Slashdot Mirror
Bring Home the Biotech Bacon
Wired is reporting that researchers may have found the key to "heart friendly bacon." From the article: "Geneticists have mixed DNA from the roundworm C. elegans and pigs to produce swine with significant amounts of omega-3 fatty acids -- the kind believed to stave off heart disease. Researchers hope they can improve the technique in pork and do the same in chickens and cows. In the process, they also want to better understand human disease."
The non-diseased white meat.
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
Still, the pork has way too much fat to be healthy. You can still get trichonosis or tapeworm from infected meat, like regular pork. It's still not kosher or halal either.
And then in 20 years we will discover that this 'adjusted' meat will cause cancer or 'mad-human disease'
200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
Good for us... Not so good for the pig or the rabbit.
Vincent: Want some bacon?
Jules: No man, I don't eat pork.
Vincent: Are you Jewish?
Jules: Nah, I ain't Jewish, I just don't dig on swine, that's all.
Vincent: Why not?
Jules: Pigs are filthy animals. I don't eat filthy animals.
Vincent: Bacon tastes gooood. Pork chops taste gooood.
Jules: Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I'd never know 'cause I wouldn't eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That's a filthy animal. I ain't eat nothin' that ain't got enough sense enough to disregard its own faeces.
Vincent: How about a dog? Dogs eats its own feces.
Jules: I don't eat dog either.
Vincent: Yeah, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?
Jules: I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy but they're definitely dirty. But, a dog's got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Vincent: Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?
Jules: Well we'd have to be talkin' about one charmin' motherfuckin' pig. I mean he'd have to be ten times more charmin' than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I'm sayin'?
As they say in the marketing rulebook: Timing is everything
We get bacon with worms?
I think someone didn't run this by marketing.
There is truth in humor.
> omega-3 fatty acids -- the kind believed to stave off heart disease.
8 599,00.html
Er...no it's not:
http://society.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,173
This may not be so great. This recent story http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4838086.stm/ casts doubts on the benefits of omega-3.
Whats the effect on them?
SolarVPS - Quality Windows and Linux Virtual Servers
not to sound like some peta activist (i'm carniverous to a fault) but how does it effect the life of the animal? i guess it's kind of like veil where not do you live to be slaughtered, but perhaps also live bad life too.
I doubt regular bacon would disappear overnight or anything, but virtually every time someone comes out and says, "X-inol in corn prevents fin rot," five years later it's common knowledge that X-inol just makes food taste funny. If in twenty years, Omega-3 is still thought to make people healthy, then go adding it to things. For now, odds are you'll just end up with birth defects and adult acne.
You can devote a silly amount of time trying to eat an optimal, low-calorie, lowfat, high-protein, perfectly-whatever sort of diet.
What does that gain you? Is all that time and energy worth it, when, if you get it right, you'll probably just die of something else instead? Sheesh, live a little. Have some bacon once in awhile, have some ice cream for dessert now and then. If you eat too much of something, your body will let you know anyway.
Respect your body's intuition, and get some exercise. There's millions of years of research to back that up.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Can anyone else smell a marketing stunt behind it?
I mean, let's face it, considering the average person in so called "developed countries", there's no such thing as healthy fat. We simply eat too much of it, no matter how healty it is. You can create "high fructose" stuff as much as you like, it still is sugar. Yes, probably better than "ordinary" beet sugar, but still sugar.
Same with Omega-3 fat. It's not like you get more healthy by eating more of it. Yeah, it's better than eating that saturated grease, but best would be NOT eating it at all!
Yes, we need fat in our diet, of course, but it's similar to salt in our diet: In "modern" food, you simply cannot eat too little of it, no matter what you do.
So, instead of eating "more Omega-3 fat", we should eat LESS fat altogether. But it is probably hard to get this past marketing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm afraid of this shit. I love bacon and eggs every now and then, and the same shit could happen with this as with corn - you can't buy non-GM corn flakes anymore unless you shop at an "organic" store and pay twice the price. Leave bacon alone, I say. Or at least clearly mark the non-GM variety so that I'd know which one to buy.
Now all we need to do is biologically engineer boneless chickens for those tasty "boneless" chicken wings :-)
All corn is genetically modified. Maize was domesticated thousands of years ago in a process of natural genetic modification. I'm not convinced that our recent addition of resistance to specific herbicides or insect pests is more significant than 10,000 years of gradual change by artificial selection. And all sorts of crazy genetic modifications (via viruses, cross-species pollination, etc.) take place naturally under the radar of our current understanding and observation. It's still corn.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Omega 3 might not be a lifesaver
Mar 24 2006
Madeleine Brindley, Western Mail
SCIENTISTS have cast doubt on whether fish oils can really help protect against heart disease.
It's interesting that they're using genes from C. elegans which along with the fruit fly, yeast and the mouse make up some of the most throughly studied organisms. I wonder if it's a case of looking for the lost keys under the street light because that's where it's brightest.
Pigs have become popular as pets and many campaign to end the eating of pork. A open and shut case of anthroporcmorphism.:)
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
You certainly don't need to worry about eating the wrong fats, as I can't think of one plant that we eat that is bad for you.
Define bad. Where do you think sugar comes from? I'll give you a hint, it's not from pigs. Avocado's are also fairly fatty. Many fruits eaten to excess can cause diarrhea. Vegetarians, especially women, need to be very careful of what they eat to ensure they get needed vitamins and trace elements commonly found in meat - like iron.
We would certainly be able to feed more people with plant farms, than animal farms.
Meat has far more energy, weight for weight, than fruit and vegetables. Depending on how you farm the animals, you can provide more energy per hectare off animals than off most crops.
Another plus is that we wouldn't ruin our environment with plants farms as we would with pig farms.
No, you'd ruin them with other farms. Growing plants puts a strain on the soil. That's why you have crop rotations - you need to give the soil a chance to regain it's nutrients before you stick some more crops in it to start sucking them out again. If you increased the fruit and veg farming industry to the point where society could function totally without meat, you'd most definately have an impact on the environment. It'd just be a different one.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Fry: I'm never gonna get used to the 31st century. Caffeinated bacon? Baconated grapefruit? Admiral Crunch? Leela: Well, if you don't like that, try some Archduke Chocula.
This remind me of those nice tomatoe which stay red a lot longer. And taste like water. Methink people concentrate too much on "not dying", and not enough on "living".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Far too much is made of these improvements, if they are in fact improvements.
My grandfather lived to be 92, and died 2 days after playing and dancing to fiddle at a wedding. After having 2 wives and 15 children it is not hard to see why he had a large farm. Being monetarily poor, everything was used and everything made from the farm and without chemicals or bio agents. He was a mixed farmer raising cattle, pigs, chickens and wheat.
Well, to the point. None of the food, including eggs fried in suet every day, or the grease from the cattle or pig lard in bread, pastries or what amounts to steak-fried chicken ever hurt him. By modern days standards he should have died at 22 of a massive heart attack due to cholesterol alone.
But one truth appears to be the chemicals, the bio "enhancements" and engineering of foods is what is killing many of us. Growth hormones get passed on through the food chain and tell our bodies to "put it on". Radiation sterilizes but also kills proteins we need and thus we eat more. Nitrate preservatives... The pesticide residues in steady feed but minute ("government accepted levels") linger and pass regularly down the food chain to humans. Who knows, your cow might have been grazed down wind of a chemical processing plant or drank water downstream from another city or chemical use agro farm with god knows what in it.
It isn't just in livestock like chickens, pork and cattle. Seafood caught after rivers carry out taconite, lead, cadmium, chromium, mercury and a host of other impurities. The shrimp from Thailand to the Cod of the shores of Newfoundland all have similar issues.
When it comes to tinkering about the food chain, we might want to concern ourselves about a species like the Leopard Frog that is sensitive to mans pollution and bio agents. There used to be lots of them, but haven't seen one for 20 years and I have looked. Never saw tumors in fish until the last 5 years either.
Finding clean food is increasing becoming a problem. The problem is there are few places to grow clean food.
They would need to make pork meat with long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids. That would be nice and healthy. Problem though: I doubt a pig can live consisting of fats that are usually mostly found in plants and vegetable oil. Would that pig have green color?
--- Eat my sig.
Does no-one remember sligs? The Tleilaxu bioengineered combination of slugs and pigs that feed on garbage and produce the sweetest meat known to man. Calling someone a slig is a grave insult, yet sligmeat is valued above all other meat...
You know, no matter how rational of an argument you have, adding multiple question marks or exclamation points always takes credability points away in most people's books.
Because of how the Internet works the only way we can tell how you mean stuff is how you write it -- caps is generally regarded as shouting, and 1337 conveys a stereotype, as does aimspeek. Similarly, using multiple punctuation marks leads to other stereotypes.
I saw a rule of thumb for exclamation points once -- you should only use as many in a week as you have thumbs.
DYWYPI?
I'm surprised that someone can be so wrong. Meat takes very roughly ten times the energy to produce than vegetables. Livestock have to eat plants to survive. Mostly, they are fed low-cost-high-yield plants like maize, soy, and castor bean, and various animal wastes, but livestock still require a great deal of land. You think livestock feed on air or something?
By going to a fully vegetarian society, though there would still be an environmental impact, the impact would certainly be much less.
Do you mean those pesticide sprayed berries in February? (North America) Or Monsanto Fries, or is it Dow green beans? Half my teeth are for meat, half are for vegies. Thats how I eat. And yes, I know meat has the same issues as vegies. But until we decide to grow food naturally I will have to live with the fact that the "all beef" steroid antibiotic burger will have to do.
Geneticists have mixed DNA from the roundworm C. elegans and pigs to produce swine with significant amounts of omega-3 fatty acids -- the kind believed to stave off heart disease.
;)
Why would they bother doing this? I doubt heart disease is a major cause of death in pigs. Most of them don't live long enough to get past middle age. Maybe we should focus our DNA testing on animals which live over five years, like the turtle. Jeez! What a waste of funding!
Put identity in the browser.
Can we please stop messing with food? Please? Especially when we don't really know anything about the long-term effects yet? It's really stopping to be funny now, and I'm running out of meat which hasn't been tampered with. Beef? Mad Cow (we know the long-term there). Pork? Antibiotics, plus this lovely new genetic experimenting. Chicken? Antibiotics again, and same goes for turkey. Fish? Full of lead. It's getting a bit tricky by now, and switching over to venison or kangaroo isn't exactly an option.
There's no knowing what the long-term effects of genetic engineering in food will be. So stop mass-testing it on the population.
Flax seeds are an excellent source of omega 3. 25g ground up will give you about 10g of omega 3.
... Standards and Practices !
PenGun
Do Whta Now ???
Finally I can eat my* Ultimate Bacon Sandwich without guilt!
* Sadly, this is not actually my Ultimate Bacon Sandwich.
GOD BLESS SCIENCE!
And to all you vegetarians out there, until they make a plant that tastes like bacon, I'm not switching. If God didn't want us to eat animals then why did he cover them in meat?
Meh, my conscience is perfectly clear, at least on the charges of eating meat. I've never butchered a chook or a lamb, but I've gutted and cleaned fish I've caught before eating them. Close enough, without the cute appeal.
And the whole supermarket thing is only recent; at least here in Australia. My grandparents can still remember their parents butchering chickens at home. We're the first generation in a while who've had qualms about consuming meat in any serious numbers - and we're the ones most removed from the actual source of the food. Talk to the ones who do do the killing - the farmers and the butchers. They don't have any qualms about it. The people who do are the squeamish suburbian types who've never seen a lamb except at the petting zoo (or the cold storage) and romantacize and anthropomorphize all the cute, cuddly animals getting killed.
And I hope you feel the pain of every soy-bean whose life you brutally extinguish. The worst thing is when vegetarians justify this by saying plants don't have nervous systems and are killed painlessly. FFS - you are killing it!
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Some people already do grow food naturally, but until you decide to stop buying the steroid antibiotic burgers they will continue to be produced for your consumption.
I voted with my money years ago, I dont buy that shit anymore and I'm not the only one.
This story is not about health, it is about marketing. Nobody is genetically engineeering pigs or corn for the good of the human race, they are doing it to make more profit at the expense of the human race.
Mmmmmm, woooooooormmm baaaaaacooooon.
I think your missing something here: you may be able to get more energy out of livestock raised on a plot of land than the veggies raised in the same space. But what do the animals eat? Veggies, usually, from another area. So you're using the vegetable area anyways, and now the livestock area on top of it.
It's pretty well established that feeding veggies to animals and then eating their meat is a very inefficient use of energy. I'm quite certain that you can feed more people off an acre of beans and rice than the cows raised off an acre of beans and rice in the same time frame. Just think about that for a moment. Thus your last paragraph doesn't really line up either, as our overall vegetable farming needs would go down, not up, if we all ate vegetables instead of meat.
Despite that, our food shortage problems have nothing to do with meat eating. Hunger is a political problem. So I say go ahead and eat meat if you like it. And choose organic if you're concerned about the environmental impact. I'm a meat eater and that's what I've chosen, anyways.
Cheers.
Hey here's a thought: just don't eat so much bacon!
Maybe we could genetically engineer humans so that instead of having free-will, we follow a government-led pre-planned path to happiness. That way there'd be no more crime. There might be poverty, but we wouldn't care! And we can eat as much pig-like meat as the labs can produce.
Oh, brave new world...
than risk the sure-thing known. Wouldn't you?
To all the carnivores out there:
I'm an Omnivore, bitch.
etc. etc. for all the animals murdered in the name of cuisine.
It's not possible to murder food.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
this is just the sort of shit we should be doing unitl long term reseacrh has proved it to be safe. some company will try and push these things through the FDA, and food associations, and there is just no way of telling what the side effects would be - especially the long term ones.
this is such a digusting aborration of science - only when we have lost what we have got will we realise how beautiful it was untouched.
2 wrongs dont make a right - but 3 lefts do
when you pry it from my sweaty, overstuffed dead hand.
The Globe and Mail newspaper today has an article about growing meat in a jar. Test products so far taste like "jelly on fabric" ... yum ...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM .20060327.wxmeat27/BNStory/Science/home
And then you have to add in the fact that 90% of the vegies that show up in our supermarkets are produced by people who live in conditions not a lot differnt than the pigs. Sugar cane, banannas, coffee, oranges, potatoes. Anything that gets shipped in from Mexico or further south can be assumed to be the next thing to slave labour more often than not. So, pick your suffering.
Just another excuse for the meat and dairy industry to perpetuate the senseless slaughter of these innocent beings; just so you can have your fucking eggs and sausage. It amazes me to no end that most people don't have the intellectual capacity to catch even half a clue. It isn't bad enough that I have to foot the medical bills of people with health problems from eating this shit. Now we have 'science' making flesh that's 'better for you'.
I could go on, but no one will listen anyway.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
The industry and science are both compensating for human behavior. The problem in Western countries is that the people KNOW what they have to do to be healthy but many do not do it. Throw in free health care and why should they give a wit? Someone else will pay to fix it. People still drink heavily though they know its bad and many still smoke packs of cigarettes daily. Its similar to the syndrome with lotteries. People understand the hideous odds yet still buy multiple tickets. Yet confront them with odds that are many times more likely that their alcohol, smoking, or over-eating is going to cause health problems and they will claim "won't happen to me"
In the less developed countries improving the benefits of food that people already consume helps make what gets to those who need it better for them. Usually the amount of food is reduced by corruption, theft, and environmental loss (bad storage facilities etc).
I really don't care for engineered animal products. I don't have a problem with plants being bioengineered to produce stuff but for some reason it creeps me out when it comes to animals.
Whats next, cows from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Live until you're 50, then get ready for The Camera.
Go home from work 24 hours ahead, and take your Fleet's Phospho-Soda. Then enjoy jello, Gatorade, etc for the next 24 hours, but NEVER let yourself get very far from the toilet. You'll get cleaned out.
Then go into Ambulatory Care for the Grand Finale.
However, there quite a bit of peace of mind in being told, "Everything looks good, come back in 8 to 10 years."
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
We all start with someone else, besides our family and friends. (our "tribe")
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I suspect you've got this backwards. Our diets weren't optimized for us as we evolved. We were optimized for our diets. (Otherwise we died, or otherwise failed to reproduce.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Hey, let me know if i am wrong, but couldn't we just genetically put a cow digestive system (so pigs could chew their cud)and split their hooves. Bingo! Kosher Pig!
So it's started. Go read Oryx and Crake. Bio-engineered piggins that grow food on their backs, and the eventual downfall of humanity caused by bio-engineering. I'm sure other people have written about it, but this wasn't a bad book.
And incidentally, they're already back to saying that eggs are good for you...
I too find the flip-flopping of nutrition to be vexing. Myself, I manage by eating whatever I'm craving and I try to eat in large quantities and with variety. *wry grin* That said, I only pull off the large quantities because my family has a metabolism more in line for a mongoose, but eh...
I'm a personal believer in that if you eat what your body tells you you want, you only eat when you're hungry, and you get moderate exercise, you should be fine. Maybe it shaves 5 years off of your life due to it not being an ideal diet. It will probably add another 5 years due to the lack of stress of not worrying about your diet and you'll enjoy yourself a lot more.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
bacon bacon bacon bacon bacon.... ITS BACON!!!!
i guess it's kind of like veil where not do you live to be slaughtered, but perhaps also live bad life too.
Anybody else flashing back to the Dish of the Day from HHGttG?
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Meat eating is directly responsible for heart disease, and in conjunction with smoking causes almost all cases. Heart healthy eating involves a vegan or restricted vegitarian diet. Eating this different pork could potentially be healthier than eating normal pork because of the increased omega-3 oils, but other compounds such as saturated fats make eating this meat still dangerous especially over the long term.
Wormy pork! It's not just for infection anymore!! Or... Um... It does a body good? Or... "Shhh!! Don't move! You'll scare em"! Or... It's a honey of an O (geddit? ringworm)? Or... "Got Ringworm"? How many 70s, 80s and 90s "healthy breafast" jingles can YOU think of? ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I have never in my life gotten any disease from eating pork. And I eat plenty of pork. Maybe because, you know, it's not pork that roams filthy streets eating garbage that I eat, but pork grown in what's basically a giant, clean pork factory that I eat.
Oh, and I actually cook my meat before I eat it of course. I'm a human being, not a coyote or something.
Or we can just eat bacon and tofu or fish, maybe in separate dishes the same day or week. That way we'll get the O3FA along with other nutrients, but without the genomic pollution roulette game.
What does bacon fried in fish oil taste like?
--
make install -not war
Meat has far more energy, weight for weight, than fruit and vegetables. Depending on how you farm the animals, you can provide more energy per hectare off animals than off most crops.
"Lisa, in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
I'm no PETA freak, but what do you think we feed animals? For the most part, we feed them the same kind of grain that we eat (like corn and soy) or parts of other food that we don't eat. (Look up silage some time.) Even grass fed animals eat up far, far more calories of plants than their bodies contain at slaughter time. You didn't think that animals are nearly 100% efficient translators of vegetable calories to meat calories, did you?
I love meat and all, but a a vegetarian diet does have significantly less impact on the planet because you don't have to waste food to feed other food. In fact, the shifting of developing countries to a Western diet is commonly cited as one of the factors behind famland straining our resources (such as groundwater) over the next century. We actually feed much more than half of our grain output to livestock instead of to people, and a lot of potentially productive farmland is "wasted" in keeping animals and growing food to feed animals instead of people. About 80% of our corn goes to livestock. This is only expected to rise worldwide as more people abandon carbohydrate food staples to enjoy a high meat and sugar diet like we've been eating for 2-3 centuries.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
You could always eat organic food. You can get produce that has never been sprayed with pesticides and meat that has never been fed food that has been sprayed with pesticides. It costs more due to lower yields (that's why we spray in the first place), but so long as you just accept that people will do that and support it with your dollars, farmers won't decide to grow food naturally -- after all people like you have shown that that's where the money goes.
Incidentally, most pesticides accumulate in the fatty tissues of livestock, so you get a higher exposure from eating meat. I might occasionally buy vegetable and wholly artificial products like Splenda elsewhere, but I buy all my meat from organic producers. The fact that organic farmers can't stack animal enclosures like in factory farms and frequently let their livestock have free range is a bonus too from an ethical perspective.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Recently there have been articles that state there is no conclusive evidence that Omega 3 Fatty Acids are beneficial.
*BZZZZTTT* This is only for heart disease and is slightly inconclusive.
From the aritcle itself:
Despite the findings, leading dieticians said the public should not stop eating oily fish as omega 3 is associated with a huge range of health benefits.
It also states that:
More research is needed to establish why some studies have shown a slightly increased risk associated with eating very high amounts of oily fish, which is possibly related to mercury levels.
Note that many (if not all) of these studies involved oily fish consumption or supplementation from fish oil capsules. If you got Omega-3 from flax-fed chicken eggs or from GM pork, you wouldn't have the problem with mercury, but I've never seen a study that addresses Omega-3 consumption from non-fish sources.
On the other hand, unless you completely replaced saturated fats with Omega-3 fats in bacon (which should alter the solidity of bacon fat), you certainly are not going to see a heart benefit from eating Omega-3 fortified bacon thanks to the overwhelmingly bad effects of the saturated fats.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Problem though: I doubt a pig can live consisting of fats that are usually mostly found in plants and vegetable oil.
The best natural sources of Omega-3 fatty acids are in fish. A lesser known fact is that wild game animals have a lot of polyunsaturated fat in their meat and are actually good sources of Omega-3 fatty acids as well. There are lots of mammals with polyunsaturated fats in their bodies just as there are plants with saturated fats in their seeds. It's not purely an animal/plant divide as a lot of people think.
In addition, pigs should be able to release stored calories from polyunsaturated fats just as easily as from saturated fats. Our biologies aren't that different, and we know that unsaturated fats are healthier for us too.
And, no, those pigs wouldn't have a green color, but these pigs would.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I first ate Mahi Mahi on a trip to California. It was the catch of the day. White meat fish, delicious. It doesn't have that "fishy" taste that tuna or salmon. Grilled or baked... so very good!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I think all these "farm-raised" chickens have been affected by the Hollywood Body Image.
It is all about the breasts! I mean, have you seen the breasts on these chickens!?! I know we raised chickens when I was young, but none of them were these "Dolly Parton Big Boob" chickens you see now.
You know these chickens can't run, hell I wonder how they can even walk with those huge breast!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Why not add those omega-3 genes directly to human DNA instead? That way you wouldn't need to eat pork or margarine or other omega-3 fatty foods to get healthy. (and you wouldn't need to wait to get a big mac marketed as a health option because the parts of animal used in making the beef were omega-3 modified).
Having those genes modified in human DNA are as natural as having them in a pig's DNA.
What do the religious autorities have to say about this? If I put pig genes in a cow, does it make the cow treyf?
I think they are putting worm genes in pork. Now the answer to that one is easy.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Does the pig have four asses?
I'll second what's been said already in reply to this comment.
A couple facts:
The pigs wouldn't exist save for being produced to be eaten by you and me.
Think about the last time you were beaten/sick/etc. Did you eat well? Did you gain weight? Producers know that treating an animal as humanely as possible results in a better product and a larger profit.
For further information, you might inspect the National Pork Board's website for information about the Pork Quality Assurance program: http://www.pork.org/Producers/PQA/PQA.aspx
Another point: As a scientist, if the concerns for animal testing have been met, I see nothing but good information coming from such experimentation. People may be concerned about 'mutant' animals and their effects on humans who consume them, but without experimentation, we'll never find out.
JGG
There are several cuts of pork that contain a reasonable proportion of fat to protein. The tenderloin is the best example; the ratio of protein to fat is something like 3 or 4 to 1. And even the higher fat bits make good flavor accents.
Hate to break it to you, but most of the people on this planet kill their own meat. My grandparents were butchers. We used to have chickens when I was little; I've watched my dad wring their necks. I think you live in a part of the country where there's not a lot of hunters; you'd be surprised at how many people in the US kill animals for sport.
My brother used to work on our pig farm. Several times, recent immigrants to the US would come by in a pickup, buy a pig, and slaughter it in the bed of the truck.
*You* may have a problem with killing animals, but humans in general are perfectly copacetic with it.
Why does anyone subject themselves to Frankenfood like this? If a fuckin' pig/worm cross should ever have been possible then they'd be able to mate!
This is just disgusting... why do we keep looking and manipulating DNA to produce results like this when breeding seemed to work fine. I mean really, riddle me this, why is it so important to get Omega 3 from Bacon? Eating a fucking fish for Christ's sake! (And wrap it in bacon if you love the flavour that much!
Oops, how did this get here?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
For now, odds are you'll just end up with birth defects and adult acne.
I'll be 32 years old in two weeks. Now admittedly IANAB (...Biochemist), but I don't think any amount of Omega-III Fatty Acids can give me birth defects at this point.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
I have heard that in the western countries, the cows are fed food mixed with animal fats to increase their body mass. There is a pertinent theory that it is these wrong practices of making the cow eat meat instead of grass that gave rise to the mad cow disease.
Now reading this article makes me wonder if another man made disease is in the making ? Perhaps it would be aptly named mad swine disease.
Linux Help
for all things on Linux
Now maybe bacon truly is a vegetable... or at least as good for you. Good news for baco-vegetarians, and vegisexual swine are abuzz.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Pigs are often raised indoors now. The USDA is about to start certifying some of the cleaner ones as being free of various diseases. This would mean that eating raw pork would be about as safe as eating sushi.
I'm totally cool with killing anything non-human, cute "pet" animals included.
Cleaning up the mess is another matter. Animals are full of shit!
Dealing with a 600-pound carcass is another matter. I guess I'd need a winch and an ax...
I'd at least taste anything that's low on the food chain, like a bison or a bunny rabbit. I just want to buy it in pieces that fit in my refrigerator. I envy the French, who supposedly are able to buy horse meat. I envy the Germans, who supposedly are able to buy deer meat. In the USA I could mail order some dried deer meat, but that's nothing like picking out the best roast at the supermarket.
I want to try whale, elephant, hippo, seal, emu, sloth, giant ant eater, zebra... Guess what was on my mind when I visited the zoo a month ago.
New Zealand grazes animals on rocky hills. To farm that for humans, you'd need to eliminate the hills. Farm equipment requires that the land be fairly smooth. If we don't use the rocky hills for grazing, they just go to waste.
Humans don't like to eat food with insect holes. When insects damage our crops, shall we let the crops go to waste? No, we can feed the crops to animals. Even when the crops are undamaged, humans won't eat most of the crop. We only want the fruit, not the stems and the leaves. You could serve pigs with apple peels, carrot tops, broccoli leaves, and far yuckier.