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.
its called SPAM
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
I'm a vegetarian
sorry 'bout the mess...
For the benefit of my fellow Slashdotters, here is a place to whine about dupe articles. To wit:
0 6/1737228&tid=191&tid=14
l _meat_grown.html) could be produced to supply the world with animal-free meat products, like chickenless nuggets. This is based on experiments for NASA (link: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/03/22/fish .food/index.html), 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."
Large Scale Production of Artificial Meat
Posted by timothy on Wed Jul 06, '05 02:27 PM
from the vat-meat-cometh dept.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/
Fraser Cain writes "Scientists at the University of Maryland think that large quantities of artificial meat (link: http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/artificia
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I guess Giz Mag doesn't mean what I thought it did.
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.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I wonder if this will be one of the first steps toward protein resequencers and eventually food replicators. Star Trek, here I come!
"Looks like meat, tastes like meat, I'll bet there isn't any meat in here. Doubleplusgood!" - 1984
Kiss ass while you bitch so you can get rich but the boss gets richer off you. --Dead Kennedys
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
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.
It's truly sickening to me the lengths that people go these days to ruin their eating experiences. Too many restaurants refuse to cook meat anything under "medium" - hell I'll sign a waiver to eat a burger medium rare! Too many people crinkle their nose unless you cook their meat to shoe leather and someone even asked me if I should be rushed to the hospital because my steak was "too pink".
All the fears in the world about animal borne disease (avian flu, mad cow disease, etc) have spawned even more "illness psychos" who are obsessed with the latest in 99.9% bacteria free soaps, hand lotions, and air filters. We are breeding a population of individuals that are more susceptible to illness than ever before!
Eat that fucking natural meat and cook it rare. When you are making some hamburger, wad up a ball, add some pepper and salt and eat it. I've done it since I was a kid and never had any ill effects.
I am beginning to enjoy food less and less (especially out here in the Midwest where they have no tastebuds) and bullshit like this will only make it worse. Sadly, people will love it... See, no bacteria - especially when I cook it till it's charcoal.
Blah.
...is brought to you by Soylent red and Soylent yellow, high energy vegetable concentrates, and new, delicious, Soylent green. The miracle food of high-energy plankton gathered from the oceans of the world.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
"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."
Yeah, because I know all my home appliances are controlled by the government. I get a Toaster Use Coupon every Tuesday in the mail so I can use the toaster 3 times a week between the hours of 4-6 PM. Thank god for the central authority.
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? Maybe we won't need to raise millions of cows just for meat production and we can change some of the food crop over to something more useful like grains.
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, strictly controlled by the government.
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
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).
Opposed to what, a sterile, buisness-suited present where food production is controlled by large corporations who are more concerned about the bottom line than the welfare of either the customers or the animals used to make the food?
/. that every submitter comment try and pass off a technological innovation as being Orwellian/reckless/sinister with some sort of boneheaded Luddite comment?
Decentralized 'meat' production where there's no suffering involved, the risk of dangerous bacterial contamination from slaughterhouse processing is gone, the consumer has moer direct control over what antibiotics and hormones, if any, go into their meat is such an Orwellian idea.
Since when did it become required in
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?
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?
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.
Unless you grow it yourself, this is already effectively the case, isn't it? If you're not making a deliberate effort to the contrary, the bulk of the food you eat is likely to come from large operations and national chains.
Mind the Gap
If the meat is wholly synthetic, and never came from a living animal, I think that most vegetarians would find it difficult to say no to it.
However, haven spoken to my vegan wife about a similar issue just yesterday (cloned meat), if the fake meat originated from the cell of one real animal, it still goes against the basic constructs of veganism.
It's not all about how the animal is treated, it's just that it is animal flesh.
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori
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.
A Muslim co-worker and I (I'm an Orthodox Jew, for reference) had a brief discussion of whether you could actually eat artificial pork. I'm _reasonably sure_ that under halakha, you could - meat is really defined as something that comes off an animal, and whatever this stuff is, if it doesn't come off an animal, it wouldn't have the halakhic status of meat. He also agreed that Shaaria would _probably_ not have an issue with it, either.
/., methinks.
I think the ideological implications are more interesting (fake bacon is one thing, but this...), but those aren't really of any concern on
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
They've been serving this stuff in school lunch rooms across the nation for decades! Usually covered with cold greasy brown gravy.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Excellent. Maybe now we can use some of those stem cells to create man meat. It wouldn't even be cannabalism because stem cells aren't people. Yummy.
--Kevin
Can I use my Super Bass-O-Matic 76?
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
God, yes. The last thing we need is the world's poor getting hold of a luxury like meat. I'm personally going to blow my brains out when the first malnourished Somalian takes a bite into that sinful essence of Satan.
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!
:\
And I thought Slashdot's unlimited, completely baseless paranoia had reached its pinnacle
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
There are several reasons why i'm vegetarian, and a couple of them have simply to do with how many animals are raised. Vat-meat surely avoids the cruelty of penned-up animals but the idea of meat which literally just sits there as it grows is really unappealing. If i were to eat meat, i'd prefer it to be free-range. It can only be healthier.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
100% of the people I've talked to who have played Russian roulette have never had any ill effects either.
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.
Why exactly is this terrifying?
I thought that was your sig.
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.
Of course they're All Beef Patties. They come from the All Beef company after all.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Most vegans (including myself) aren't against eating animal-derived products simply because they're derived from animals (though as a coping mechanism, 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), but because of how they're derived. Good for instances include milk and eggs; in both cases, when you're mass-producing either product, it's practically inefficient to keep around very many males around, as only a few are necessary for the continuation of product, and extra animals hanging around consume a large amount of resources. I mean, milking a cow isn't intrinsically wrong, though it is weird when you think about it, but continually inseminating in animal in order to continually retrieve a product (or in this case, a raw good..either way, though) from it is pretty messed up from my POV.
Back to those male cows though: you've got a lot of them, but you can't just kill them, that would be resource consuming in and of itself, so what do you do? You sell them off for veal. They, more often than not, have their hooves nailed to the tiny cages they'll spend the rest of their lives in, before being slaughtered for a delicacy. If I chose not to eat meat, but consumed a lot of dairy, I'd be directly funding one of the most inhumane (again, POV) parts of the industry I was personally boycotting. Male egg chicks are at least disposed of quickly, but usually not disposed of, generally just discarded, i.e. in a dumpster or elsewhere.
So yeah, those are my main reasons for not partaking in animal products. 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. This seems, again initally, like a pretty non-invasive procedure, and there will probably always be host animals around, hopefully ones living happy lives.
*Note: I'm not in anyway trying to proselytize here; I'm not telling you what to do, think, eat, or say. The above information is accurate, as far as I'm concerned.
--- What
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.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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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SPAceMeat
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.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Splenda comes damn close and this is coming from a former pastry chef. I just wish you could bake a creme brulee with it.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
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
Sure, if it looks like meat, tastes like meat, and if my body doesn't know the difference, I'll give it a shot.
However, having grown up on a dairy and beef farm, there is nothing more satisfying than a good slab of heated cow flesh.
I'm an omnivore, have always been. I hate plants as well as animals.
There was a militant vegan in my office. Ignoring her leather shoes and so on, she used to scoff me for my lunch. Smirkingly and smarmingly eating a banana like she was -superior- to me. "You know. Cows are superior to Bananas." "Impossible!" "Sure. After I'm done eating -MY- lunch, -I- can wear the peel."
Unlike her, I've -seen- cows in person. I grew up on a farm. I -know- just how mind numbingly stupid cows are. I mean, they're nearly as dumb as your average member of $political_party. I mean, the cow's -ONLY- saving grace, is that they are tasty. (Mind you, I'm not of the faith that considers cows to be sacred.)
I eat steak, chicken, fish, you name it. If its the flesh of a formerly living creature, there's a good chance I'd consider it food. Make it as rare as safe. I want to -taste- the meat. Steak Sauce? Sure, but -only- if I really, really f'ed up the cooking. She? Strictly Vegan, has been most of her life.
I take practically no sick leave from work. If I'm out sick, people are surprised, and wonder about me when I return. Her? She was out sick constantly. Anyone so much as wrote 'Germs' on a post-it, and she had a three day cold.
I'd like to think that -maybe- my diet contributed to a more formidable immune system.
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.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
I haven't seen anyone talk about this yet, but this will open up a much bigger can of worms then most people think. Examples:
* Monkey Meat - People will no longer have the taboo associated with eat Chimm Chimm.
* Cannibals - Someone with phrack one of these units and take a human muscle sample (your own, a friend, a famous person, ect.) so they can indulge in eating human flesh.
* Faked Identities - take someone's DNA, grow it, and use it in an examine.
* Faked Deaths - take your own DNA, grow it, and put it into a house fire.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
bzzt.
He didn't do it for a british telecom ad. It was a Pink Floyd song (actually about relationships) which BT then used as an advert.
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???
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Food of the Gods, by Arthur C. Clark.. Brings Soylent Green to a whole new level.
where food production is controlled by some central authority, and real, hoof-grown meat is a rare delicacy.
Since when is dog meat hoof-grown?
Speaking of space meat, have you read Terry Bisson's excellent short story"They're Made Out of Meat"?
"Remember, today is Soylent Yellow Day!"
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
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)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Nobody wants "cruelty free" meat. The cruelty is where all the flavor comes from!
There are plenty of technologically-induced distopias to worry about.
;-)
Yeah, like the horrid age of computers where people can't spell...