Slashdot Mirror
Cloned Beef Coming Soon?
An anonymous reader writes "According to this article at Popular Science cloned beef may be coming soon. It talks about using meat within 48 hours of slaughter to allow cloning the best possible specimens, something that is not possible to determine while the animal is still alive. Apparently only 1 in 8000 animals is truly the best. Personally I'd love to see us progress to the point where it was possible to grow just the meat itself without the animal. That would end all the ethical issues with raising an animal for food, potential issues from mad cow disease, bird flu and whatever the next media induced panic is."
Unless you can exercise the meat that is "grown" it will be mostly tasteless.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
You've never heard of VAT meat? Coming soon to a dinner table near you.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3208
PS. Tofu rocks.
Pigs get stressed more than most animals when they are housed in high density pens. So there is now a move to selectively breed the "stress" out of pigs. There are also much more advanced methods of slaughter now, such as Temple Grandin's Stairway to Heaven.
The larger problem is actually meat consumption. It takes 12,000 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef... and that's the natural way of growing beef! Imagine doing it in a factory... each pound of beef requires six pounds of corn that could be eaten by us instead. When you look at the numbers for meat, its a depressing story.
Economic and environmental issues dictate that the final solution will be processed foods grown where species can be raised most cheaply. They will probably be adequate as a food source for us, albeit a rather boring one. Not much meat in it. Heavily cooked. Fortified with vitamins and additives to make it worth eating.
If someone else can think up something more interesting and more likely I'm all ears.
I can buy organic beef at my local supermarket for about double the cost of regular beef.
Wow, you're getting ripped off.
The organic beef at my local supermarket is only about 20% more than the "regular" type. My wife and I picked up two cuts from each type, and were surprised at how much more tender and better tasting the organic beef was. We've only been buying the organic beef ever since.
I'm all for growing meat in a lab. The more meat, the merrier... but we can't even get farm raise salmon to taste right, what makes us think that meat grown in a lab is going to taste as good as a nice kobe beef ribeye?
Gurgle... meat... gurgle. Damn, now I'm hungry.
Might have the thaw that wild boar bacon I have in the freezer. That stuff is like crack, but with more cholesterol.
Sometimes the desire to criticize evil profit-doers can lead to neglecting relevant evidence, such as the fact that the US does indeed provide quite a lot of food aid. Over 4000 metric tons in 2005 (pdf), for instance. Besides, it's a *surplus*.
There is a great 'speculative fiction' novel by Margaret Atwood called Oryx and Crake where they have genetically engineered chicken to be just masses of flesh that you can 'harvest' meat from. They have no brain or heads...just the necessary organs to let the meat grow.
They call them Chicki-knobs, which is still my favourite word to describe things like chicken McNuggets and Big Macs.
She also wrote about pigoons, which are fictional transgenic creatures that look much like domestic pigs, but their DNA has been spliced with human genetic information and they have been engineered to grow multiple organs for transplants.
We haven't been factory farming for thousands of years, though. Farming in the past half century is vastly different from the way it was prior.
The body needs, IIRC, 3 grams of linoleic acid a day, plus some trace amounts from other sources. Most people get MUCH more than that.
You'll find that excessive carbohydrates will do you more harm than anything.
It's important, and you allude to it later, that the quality of carbohydrate is critical. Most Americans eat lots of WHITE processed flour and sugar. It's stuff that INSTANTLY triggers an insulin reaction, and after a couple of decades of it the body just gets resistant to the insulin. Sadly, they've stopped calling it "Adult-onset diabetes" in the US because it's becoming more prevalent in teens and even younger.
And a lack of protein is more dangerous than too much. You can eat 200g of protein a day without ill effect, but eat less and you end up losing significant strength.
I would counter that a lack of protein is almost unheard of in the developed world. There's a published figure of 56g per day for a 75kg man, but actual studies indicate that it can be even lower, and that rat studies are NOT indicative of human studies. See the results of some studies here. The results of a diet too high in protein, esp. animal protein, usually are an increased load on the kidneys and bone calcium loss, primarily through extra acidtiy in the body. This is part of the reason the USRDA for calcium (1000mg) is almost double that recommended by most other governments (I belive the UK has an RNI number of 700mg for adult men.)
It's probably notable that human breast milk - the food that makes a baby double its weight in one year, is only about 10% protein by calories. If 10% is good enough for a newborn baby, it should be good enough for anyone.
Feeding of antibiotics is not allowed
Slight caveat... in most of the developed world antibiotics are given to sick animals to help them get better quicker and with less long term damage. However, the countries you are referring to don't allow the constant feeding of antibiotics to promote faster growth, and animals are generally not allowed to be slaughtered and sent to market for a certain time after administering antibiotics so their body can naturally eliminate the antibiotics and metabolites, as well as allowing the natural bacterial flora to reestablish itself, hopefully preventing transmission of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
I assumes that's what you meant by "feeding antibiotics" as opposed to "giving antibiotics" but I wouldn't assume that most people know that.
"The 'dangers' of fat are vastly overrated, the body needs fats to function properly"
Yes, we need very little fat though. Most people eat FAR more than needed, and we don't need any saturated fat, which is much worse for us, and is what you get from meat.
"You'll find that excessive carbohydrates will do you more harm than anything."
No, excessive calories from any source will make you fat. Excessive carbs that break down to glucose very quickly will spike your blood sugar, and its theorized that that may increase the risk of diabetes. The vast majority of the people in the world live almost entirely on carbs, and the human race has lived that way for thousands of years. Meat has been an added boost to our diet, only available in small quantities. Grains like rice have sustained people.
"You can eat 200g of protein a day without ill effect, but eat less and you end up losing significant strength."
No, you will need to increase your calcium intake if you do something stupid like this. Protein is broken down into amino acids for use. They are not stored however, and since even marathon runners and body builders do not need more than 70-80g of protein per day, the rest is broken down further from amino acids into, *gasp*, sugars. The process of breaking down proteins releases acids however, which your body neutralizes with calcium. So increased protein can lead to weak bones. This is why all the "eat more calcium" studies are done with calcium suppliments, not milk which has little to no benefit due to the protein.
"but eat less and you end up losing significant strength."
Protein does not magically make you strong. Your body only makes muscle if it wants to. It only wants to if you use what you have, or have a rare disease that makes your body go nuts and always build your muscle. Even still, nobody needs more than 70-80g a day. You only need to eat as much as your body needs to repair your existing tissues, and create any new tissue it wants to create.
"You only have to look at the sagging arms of most Americans to see they're not eating too much protein!"
Again, protein does not make you strong. Its simple one of the basic building blocks required to create tissues. Excercise makes you strong. And most americans already eat far more protein than they need, as the RDA is 50-55g for women, and 60-65g for men. That means 98% of americans would get enough protein eating that amount. At many restaurants, a single burger contains more protein than that.
"The general health of Americans would be better if they cut out the donuts, cokes cakes, breads etc. and replaced them with more natural foods like steak, chicken and lamb"
They already eat fucktons of meat. They need to cut out the shit you mentioned, cut back on their meat, quit deep frying all their meat (and potatoes), and start eating vegetables and fruits. Replacing high calorie foods like donuts with high calorie foods like steak is not going to make people lose weight.
"Meat is not expensive or inefficient. There is enough land for everyone to have enough meat, no-one in America is starving."
Yes, it is very expensive and inefficent. We would get 10 times more calories from the land we use for raising beef cattle if we used it for crops like corn, rice, wheat, legumes, etc. We are filthy rich compared to other countries, so we have the luxury of being greedy and wasteful while they starve.
Go read any basic intro to biochem and you will see how incredibly stupid your comment was.