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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.
Yeah, right. Steaks made from clones. No potential for "media induced panic" there!
Personally I'd love to see us progress to the point where it was possible to grow just the meat itself without the animal.
Personally, I would love to see us progress to the point where cows are well fed, happy and healthy. The meat will taste better, we'll be healthier and there's less cruelty to the cows. I would never eat meat grown in a lab.
I was just talking about this the other day as I was enjoying a burrito. I love this idea so much, and yet there are those who find it somehow repulsive.
How can growing meat be seen as more repulsive than the murder assembly lines at slaughterhouses?
My more stable-minded vegetarian friends gladly welcome this - as their food choices are equally health and ethics based.
Don't go thinking that all vegitarians hate the taste of beef. That red meat has got some major building blocks in it - and meat is a very good source of the basic building blocks your body needs.
You can think of meat as "pre-fabricated" building materials for your body - since the animal who owned it before you has already done much of the work needed to convert the raw materials into useful proteins.
I love this idea, I would much rather make my own meat than take it from a nice, innocent bovine who happens to be using it at the moment.
And this actually brings up a somewhat...uh, weird question.
If meat is a great building-block food - and certain meats are better for certain things...then might we design the "perfect" meat for human consumption?...if so, and this is the disturbing part, might we actually splice our own DNA into the transgenic mix?
Could this be considered a form of cannibalism?
Ah the future, so fun to turn everything on it's head.
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Begun, this clone BBQ has.
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
What about cloned sex workers?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Consider that the dangerous bacteria and viruses you're talking about, would only have a single organism to target, and we'd run the risk of a single lucky virus taking out the world's entire meat supply.
Unless of course, they are right, and there is no evolution- and every organism is the same as it was when the planet was summoned into existence over the course of a particularly shady six day run. In which case, we have nothing to fear, because new viruses are not mutating into existance, and we only need to protect this meat from the dangers that exist right now and just wait until all the mad-cow viruses go extinct.
I'm not sure I want to live in either world, so excuse me while I go take a chew on this helpless animal here.
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.
From dictionary.com:
vegan (vgn, vjn) n. A vegetarian who eats plant products only, especially one who uses no products derived from animals, as fur or leather.
The dictionary definition doesn't distinguish them, why should we? We have a name for animal rights activists: animal rights activists. You calling someone who doesn't eat meat for diet reasons a "fakeatarian" is elitism, and purposfully insulting. Bad things!!! Just ask Germany. (a leap, I know, but I couldn't think of anything else).
Personally, I have always seen the dietary reasons as some of the best not to eat meat. Eating higher up the food pyramid means it takes more energy to feed you, which is inefficient and a little unfair considering that people starve in this world.
Note: I do eat meat, but that's because I am spoiled and like how it tastes.
I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint.
I ask why the poor have no bread, they call me a communist.
It's far more likely that textured vegetable protein, which has had millions of years of evolution behind it, will end up be more efficient to produce than grown steaks. Another issue is that the stuff inside steak that's "tasty", also happens to be bad for you if it's a significant portion of your diet. Saturated fats and high protein diets seem to cause long-term issues.
Now, I happen to be vegetarian, but certainly not for your standard ethical reasons. I'm all for animal experimentation, for example. I just find that our country's meat-heavy diet is expensive and inefficient. We're depleting our fresh water aquifers at a rapid rate, trying to grow feed for our cattle. American's waists are expanding, in part from our high-calorie meat diet.
And, to end on a lighter note, here's a funny little story called They're Made Out of Meat that's hysterical.
The only truly ethical solution is to genetically engineer a cow that wants to be eaten. Preferably, the cow should be engineered to be sufficiently intelligent to go up to the diner and tell them how delicious it is, and ask them how they would like to eat it.
I am far more concerned about the long term effects on the genetic diversity of our live stock vs is it healthy to eat.
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.
Let's take it to next logical step. Why not clone human flesh? I mean after all there'd be no ethical issues involved with it. They could take those new ethicly created stem cell lines to make human meat. And since breast milk is the best, why clone giant boobies to produce all of our dairy needs. No I see no ethical problems at all.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
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.
Yeah, if it's cooked rare and made of cow muscle.
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I eat a lot of imitation tofu. I'm personally opposed to cruelty to soybeans. So I eat tofu substitutes made from chicken, beef, pork...
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.
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)
(from the latter article) [....] [....] [* 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.]Now for the quote-mining:
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".