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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.
of the summary? If it tastes the same, i would have zero problems with artificial meat.
I dont actually enjoy having animals slaughtered just for fun.
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In the future, I see no more grissle or stringy bits of fat etc. Cheapest meat will taste like the best eye fillet you can buy, and nothing had to die.
That's what we have now
While this could help with hunger in third-world countries, I would imagine most other people would reject it as "Franklin' Nuggets". It'll be interesting to see PETA's stance, since those type of people tend to also be against artificially created food (and even genetic engineering).
Well, I see two ways of this going
1) Meat quality increasing and price decreasing (since anyone can "grow" their own) thereby leading to more healthy eating which would be the utopian way
OR
2) The demand for meat overtaking the quantity that can realistically be produced and thereby allowing a few people to grow/sell meat for a huge profit, thereby increasing the cost.
What this all hinges on of course is if they make this technology available to the everyday person in their home.
Where exactly did you get the idea that the meat you were eating now was somehow natural?
I approve of this, as the meats' being synthetic may remove certain taboos currently in the way of good eatins. I'll be first in line at my area's new Manburger stand.
SPACE MEAT!
Well, it all started in 1962... Utilizing advances in modern food synthesis, scientists at NASA began work on a germ hostile space meat to be used into long expeditions in deep space! Only recently has their hard work paid off. As even more advances in the field of space meat have been made and applied to what is now known as operation meat. Seeing this as a way to end their streak of being sued by angry costumers poisoned by their burgers, the Mac Meaties corporation decided to try this miraculous space meat. Not having access to that technology, we make ours out of napkins.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Great insight. As an unreconstructed carnivore, I've got some ignorant comments to make :)
While the attitude you describe may hold true for pre-existing vegan and vegetarian folk, I wonder if we would see a sharp decline in the ranks of 'new converts'. Pure speculation of course, but if the ethical difficulty becomes basically theoretical rather than actual, I doubt that many people would feel compelled to change their eating habits.
I don't see what the problem is. If the meat tastes like meat and has roughly the same protein and calorie content but costs much less then this can only be a good thing, right?
Because it won't taste like meat. It'll taste "something like meat, but not quite as good". Like soya-based 'meat' products. It'll taste just a little more mediocre, more bland, and more 'homogenised' than the real thing. You may not care, but many people already think modern packaged foods (and society in general) has become too bland, mediocre and homogenous, and this is just another step towards the ultimate bland, generic society. (Maybe. Maybe not. Probably.) Of course, the first generation to grow up on the stuff will just think that's normal.
I just don't understand how being able to synthesize food in every home in America means there would suddenly be a shortage of non-synthesized food
Because industrial agriculture requires economies of scale to work effectively. If the majority of people mostly eat synthesized food, modern large-scale agriculture will collapse. (Of course, it's debatable as to whether or not this is good or bad in itself, because industrial agriculture is not sustainable anyway.)
You mean kind of like how vegetables?
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Why do you find it unappealing?
Is it as unappealing as the idea of a few cells encased in dirt, bacteria and poo, multiplying, replecating, literally just sitting there as it grows?
Just sounds to me as though we are now growing meat, as we would a vegetable.
Why exactly is this terrifying?
Environmental reconstruction is not the biggest problem with farming.. it's the pollution from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO's), which are virtually unregulated and dump all the feces from hundreds of thousands of animals into lagoons 30 feet deep and 3 square football fields in area... I believe Al Franken summarizes it well in his chapter "vast lagoons of pig feces".
Of course.. we need to keep a substantial number of livestock animals alive in case of problems later on concrerning this meat synthesis..
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I'm sure the market will grow slowly initially, but people had objections to microwaved food and irradiated spices originally too.
The tipping point will likely be when this can be made reasonably cheaper than "real" meat, combined with campaigns aiming for the "veggie sympathisers" that will figure that they can now take the step away from dead animals without giving up meat. Ensure it's grown very lean, so you can market it as a healthier alternative as well.
If it gets cheap enough it's bound to be a success eventually.
If i were to eat meat, i'd prefer it to be free-range. It can only be healthier.
Why do you make that assumption? You have no idea what a 'free-range' cow is eating, or what diseases it had. If anything I would say it could only be less helthy. You have the knid of mentality that drives the demand for 'organic' products, even while in many cases it's impossible to know what 'organic' means; worse, even when we do know what 'organic' means we have no good idea of what is in any particular batch of 'natural' fertilizers or feeds and have little understanding of how the complex chemical mixtures in such things interact with our body when compared to the chemically simple 'artificial' fertilizers.
Whenever I heaar people talk about this stuff I always remember a section from Neal Stephenson's book 'Zodiac.' The (environmentalist/chemist) main character's drug of choice is nitrous inhaled out of a plastic garbage bag. His reasoning is that he doesn't want to put drugs in his body that he can't draw a molecular model of. (It's been a few years since I read it - It's explained much better in the book). Anyway, it seems like a good philosophy to me. A lot of things that are 'organic' scare the crap out of me.
There are substantial environment benefits to making meat and other foods in the lab.
You're just swapping one set of problems for another. If you are growing food in the lab, you now have to deal with contamination, you have to use aseptic procedures, disposable equipment, chemical sterlization agents etc. Unless what you really want to sell is a huge E. Coli or S. aureus or fungal colony...but anyone can do THAT...who wants to eat it tho? Ewww.
The mere fact that humans exist contaminates the environment, no matter what we do. Our bodies are highly organized at the expense of our environment. It's the law of entropy, really - the creation of order has to be balanced somewhere in a universe whose nature tends to disorder over time.
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ship mass quantities of synthetic meat to the 3rd-world countries (thus solving part of world hunger and getting them to shut up
Ship it to the 3rd world and it will end up rotting in a warehouse while the people starve. The problem with the 3rd world is not a lack of being able to produce, it's a political one. The government's job in those countries is pretty much to rob the population blind, not help develop the country's infrastructure. I should know, I've lived there for 20 years.
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In that case, then this product originated from an animal from a technical sense.
As a vegetarian, I've thought of this same scenario. For me, being a vegetarian stems from the ethical stance of not wanting to introduce unnecesary harm into the world through the killing of animals. Since, theoretically, one animal's death could result in the perputual production of meat without pain or harm down the line, I'm still a little torn about whether or not I'd actually eat this stuff.
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Well, there are vegetarians and there are vegetarians. Some eat meat because they don't want to condone (perceived) cruelty towards animals; others don't eat it because they think it's unhealthy (or at least less healthy than other food), or for religious reasons, or simply because they don't like the taste.
Whether any given vegetarian will or will not eat this stuff (or even consider doing so) very much depends on why exactly they became a vegetarian in the first place.
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Not true. Mankind has been selectively breeding cattle for thousands of years. In that time we have literally bred them to be tasty. I remember seeing a while back a bit on CNN about cattler farmers using Ultrasound to measure the fat content and muscle mass of steer so they can tell who to stud before having to breed them, raise the offspring, then slaughter the offspring to get the information.
You also suffer from the falicy that any biomass is intended to be food. With the exception of milk and fruit, everything we eat was a creature or plant that had other ideas.
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--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I'd be interested in hearing what ethical vegetarians think about eating cruelty-free meat.
Your labels need refining. There are "ethical vegetarians" who don't eat meat because they are concerned about the unethical treatment of the animals. Most of these people have no problem eating meat raised on a traditional farm and slaughtered humanely or wild game killed in an ethical fashion. I don't see why they would have any problem eating this type of meat.
There are people who have an ethical problem with the killing of animals that trust them, or the killing of animals who trust their slaughterers on their behalf. These people are usually willing to eat wild game, or animals raised in a way in which the animals are not taught to trust the farmers. I imagine they would have no problem eating this meat.
There are people who have an ethical problem with the killing of higher life forms as defined at some arbitrary point. (For example some will eat fish, but no mammals.) These people most likely would not have a problem with this type of meat, although depending upon its origins some might.
There are some people who object to the killing of any living animal. Some or those people will likely not have a problem with this meat and some will (since it does originate from an animal) but most will probably be fine with it.
Finally there are people who believe meat is evil. These people will likely refuse to eat this meat.
On a slightly different note, I read a study last week that said 1 in 5 high schoolers thought beef came from pigs. I don't imagine this will do anything to alleviate this educational problem.
ethical vegetarians don't eat meat because of the horrible animal suffering that's involved. i think a lot of them might give it a try if the cruelty (hell, sentience even) were taken out of the equation.
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The nice thing about lab meat is you can have such a wide variety of styles and flavors built in from the factory floor. You can have beer massaged Kobe beef at a fraction of the price. You can have built in italian, bbq, greek, etc. seasoning. All this and more for a fraction of the cost.
Hell, I eat meat and I still prefer good veggie burgers to meat ones due to the lack of flavor in the vast majority of meat burgers and the amount of time it takes to make one. I can spend 20 minutes making the perfect Mexican-flavor-esqe burger or I can microwave an equally tasty Morning Star Fajita Burger in 1 minute.
YMMV,
-l
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with Jdray. "Sterile", or humane? And home appliances would of course be much less centralized than the current system. But more importantly, artificial meat could be one key to a sustainable future.
A lot of people have moral qualms about killing animals for food, and their numbers are growing. I think this growth may, ironically, be correlated with increasing urbanization: as fewer people are involved in the process of raising -- and butchering -- farm animals, there's less desensitization to it. Urbanites experience animals most often as pets, rather than as servants or foodstock. Of course, most of these people still eat meat -- but even that is a less visceral experience than it used to be, with undifferentiated meat prodcuts like hamburger and chicken "nuggets" making up a large portion of what's consumed. So, although it's become easier for the average person to avoid confronting the realities of the slaughterhouse, it makes more of an impact when they finally do.
I think these changes are all to the good. I'm not (yet) a vegetarian myself, but I gotta admit, I'm sympathetic. And if artificial meat makes the switch easier, I think that's wonderful.
There's an even deeper problem with (natural) meat, though -- one which I even believe could, in combination with the spread of vegetarianism, lead to its complete abandonment within the next century. The problem is the cost. Not simply the monetary cost, which is an imperfect reflection of the true cost; but the fact that meat is incredibly inefficient. You can feed grain to cattle, and then feed the cattle to people; or you can feed grain directly to people. Skipping the cattle step lets you feed several times as many people. The price of meat already reflects this, to some extent, and it's only going to go up. But one of the largely uncounted costs is deforestation, as more and more land is cleared to create grazing grounds for larger and larger herds. This is a major factor in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, with very far-reaching consequences. We haven't paid much of that cost, yet -- but one way or another, we will. The sooner we can replace those herds with artificial meat, the less the blow will be.
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Splenda comes damn close and this is coming from a former pastry chef. I just wish you could bake a creme brulee with it.
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If nutrients only go to grow muscle cell the efficiency can go from 10 to 20 parts of food to 1 part of meat to only 2 or 5.
That is a very large saving of resources, it might be something to consider in the future.
They could just take a tissue sample by a biopsy. Then the "donor pork chop" wouldn't actually have to die.
Or would that still be too much harm?
Putting moderation advice in your
If you really wanted to not kill animals, you wouldn't live in a house, or even eat for that mater, since that all kills animals. It is possible to live a lifestyle where the number of animals are killed for your lifestyle are reduced, but physically impossible to live in a 0-kill world.
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It'd require some deep thought, but initially I'd say that yes, it is possible that I'd consume products that were derived from an animal, so long as it was humane, sterile, and non-harmful to the animal.
;-)
I hear many ethical vegans say this, but it has always piqued my curiosity: why not choose to eat free-range, locally-raised, certified organic animal products? For example, I buy my milk from the local co-op, which acquires it from a local free-range organic farm: the cows are milked because they have given birth to calves which will be raised for breeding stock (males) or replacement producers (female). When their cows are unable to safely produce offspring, they are sold for the beef.
Would something like that cause you trouble?
I ask because I share many of the concerns that vegans express about the production of things like milk, eggs, and beef -- but my answer is to vote with my wallet and buy from producers that practice responsible and sustainable farming. As a bonus, the food usually tastes better, too, because there is a greater focus on quality as opposed to quantity.
you do eventually see things like a plain glass of milk or a block of cheese as pretty gross..which, if you think about it, they really are
You must be easily grossed out. I made cheese for a living, and still love the product (tasty). Though, I learned two things: Velveeta is not cheese, it is a cheese food product and thoroughly disgusting; and soaking cheese in italian dressings is not only bad marketing, but creates a horrific smell when it goes bad.
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One thing I've come to realize is that if you think about it, every single thing we eat is "pretty gross".
.... and that's not even to mention what may be in the soil itself that surrounds them. Then, if you didn't just pick them yourself and fix them immediately, they've been handled by who knows who, and spent quite a while sitting in less than "clean" environments before they reach you, the consumer.
Those naturally grown veggies have had all manner of bugs crawling all over them, not to mention being rained on by water containing who knows what pollutants
And that's about the *least gross* scenario I can think of for food. No point even getting into the whole thing of rat hairs and worm parts found in your canned food goods..... or the amount of chemical preservatives holding together everything from our bakery goods to desserts.
Ultimately, everything about food is a "point of view" issue. One man's "disgusting ants" he'd *never eat* are another person's delicacy when covered in chocolate syrup.
So with that in mind, I personally would be rather "put off" by the idea of eating synthetic meat. I just don't like the mental image of eating something that's not really what it purports to be. But I'm also sure I'd eventually get used to it, if it became popular enough and tasted just like the "real thing". Certainly, it would become a non-issue within one more generation, as kids grow up eating it.
Whether you believe it or not, you are being poisoned. It may or may not be intentional, and I don't care if it is or isn't. But the fact of the matter is that the food production chain in most western nations is destroying the health of the consumers. There are a high number of chemicals that have found their way into the food supply due to their inexpensive provision of preservative, aesthetic and texture properties. Many of these chemicals may be the underlying cause of various chronic illnesses that are becoming epidemics in the western world. But we will never know because to compound the problem we are also being overmedicated.
One of the worst ingredients that has found it's way into too much of the food supply is white processed sugar. One can of soft drink can contain up to 14 tablespoons of sugar in it. Sugar also has some light preservative qualities and tends to make everything taste better. In small quantities, sugar is mildly harmful. But at the rate that we ingest sugar, it is downright dangerous. Don't believe me? Next time you are at the grocery, pick up most prepared foods and look at the ingredients. You'll find that sugar or high fructose corn syrup is in nearly everything. It's a bit frightening especially since I had a personal health issue that no doctor could solve until I cut food with sugar out of my diet. Compounded with the medications that doctors tried to give me to cure my sinus infections, I continued to get more and more ill rather than get better. But once I stopped taking the antibiotics and the prevacid and dumped white sugar, white rice, white flour, corn syrup and honey ouf of my diet, my various illnesses went away. It's been about three years now and my health is better than ever.
So now I read this story about "space meat" and it makes me cringe. I can only imagine what kinds of horrible effects this artificial food stuff is going to have on some people. (remember even if one person gets sick because of a chemical reaction it's one person too many) I have this feeling that if this becomes standard "food" for anyone they will need a whole slew of drugs to combat various ill effects caused by this new toxin. I don't call that living, I call it chemical bondage. Why can't we just start to work on improving organic farming???
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As a vegetarian (not vegan - sorry, friend vegans, but I think you're nuts to give up everything that you do :) ), I have to say that I find my reactions to this mixed.
On one hand, I think this would be incredible technology. I became a vegetarian for moral reasons (my partner did for environmental reasons); almost any reason people become a vegetarian for (apart from, possibly, religious reasons), this addresses. Even further, developing this technology will help greatly with developing organ cloning, a potentially world-changing medical technology that is built on the same principles.
So, I think this is an incredible development, and am so happy to hear about it.
On the other hand, I don't think I could eat it. I've been vegetarian long enough that the thought of eating meat just makes me sick. It's no longer simply the moral issue that led me to be vegetarian in the first place.
I guess the closest thing I could compare it to for your average person is: picture a world where eating butchered human flesh is common, and you were raised to eat it just like everyone else. You decide that you simply cannot do it any more; it is morally reprehensible to you. So, you stop eating human flesh. Then, way down the line, someone comes up with "guilt-free" synthetic human flesh.
Could you eat it? Would you eat it?
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Could you eat it? Would you eat it?
Why not?
If it tastes good, and it was grown in a lab to avoid any ethical problems, I don't see why not.
I suspect beef would taste better than human, but I'd give it a try if offered.
yeah i've worked at an applebees, when people ask for a steak "as rare as you can get it", we'd often have them on the ~650 degree grill for 30 to 45 seconds each side. that's pretty damn rare.
burgers however were medium-well at least. it's the law, not a choice. i personally think the burgers aren't all that amazing, cooking them less isn't likely to improve them. bbq sauce and fry seasoning will though.
Probably, but I agree with you.
What I found really humorous was when McD's went from having "dark meat" chicken nuggets to all "white meat" chicken nuggets. At the time of the "dark meat" variety, you could usually count on the "odd shaped" ones to be "dark" (and more tender and flavourful - for a McD nugget, I guess), and the round ones to be "white". Today, all nuggets are "white" - odd-shaped ones and round ones.
Strangely enough, when they did this, the nuggets themselves started tasting like a combo of the "white" nuggets and the former "dark" nuggets, but they were all "white meat". Here is my theory on this:
All the nuggets (past and present) are made from mechanically separated chicken meat in an industrial process (look it up if you are interested in how this kind of meat is made - you may not want to). Personally, what I think they are doing is taking this meat product, and in some FDA-approved process, the factory making the nuggets are bleaching the meat - so that all the meat is "white meat". Notice they never say "breast meat" or "white breast meat" - just "white meat" chicken nuggets.
If I am right, that is just wrong (McD's sucks - as if it could be any other way)...
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People are made out of meat. Are they meant to be eaten?
The pleasure to the cow of yanking on its teat is irrelevant. It is the living conditions that the cows are kept in that is the problem. Concrete lots next to rank manure pits, feed troughs that will have colonies of maggots in the bottom of them by mid June, the use of electric shock to heard the cattle through the loop. These are all things that go on with the milking of cattle.
I want to know why it's ethical to kill plants, but not ethical to kill animals.