six of one, half-a-dozen of the other." (This also assumes that the test-tube fish is nutritionally equivalent to one that was raised in the normal manner.)
I don't think the nutrient solution they're using would be particularly harmful as long as you're not getting it from Europe (that's where all the BSE problems have popped up). This process doesn't sound all that appetizing, but neither does the idea of processing excrement (among other things) to get the water out for other uses (which I think is something they're already doing).
It seems strange that they used goldfish, though...why not a fish that's more commonly used for food? (Yes, I know there are some people who are into swallowing whole live goldfish, for sport, entertainment, or whatever...these people are commonly known as "freaks." :-) )
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
MMMMMMMmmmm. Animal protein grown in bovine amniotic fluid! Just like mom used to make!
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
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...
Who would want to eat GOLDFISH?
OH NO! MR. FLIPPER! Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...
etc.
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
does unused cultured muscle taste better or worse than muscle that has been used by the animal in question?
Maybe for the same reason we feed the grass to the cows instead of eating it directly ourselves... (Assuming a cow that gets fed grass these days, as opposed to soybeans, fish, and bits of other dead cow. :-P )
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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