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Large Scale Production of Artificial Meat
Fraser Cain writes "Scientists at the University of Maryland think that large quantities of artificial meat could be produced to supply the world with animal-free meat products, like chickenless nuggets. This is based on experiments for NASA, that created small amounts of fish protein cultured from single cells. According to the researchers, larger quantities could be grown in thin sheets and then stacked up to create thickness. Of course, they need to figure out a way to exercise it to make it taste like regular meat."
I already get those at McDonalds today - who needs these acedemics to come up with this when you can just go out and buy it in the store?
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
I can't wait to head down to the local supermarket and buy some "I Can't Believe It's Not Steak".
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I wonder how they can get it to taste like different animal meats. I believe most flavor comes from the fat intertwined in the meat, not the meat itself. Meaning 100% lean ground beef would taste the same as 100% lean ground pork.
"Well..here I am..." - Jubal Early
The true test, will be if the stuff tastes good.
I know that eating fake meat will be better for the world, but people won't bite (Pun Intended) if it doesn't taste comperable to real meat.
Pretty Pictures!
Artificial meat isn't too important yet. If there was a shortage of real meat it might be important. I doubt this will be widely adopted by vegetarians or other fetish groups that don't eat meat because it still resemble's meat and is made from fish proteins.
Outback announces a new addition to their menu, the semisteak. Half the price of normal steak, 0% fat, only comes well done.
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virtual veal
Our Burgers are Made from fresh vat grown Wendy Meat. You won't get a better Wendy Meat burger any where else!
Logic, macros, and more
Honestly people, it's barbaric to eat animals.
But I'm still stuck doing it.
I tried going vegetarian for a year once but it was boring to eat meals, and it ended up costing a lot more. At least that's what I found.
I'm going to try again in a few years when I have more money and more time to learn new vegetarian recipes.
And if you ever wanted a reason to quit: http://www.peta.org/
I doubt this will ever be as cheap as raising real animals. You need all sorts of scientific measures to ensure that the sample isn't tainted, that it is in the proper conditions to grow, and I'm guessing very expensive equipment to grow it in quantity.
On an ideological note, do any vegitarians have any feelings on this? It's not completely artificial, because its made from cells of living animals. Is it far enough away to be ok though?
And lastly, I bet 'chicken' nuggets have been made without meat for a long time now. Just like our hot dogs.
lol: You see no door there!
Can I have some Coffiest with my Chicken Little?
My UID is the product of 2 primes.
Virtual veal!
It's not real!
Taste'll give you zeal!
Has a good feel!
It can be steak!
But yet it's fake!
It's quick to bake!
No animals at stake!
Virtual veal!
It's a good deal!
Has lots of appeal!
Make it your meal!
Honestly people, it's barbaric to eat animals.
Eating meat is natural for people, and a number of other animals as well. There is nothing barbaric about eating the foods that your body is meant to. Now if you were saying the modern treatment of livestock is often barbaric, I'd be inclined to agree, but these are two different matters entirely.
pour me up a bowl of slig chowder!
Why do those who are trying so hard to eliminate animal meat try so hard to make the replacements look, feel, and taste like meat? I've never understood that.
I'm not sure about the economics, but one would think eventually it would be cheaper to grow meat in a vat than raise a few million animals, pay for their feed, clean their waste, and then spend the time and money shipping them off to the slaughter house.
At least it would take less energy and be more environmental friendly or don't stink up the local area...
Ever drove by a pig farm? They have a ton by the coast in North Carolina and they don't call em pigs for nothing.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Personaly i have been looking for the zero fat, zero calories, zero carb, zero everything that can be used to fill my belly and stop hunger pangs, but not put any more meat on my fat ass.
... to be the seed plasm for delicious roast haunch of human.
That way, millions of people across the earth could finally eat my butt for real, instead of my just screaming for them to do it from street corners.
OK, so if the whole point of a vegan or vegetarian's lifestyle is to preserve life, ponder this. Over 100,000 animals are killed every time 1 acre of land is plowed to plant those precious soybeans. And I'm not counting insects here, just mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Mice, gophers, groundhogs, snakes, frogs, salamanders, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
What makes a cow's life more important than the life of a frog, or a snake, or a little mouse?
If saving life was the most important aspect of your culinary habits, then you would be eating blue whales and elephants, as one death would feed so many people.
Yes, there is way more than a hint of sarcasm in my reply here, but I"m sick of hearing the rhetoric of vegetarians and vegans who claim that I am in some way inferior to them because I eat meat. Now, I'm far from the average. I raise, slaughter and butcher my own meat as much as I can on 5 acres. That way I know it lived an above average life, and was in optimum health at the time it died.
Lastly, for anyone who wants to cut out all meat from their diet, please, please research B vitamins from a non-vegetarian source. B12 is something that can not be replicated by plants, and the various 'vegan' forms of B12 out there are incapable of being absorbed by the human digestive system. Side effects of B12 deficiency are: mental illness, paralysis, continual chronic pain syndromes, and virtually every other nervous disorder in the book.
I've had friends go vegan, and can personally attest to the fact that it changes them mentally, they are plagued with depression, and physical disorders. One fried in particular keeps breaking ribs from caughing, because her bone mass dropped so quickly from malnutrition. And yet, she became so preachy about how superiour her lifestyle was.
I've always said that the one universal application for cloning research is the development of vat-grown meat.
Cruelty free, vegan-friendly. It could be engineered for the perfect protein, fat and mineral content while maintaining perfect flavor.
Imagine a sea of perfectly marbled, gristle-free beef filets.... droooool....
:::: the insomniac's digest
If it's cheap, nutritious, and almost tasty expect to see it in public schools.
If it's cheap, nutritious, and gross, expect to see it in prisons.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
100,000 non-insect animals in 1 acre? Maybe in cases where dense rainforest is being destroyed. I'm very skeptical of this claim and I'd like to see you back it up with some evidence. If anything, this is a larger indictment of the agri-business superfarms.
B12 deficiency only occurs in vegan diets. Vegetarians get more than enough Vitamin B12 through dairy and eggs. I agree though, anyone making dramatic changes to their diet should be well informed before doing so.
I congratulate you on caring for your livestock, but I ask: why kill them? You could just as easily use their eggs and milk, and probably have plenty of space and time left for a large garden. If you can live well on that sustenance, what reason remains to justify their death?
It's perfectly natural to go out and crap in my front yard. My body has no problem at all laying a big steaming turd on that nice green grass on a hot afternoon.
But I think I'll stick to the toilet. Sometimes justifying acts on the basis of nature clashes with doing the right thing.
What have these people got against beans and tortillas?
> OK, so if the whole point of a vegan or vegetarian's lifestyle is to preserve life, ponder this. Over 100,000 animals are killed every time 1 acre of land is plowed to plant those precious soybeans.
More of which is used to feed animals than humans.
Pathetic. Try again. If you're sick of hearing the rhetoric, try not spreading it around.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
I'm not so sure. McDonalds hamburgers are pretty popular, and they taste like shit.
I grew up in cow country, I was friends with ranchers and ate plenty of beef growing up. McDonalds hamburgers taste nothing like beef...
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What is the energy efficiency of growing this artificial meat? The joules required to produce each 100 calories of the mmeat? Vs. the joules required to produce each 100 calories of natural meat, whichever is the "cheapest" meat to produce?
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make install -not war
What about cloning the stemcells of chicken (or whale, for that matter) that differentiate into muscle? That seems easier, faster, and more reliable. Without putting an animal consciousness into harm's way. Caviar from the endangered beluga sturgeon should be really easy.
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make install -not war
So, how long before some smart-arse comes up with the idea for menless-dildos ?
Getting them erect might be a problem.
Christ, I think I've just grossed myself out.
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I could have sworn McDonald's already had this technology and has been using it for years now.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
I do have one *tiny* question for every veggie, vegan et al - what do you think will happen to all the domestic animals (especially young ones - milk could still be used afterall, but there's no use for a calf if we're not eating veal) if the whole world turned veggie? I'd guesstimate that you'd a) see the extinction of about 80% of the breeds of cow, 90%+ of the varieties of pig, not to mention the ecological impact of western society suddenly losing 2/3rds of it's natural wildlife (farmers, already poor, aren't going to keep animals alive that are losing them money)... Just curious as to how veggies view this... (resists adding disclaimers - there is *NOTHING* worse than an article that to 50% of the population is flamebait ending with some crappy get-out clause. Mod me up, mod me down - but hey, mod me on my questions not my skill at escaping negativity ;))
Programming is an Art. I am an Artist. Does that mean I get to wear a daft hat?
How long have humans been eating real meat? Why stop now? Animals have no compassion for killing other animals to eat so why should we? Some people have to realize a simple term, "Food Chain". We are at the top, everything else at the bottom. Let's use the term to our advantage because I bet the other millions of animals out there just envy us. Why not make artifical meat for Africa or hungry people? It would be a solution to end hunger in the world.
I say we do NOT use fake meat to feed the third worlds population. Heres why:
The idea is to reduce suffering. Right?
If we cannot eliminate it completely overnight, we have to aim for say fewer people dying of starvation. Right?
Now in many poor countries, people are like bacteria cultures. Add food, they'll increase in numbers. Reduce food, they'll starve in big numbers= starvation.
Eventually the population reaches an equiliberium like it is now in Pakistan. People simply cannot afford to have more kids. Food becomes more expensive as the population grows. The amount of food also fluctuates between the years. During the bad years you'll see maximum suffering in an overpopulated country.
The only break out of this is education and economy. People will realize their quality of life increases with fewer children if they have to pay for education rather than put them out to the fields. Empowerment of women also helps enormously, whereby a man will not be able to make puppy mills out of his family to spread his progeny at the cost of the quality of everyones lives. Empowerment of women further increases education and the economy thus the system becomes a positive-feedback system.
But while the country is a 'third world' country with starving and overpopulated people, feeding them further will increase the population to the next point of saturation. Not feeding them now will get them to reach saturation with fewer people starving and suffering than if we feed them to the next point of saturation when fake meat production will not be able to sustain them.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Pohl and Kornbluth 1953
Really strange image of 'Chicken Little', an enormous everliving vat grown chicken tissue that the radical conservationists hold their meetings inside.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
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>> OK, so if the whole point of a vegan or vegetarian's lifestyle is to preserve life, ponder this. Over 100,000 animals are killed every time 1 acre of land is plowed to plant those precious soybeans.
... "A murderer who kills 10 people is no better off than a murderer who kills 20 if the murder is avoidable." ... "Unless you plant, grow and pick your own crops, you're not doing everything you can to 'limit' the suffering."
>More of which is used to feed animals than humans.
>Pathetic. Try again. If you're sick of hearing the rhetoric, try not spreading it around.
So, killing less animals is better than killing more? To quote Maddox, "that's like me saying I'm going to eat meat only 364 out of 365 days of the year in an effort to 'limit' the suffering, I'm doing my part to prevent suffering"
In short, your vegetarianism has absolutely nothing to do with preventing the suffering of animals, rather, it has everything to do with preventing the suffering of your conscience.
(quotes from: http://maddox.xmission.com/grill.html and http://maddox.xmission.com/hatemail.cgi )
Think quality. Think choice.
Suppose that instead of someone else growing steak in a lab for you, and you having to guess whether this mystery meat was truly lab grown or not, that instead you are able to buy a tiny quantity of seed culture for 100 different things (e.g. the 100 finest varieties of steak, or the 100 finest kinds of gourmet coffee beans, the tastiest spice plant leaves, etc...) and suppose you can choose to grow these things yourself in your own grower, process them yourself, etc.
Suddenly, it may be possible to eat much better food than before, and you choose to eat only what you like. Stuff that you would not have been able to afford before you can suddenly have every day. Further, you wouldn't have to drive a car to 50 places to get all of your food.
Now, suppose (since we are already supposing) that a food grower were to go down in price and become affordable. Then, if oil prices keep going up, growing your own food eventually becomes cheaper than transporting it from somewhere else.
Linda McCartney felt Meat Was Murder. She thought that if we had to kill the animal before eating it, we'd be vegitarians. Generally, though, that would only be true if we were not brought up having to kill animals.
So, some vegetarians *do* see meat as evil. These are the ones that the GP was talking about. Apart from Linda, I don't know that the substitute makers are targeting that market, though. Maybe even Linda was just caching in...
Human meat is one of the obvious potentials of this technology. Tastes like pork. Growing it in a a vat solves many of the ethical problems.
The idea of artificial meat is not new.
Robert Heinlein may have invented it. Was it in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? His character built an artifical cow for milk, and beef was a byproduct.
Pohl and Kornbluth also had the concept, in, I think, the Space Merchants, a giant chicken heart.
Yay! I'm a slabber of beef! - beefsteak, http://filthylies.net/
Oh come on, this is absurd.
Do you realize how many more resources -- land and fresh water -- are consumed in producing meat than in producing vegetable crops? Livestock are either fed other livestock or vegetable crops. There is no possible way to use fewer resources to produce a pound of animal protein vs a pound of soy protein.
That ethical reason is what motivates me in limiting my meat intake to fish and chicken and limiting my intake of those as much as I can. The most resources are used in producing red meat, followed by pork, then fish and chicken, but a pure-vegetable diet uses the least.
Ceci n'est pas un post
On the health side it would seem that plant based foods are associated with all sorts of problems : allergies, auto-immune diseases, gut problems, asthma, etc. Carbs are heavily implicated in syndome X (a clutch of symptoms going towards diabetes) and other ills, such as PCOS, thyroid problems, water-retention, abcesses and many many more. And carbs don't come from meat (except a little from liver).
Perhaps reflecting out near-carnivore hunter-gatherer origins (according to anthropologists) its very rare for people to have problems with unprocessed meat. One might point at saturated fat as a cause of heart disease but current research indicates that it is contributory at most, and that the actual cause of heart disease is much more likely to be either sugar, vegetable oils, a type of chlamydia infection and one or two other things. As for meat and cancer : the most authoratitive study (WHO in 2000) found no relation between unprocessed meat and cancer; you can discount the recent nonsense about meat and cancer since that recent study is no where near the WHO study in terms of integrity and reliability, and in anycase the emphasis was on processed meat.
Who ever heard of a meat allergy (other than related to added nitrates)? It exists, AFAIK, but is very very rare, perhaps reflecting that meat is totally natural to us.
The irony is that western nutritionists have everyone believing that muesli is nature's way, when it is anthroplogically the opposite of an original and natural human diet. Sure evolution will have compensated in the last 10,000 years, but it takes time to adapt to a 180 degree change in dietary direction from 2 million years+ of meat; I've read one source claim that we need 20,000 years to see a significant adaption, and we are only half-way through.
Worse still while we may have had 10,000 years adapting to farmer foods, we've only had 100 years to adapt to industrial foods such as margarine, vegetable oils, sugar and other forms of unnatural foods (at the very least unnatural to us, even if technically natural which margarine totally isn't).
So if I take one of my skin cells and grow it in a vat, then I get to eat myself?
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There was an episode of TV Funhouse where Foggey was trying to give up eating his own poop and was seen eating from a tub of "I can't believe it's not poop"
He came back the next day to say "McDonald's is threatening to sue me if I don't take back what I said. OK, McDonald's is NOT on their second horse . . ."
- I'm a meat eater. Tastes good, etc. Let's say, over the course of the year, I eat 52 lbs of meat. I'm only eating certain cuts, so let's say my eating habits contribute to the deaths of, say, 300 animals. Vegetarians eat plants. For some reason, the moral implications of killing and eating plant life is different from killing and eating animal life. Not only that, because plants are normally most nutritious as seeds (embryos) or sprouts (infants), and because you eat a CRAP-TON of them to keep from dying from malnutrition, a vegetarian could easily be responsible for the deaths of literally 100,000's of lives every year. And they eat a lot of them raw. And I'm the creep?
- Plants have been living on the earth for at least a BILLION years longer than animals. Who's to say they don't have some conciousness or "thought" so beyond our puny understanding that we cannot hope to comprehend it. And there vegetarians go, chewing baby plants alive while they scream their silent horror.
- Suppose the vegetarians win all their arguments! Liberate all the cows! Oh frabjous day! You know what happens the first winter? A lot of dead cows happen. That is an engineered organism. It's not designed to live in the wild. It's been bred to die and put its delicious muscular tissue in my digestive system. Mmm.
- Every time I hear about great white sharks are the World's Greatest Predator or spiders are the World's Greatest Predator pound for pound I just chuckle. HUMANS are the World's Greatest Predator without a damn doubt. Yeah, sure, naked and so on we're wimpy. But how often are going around naked out there? We wear armor and carry howitzers. Just because we evolved the ability to make dirt and oil into howitzers instead of extra rows of teeth doesn't mean we don't kick great white shark ass. We are the top of pretty much every food chain (basically, excepting those at the bottom of the ocean and the ones we don't feel like eating--insect food chains, mostly). I feel humanity's ability to change the shape of cows to make them meatier and more docile coupled with our ability to make long sharp knives and casting pens lets us flex our predatory nature a little. Why do vegetarians have such a problem with our utter dominance?
I realize not all vegetarians have irrational beliefs about this sort of thing. I also realize not all of them are the kind of folks that try to impose their moral decisions on me. But those of you that do? You're ranking only slightly higher than the Mormon boys that try to convert my family every other weekend.blarg.
Nope.
People who go vegan should really consult a doctor, as it's almost impossible to get all the vital micronutrients they need without taking supplements. Of course, most of the same people who are vegans are also opposed to supplements and the like, so you end up in a bit of a pickle.
;-)
BTW, why do you think providing meat animals with a good life is important? I'm sure it improves flavor, but I'd think it'd be crueler to kill an animal which is enjoying its bucolic existence before you break out the chopper and terminate its promising life early.
Bite my shiny metal ass.
Your rant kind of wanders all over the play without making any real straight foreward point. Can you maybe clear up exactly what you meant to say with this post?
Get a book of food counts and look up all the plant based foods. Most vegetables (plant based foods) have little to no carbs. Grain do have high carb loads, but if we humans didn't strip all the fiber and germ from the grains they would be complex carbs instead of the refined simple carbs. Complex carbs have a slower release cycle and provide a longer lower more steady energy then the dangerous spiking you get from simple carbs.
I am not saying not to eat meat. But advocating no plant based foods is stupid and really cuts down on variety/flavor. I doubt you or anyone could live on pure meat alone with no plat based anything, or be able to eat anywhere with that kind of dietary restriction. I say that not because I think you would die, just that it would gt awful boring and tasteless.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
"Lastly, for anyone who wants to cut out all meat from their diet, please, please research B vitamins from a non-vegetarian source. B12 is something that can not be replicated by plants, and the various 'vegan' forms of B12 out there are incapable of being absorbed by the human digestive system. Side effects of B12 deficiency are: mental illness, paralysis, continual chronic pain syndromes, and virtually every other nervous disorder in the book."
I'm sorry but you are so full of shit in this.
I know hundreds of people who suffer no more or less health issues then meat eaters (some do suffer less because they avoid a lot of excess fats and cholesterol).
Here is some truth about B12 and vegetarianism.
"The requirement for vitamin B12 is very low. Non-animal sources include Red Star nutritional yeast T6635 also known as Vegetarian Support Formula (around 2 teaspoons supplies the adult RDA). It is especially important for pregnant and lactating women, infants, and children to have reliable sources of vitamin B12 in their diets. Numerous foods are fortified with B12, but sometimes companies change what they do. So always read labels carefully or write the companies.
Tempeh, miso, and seaweed are often labeled as having large amounts of vitamin B12. However, these products are not reliable sources of the vitamin because the amount of vitamin B12 present depends on the type of processing the food undergoes. Other sources of vitamin B12 are fortified soy milk (check the label as this is rarely available in the U.S.), vitamin B12-fortified meat analogues, and vitamin B12 supplements. There are supplements which do not contain animal products. Vegetarians who are not vegan can also obtain vitamin B12 from dairy products and eggs."
Note that hard core vegans who don't eat dairy (and obviously don't eat eggs or fish) have a much greater need to supplement diet. Just cutting meat, but leaving dairy (a lot of vegetarians are this type) will provide you with sufficient B12.
A fact you are also missing is that B12 problems would arise in any anime that was never exposed to the bacteria that make it. Thats right B12 only exists in both plants or animals due to a bacteria. How do the animals get exposed to the bacteria? By eating plants. Then we eat them and the bacteria. So if the plant based B12 is incompatible with our systems, how do we get it from meat, dairy, and eggs?
Before you spout off more about B12 deficiencies maybe you should read up how long it takes to develop it and it's symptoms as well as what can be done about it, because you above post is sadly lacking any indication of understanding.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
I forgot to add these gems from the national institute of health:
"The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences did not establish a Tolerable Upper Intake Level for this vitamin because Vitamin B12 has a very low potential for toxicity. The Institute of Medicine states that "no adverse effects have been associated with excess vitamin B12 intake from food and supplements in healthy individuals". In fact, the Institute recommends that adults over 50 years of age get most of their vitamin B12 from vitamin supplements or fortified food because of the high incidence of impaired absorption of B12 from animal foods in this age group.
Gastric acid helps release vitamin B12 from the protein in food. This must occur before B12 binds with intrinsic factor and is absorbed in your intestines. Atrophic gastritis, which is an inflammation of the stomach, decreases gastric secretion. Less gastric acid decreases the amount of B12 separated from proteins in foods and can result in poor absorption of vitamin B12. Decreased gastric secretion also results in overgrowth of normal bacterial flora in the small intestines. The bacteria may take up vitamin B12 for their own use, further contributing to a vitamin B12 deficiency.
Up to 30 percent of adults 50 years and older may have atrophic gastritis, an overgrowth of intestinal flora, and be unable to normally absorb vitamin B12 in food. They are, however, able to absorb the synthetic B12 added to fortified foods and dietary supplements. Vitamin supplements and fortified foods may be the best sources of vitamin B12 for adults over the age of 50.
When adults adopt a strict vegetarian diet, deficiency symptoms can be slow to appear. It may take years to deplete normal body stores of B12."
Strict means no fish, eggs, dairy, meat. Even avoiding all of that all a person (meat eater or not) has to do is eat a bowl of 100% fortified cereal each day. Or 4 cups yogurt, or 6 oz salmon (assuming farm raised). If you are avoiding all animal products eat that cereal with soy milk or whatever you want that fits with your diet.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
"We wear armor and carry howitzers."
You are either the Hulk or Henry Pym.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
There is an explosion due to terrorists at the Real Meat(TM) factory and your team is sent in to investigate.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
Rant? You're kidding, right?
If you read the post to which I replied perhaps you'll see why I wasn't trying to make a point; rather I adding to the parent post's point.
As for only eating meat, I don't believe I was suggesting that. Perhaps you are having a bad day. My commiserations....