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.
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.
Where exactly did you get the idea that the meat you were eating now was somehow natural?
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 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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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.
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.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
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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.