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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.
its called SPAM
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
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?
You might say this in jest, but I'd be interested in hearing what ethical vegetarians think about eating cruelty-free meat.
"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.
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.
"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!
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
Where exactly did you get the idea that the meat you were eating now was somehow natural?
"cruelty-free"???
What about the folks who have to eat this stuff?
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?
Soylent Green. It's who's for dinner.
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.
I for one would not eat this. It skeeves me out like you wouldn't believe. Tank-grown, faux-critter isn't on the list of things I'm likely to try.
And, for many of us vegetarians, it's a combination of the ethics of meat combined with the fact that meat-heavy diets are held up as unhealthy overall.
I think you'll find that for vegetarians, this stuff is a non-starter -- it's still meat. The fact that it's a lab experiment is even creepier.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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.
You mean kind of like how vegetables?
Mod point free since 2001
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.
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.
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
> As for truly artificial m**t, there wouldn't be any cruelty to animals in the production, but there must have been cruelty to animals in the initial discovery process {i.e. working out what it was supposed to taste like in the first place} which would be enough to put some people off.
What if a human volunteered his inital cells to grow meat in a vat? No cruelty. You can't get more ethical than that, and you would still get to eat Matt.
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."
--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.
> You might say this in jest, but I'd be interested in hearing what ethical vegetarians think about eating cruelty-free meat.
http://angryflower.com/vegeta.gif
---- Take the Space Quiz!
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?
Nobody wants "cruelty free" meat. The cruelty is where all the flavor comes from!