Slashdot Mirror
Space Meat Coming to your Kitchen
jdray writes "Australia's GizMag is running an article about the industrialization of a NASA-tested concept for artificially creating meat. The article mentions meat makers as home appliances. Carne-Matic aside, this sounds like a mixed blessing, and brings about visions of some sterile, Spandex-jumpsuit future where food production is controlled by some central authority, and real, hoof-grown meat is a rare delicacy. Remember, Soylent Green is people!" You can read a curiously familiar Slashdot story from a month ago too.
Jeez, lighten up. There are plenty of technologically-induced distopias to worry about. This one ranks near the bottom of the list. First of all, food is pretty much already controlled by a central authority (ADM anyone?). Besides, have you ever been inside an abattoir, or within 5 miles of an industrial hog farm? The idea of eating meat without killing cows (and mad cow disease!) seems pretty good to me.
If you absolutely must freak about technology, worry about what happens when your health insurance company can do genetic screening on you. The go watch GATTACA.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
"Too many restaurants refuse to cook meat anything under "medium""
Any place will cook your steak rare. It's safe to eat rare steaks because there isn't any bacteria inside the meat. It's on the outside, and that gets cooked.
Ground beef isn't safe to eat rare because bacteria is all over it and must be cooked off.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
There are substantial environment benefits to making meat and other foods in the lab. Farming causes more environment distruction then any other industry. While some industries pollute the land, the damage can be reduced with better technology.
Farming converts vast tracts onto a monoculture completely replacing the natural environment. North America used to have vast amounts of grasslands and millions of Bison. Now the whole area is covered with farms and people are only dimly aware that there was ever anything else there before.
Most species are made extinct by habitat distruction and most habitat distruction is mostly caused by farming.
I thought that was your sig.
First, fresh meat is unlikely to contain food-bourne illnesses if handled properly; after all the animal was alive and not dying of salmonilla not too long ago.
Not true. You can count on pork to contain trichinella. Also, you can count on the outside of chicken to be contaminated with salmonella, and E. coli will surely be found on the outside of steak and on the inside of ground beef. This is a fact of life now because of the methods used by meatpackers. If you buy your meat from anyone but a skilled independent butcher (a vanishing trade), not from your grocery store or not slaughtered or processed in a meatpacking plant, your meat will be dangerous to you uncooked.
Second, most food-bourne illnesses that you get from raw food are non-lethal unless you are unhealthy for other reasons.
Non-lethal cramping, diarrhea, are vomiting are fine with me! Where do I sign up?
It's safe to eat rare steaks because there isn't any bacteria inside the meat. It's on the outside, and that gets cooked.
Sorry but this just isn't true.
Meat can surely contain bacteria or the likes. Especially wild animals are likely to be infected or be inhabitet by parasites. Though, i guess that most of the meat being sold is probably more likely to be harmless.
Just out of curiosity, do you manage to avoid jello, make-up of any kind (for you or your spouse), shoes, fabrics, etc.?
I guess I can understand "doing the best you can," but it sometimes seems as though one can't be completely unhypocritically vegan and still live in the world.
I was vegan for three years. It's not at all hard to avoid animal products anymore.
Pangea has replacements for just about every kind of food, including Jello.
There are many makeup companies that make products without animal ingredients or testing. Not all of them are little speciality brands either - MAC is acceptable to vegans, and they're in every halfway-decent department store.
Vegetarian Shoes has all-vegan footwear, and if you like buckles and tall boots like me, Pennangalan Dreams can get most of their styles in synthetic material.
The only fabrics I'm aware of that are animal-based are wool and silk. I have a suit from Pangea made from synthetics that looks better and is more comfortable than anything I've worn made of wool.
I gave it up in the end because I wasn't getting something I needed in my diet, but I still avoid unnecessary animal products.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman