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."

Comments

Re:Growing meat...

[Reality Master 101]

Unless you can exercise the meat that is "grown" it will be mostly tasteless.

Actually, it's exactly the opposite. It's fat that gives meat flavor, not lean "exercised" meat. In fact, Kobe Beef, which is widely recognized as tender and flavorful uses steers that are specifically fattenened up and never exercised.

Re:This is being done with pigs already

[Ksisanth]

Vegan advocates love to trot this out in their "fact-sheets", and it's always interesting to see which particular Pimental source they use. It's like they draw it out of a hat or something, because it's always a different citation (same author, same factoid, but worded ever-so-slightly differently). A long while back I tracked down the article it was from (at the time) here. (pdf) That one is from 1997, I believe. There is also a 2004 edition. (another darn pdf)
Now for the quote-mining:

(from the latter article)

The average precipitation for most continents is about 700 mm/yr (7 million liters/ha/yr)

[....]

The water required by food and forage crops ranges from 600 to 3,000 liters of water per kilogram (dry) of crop yield (Table 2). For instance, a hectare of U.S. corn, with a yield of approximately 9,000 kg/ha, transpires about 6 million liters per hectare of water during the growing season (Benham, 1998; Palmer, 2001), while an additional 1 to 2.5 million liters/ha of soil moisture evaporate into the atmosphere (Donahue et al., 1990; Desborough et al., 1996). This means that about 800 mm (8 million liters/ha) of rainfall are required during the growing season for corn production. Even with 800 to 1,000 mm of annual rainfall in the U.S. Corn-Belt region, corn frequently suffers from insufficient water during the critical summer growing period (Troeh and Thompson, 1993).

[....]

For open rangeland (instead of confined feedlot production), from 120 kg to 200 kg of forage are required to produce 1 kg of beef. This amount of forage requires 120,000 liters to 200,000 liters of water per kilogram of beef (Thomas, 1987; Dorsett, 2003; Rangeland, 1994). Beef cattle can be produced on rangeland, but a minimum of 200 mm per year of rainfall are needed[*] (Hays and White, 1998).

[* The previous article put this at 150 to 200 mm per year, a range of 1.5-2 million liters/ha, but also noted that "production is low under such arid conditions"...which only means that fewer head/ha is supported, not that it is a less efficient use, since those "arid conditions" wouldn't support much of anything. Maybe nopalitos.]

As I recall from my childhood when my grandfather was raising cattle, he never irrigated. And even though he doesn't have cattle anymore, he still grows and cuts hay for his neighbors who do. No irrigation. But it would be rather disingenuous to point out how much water that actually uses vs. how much it would have required to produce a comparable amount of a given crop (assuming it could survive the heat and the depredations of the deer, hogs, rabbits, etc). The water requirement for the former is spread out over a larger area and can be met by limited rainfall with the proper selection of grasses, but for the latter it is not spread out and would most certainly require additional input. It's therefore a more efficient use of the land and water resources, and not at all "wasteful and irresponsible". Quite unlike "Vegsource".