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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."
I want the chance to vote with my dollars.
I don't think we know enough about the process and long term issues to go nuts with this now. Test it. Test the hell out of it.
But let me choose whether or not to buy it.
My mom says I'm cool.
Even if we could "grow" perfect steaks without the rest of the animal, somehow the practice will be banned. Yes, I'm looking at you, animal-rights extremists and religious wackos.
I hope you would stay vegan for dietary not for ethical reasons. Grown beef would be just as ethical as grown plants that are GMO.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
Yeah, right. Steaks made from clones. No potential for "media induced panic" there!
Ethical issues? We've been raising animals for food for thousands of years, it has been one of the keys to our dominance as a species. Don't believe everything PETA tells you.
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
I am far more concerned about the long term effects on the genetic diversity of our live stock vs is it healthy to eat.
Didn't they already clone sheeps?
I'm not much for biology, but if you figured out the way that various stem cells are "programmed" to grow into certain structures, couldn't you do it that way? That wouldn't require removing all the genetic information from the genome besides the "meat" portions, it would just require falsifying the messages that assumedly must be sent to stem cells that tell them what structures to develop into.
Of course, I'm not sure that this would produce meat in the conventional sense that we think of it: a bunch of muscle cells in a jar wouldn't taste much like filet mignon, because they wouldn't be formed into those muscular structures, which are then exercised while the animal is alive, have a certain fat content, etc. In short, meat is more than just muscle tissue, it's a part of a particular animal. I have this feeling that the net result of trying to grow meat in jars would be closer to tofu than beef. Maybe it would be acceptable for foods that end up being processed beyond recognition anyway (hamburgers, sausage), but I doubt it would work for beef.
If anyone who's more schooled in biology wants to fill in my misunderstandings, I'd be interested.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"We are seeing organic & "air-chilled", "premium" chicken breasts advertised on TV "
Don't be daft. In Amerika there are no breasts on TV.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I've tasted steak, and I've tasted tofu, and they are not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.
honestly I don't see how you could "grow" meat.
I honestly don't see how they can pack a billion transistors onto a chip the size of my thumbnail, but somehow they do it anyway... fortunately human progress is not limited by the scope of any one individual's imagination.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Only if you venture out into the wild armed with nothing but a spear and a loincloth, hunt down the animal, and stuff yourself with its still-warm raw flesh at the site of the kill.
If, on the other hand, you rely on an army of strangers to grow captive animals in large, overcrowded, stinking buildings, feed them massive doses of antibiotics to keep the inevitable disease outbreaks in check, fatten them up with genetically engineered hormones and "interesting" feed materials (including, up until recently, the nastier parts of their deceased compatriots), butcher them on an assembly line, then wrap the results in petroleum-based film to be delivered to local grocery store for you to buy.... then no, that's not very natural at all.
I'm a meat eater myself -- but I don't kid myself about my diet being "natural" in any sense of the word.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Lean steaks are also tasty. The 'dangers' of fat are vastly overrated, the body needs fats to function properly. You'll find that excessive carbohydrates will do you more harm than anything. 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.
Americans are fat because of too many processed foods filled with starch and sugar. 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. You only have to look at the sagging arms of most Americans to see they're not eating too much protein!
Meat is not expensive or inefficient. There is enough land for everyone to have enough meat, no-one in America is starving. People probably eat less meat now than ever, so talk about depleting at rapid rates is sheer scaremongering.