PETA Offers X-Prize for Artificial Meat

Bored MPA writes "The Times reports that PETA is to announce plans on Monday for a $1 million prize to the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012." PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk addressed the controversial decision by saying, "We don't mind taking uncomfortable positions if it means that fewer animals suffer." An unexpected and pragmatic move from an organization that has a strong base of support from pro-organic vegans." The question I always had about this- if they can take one sample from one animal and clone it in a vat and feed this world, will the vegans be ok with that?

Comments

While...

[Icarus1919]

While I applaud the intent here, I gotta say that if people have a problem with genetically modified vegetables, then meat grown in a laboratory will DEFINITELY not appeal to them. This would be a classic case of a concept that people will find instinctively suspicious and disgusting.

Re:While...

[SatanicPuppy]

Jesus, it's not about being a liberal. The problem with GM plants is that they still throw out a bunch of pollen, and pollute existing seed lines. It's just bad science.

When the GM meat gets out of the tank and starts humping un-gm'd cows, I'll have problems with it. Otherwise, hell, if it tastes good, I'm there.

Eat the PETA members

[TheMeuge]

Maybe it's just me, but I think that movements such as PETA are a sign of deep issues within our society. We have people who are so completely satiated and content with their lives, that they are willing to spend vast amounts of their time, effort, and money, in order to achieve something so truly inane.

We have hunger, diseases, war... and all these people want to do is to get everybody to stop eating animals. Considering that it was likely the consumption of large amounts of animal protein that allowed humanity to evolve rather rapidly in the last stage of our evolution, I find PETA's goals rather ironic.

Re:Eat the PETA members

[CRCulver]

I think it's highly ironic that certain supporters of PETA, quick to condemn the taking of innocent animal life, get riled up when they see people seeking to outlaw abortion. There's this weird paradox in the animal rights movement, especially in the work of Peter Singer, that animal life is elevated to sacredness but certain human lives are lowered to complete expendability.

Probably not ...

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

"The question I always had about this- if they can take one sample from one animal and clone it in a vat and feed this world, will the vegans be ok with that?"

They're not very rational. They'll probably demand you release the sample from its captivity.

All kidding aside, I'm a veggie myself and have a hard time being sympathetic to the vegan cause -- it's just so unrealistic.

Free farm animals will only result in the demise of the particular species ... ever seen a farm pig or a farm cow in the wild?

Current biological thinking is that domesticated animals were drawn into human habitat because their own habitat was taken over by more fit animals. Humans simply domesticated these animals, but otherwise they wouldn't have stood a chance in the wild. Following this reasoning, releasing farm animals would just condemn them to starvation, a horrible death.

Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly opposed to using farm animals as an industrial product, as this is what is common in bioindustry at the moment, but we're in symbiosis with these species ... freeing them is not the answer. Treating them well and with respect is.

At last PETA and I agree on something

[QuantumG]

But, Ms. Newkirk said, the decision to sponsor a prize caused "a near civil war in our office," since so many PETA members are repulsed by the thought of eating animal tissue, even if no animals are killed. I think you mean "holy war".

Other than that, yeah, good show.. I'm a big fan of growing food in vats instead of animals on grain and parts of other animals.

For a start, it makes real permanent space stations all that more feasible.

PETA isn't against taking animal life

[Reality Master 201]

That's a commonly held misconception. They're in favor of ethical treatment of animals, which for them precludes farming. PETA actually offers free euthanasia for sick animals for people that can't afford to have it done by vets.

As for abortion, it's highly ironic that many of those who get riled up by killing of a pre-human lump of cells are just fine with their government getting into a non-defensive war and driving up food prices around the world through it's subsidy of corn based ethanol. There's this weird paradox in the pro-life movement that unborn life is elevated to sacredness but actual humans living on earth already who have memories and consciousness can be chucked aside without protest.

yes

[onemorehour]

As a vegan, I can at least speak for myself: the answer is definitely "yes."

Veganism is neither irrational nor difficult to understand; if you're making an animal suffer unnecessarily, vegans are against it. It's amazing to me how such a simple position seems to confuse people.

Re:Interesting...

[Hatta]

You know, we evolved canine teeth for a reason. Do you really think it's healthy not to use them?

They are unpleasant already

[Gription]

Instead of a movie they need to watch cable. Force them to watch the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet nature shows.

If they are at all awake they will either realize that the whole world is designed around the idea of one thing eating another. (Or they might decide that God screwed up as they watch the lion take down that gazelle...)

Remember if they weren't intended to be eaten they wouldn't have been made out of meat!

Re:They are unpleasant already

[aplusjimages]

Remember if they weren't intended to be eaten they wouldn't have been made out of meat! Aren't you made of meat? Also not all creatures are designed to eat meat. And factory farming is far from natural.

Re:They are unpleasant already

[RemoteSojourner]

There are quite a few cultures which have been vegetarians since centuries. i come from one such culture. Nobody in my family has ever tasted anything for which you have to kill an animal and we are perfectly healthy. See this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarian There are always alternate sources available and fortunately our food habits include all of them. As far as why you should be a vegetarian, see the logetivity section. Also the supplement you mentioned is more in fish than in meat so ppl who eat no meat and chicken and only eat fish will be healthier.

Re:They are unpleasant already

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans and many animals need meat as much as air. It's a simple biological fact.

Nope. Rubbish. You could argue that humans need *animal protein* or equivalent synthetics. But not meat. You can be perfectly healthy on a Vegeterian diet which includes dairy products but no flesh (red meat, polutry or fish etc.) (I did this for 10 years with no supplements etc. and cycled 100's of miles and was very healthy). The problems occur with Vegan diets where you eliminate all animal products.
However, one of my colleagues who is vegan says that you don't need supplements; there are specific types of nuts and stuff which contain the relevant nutrients. He seems perfectly healthy.

Note that I have no moral axe to grind here since I now eat quite a lot of meat and enjoy it.

As for your statement that 'there is no meat replacement' surely the whole point of this prize is to grow something in the lab which is nutritionally and taste equivalent to meat? And if they suceed, there *will* be a full 'meat replacement'

Re:They are unpleasant already

[hador_nyc]

Humans are omnivores. It's also natural for us to kill and to eat other animals; say like a bear.

So, to answer your question, we are capable of not killing to eat, but you have to make the argument as to why. Thus far, I haven't been convinced of why we shouldn't eat meat; eat less of it, sure, but no meat entirely, not yet.

Also, it's hard to make the case that killing a human and killing a animal is the same thing. I'm not particularly religious, nor am I Christian, but my objection to that is more akin to what Silverback Gorilla's, male lions, and other animals do when they take over a group. They kill the infants of the former group leader. Most people for a variety of reasons don't consider animals, let alone other humans, "human". That is the basis for eugenics. While I agree that is reprehensible, it's still a fact. I think we have a lot of work to convince all people that all humans are "human," before your goal of equating animals with humans can be achieved. Still, I still can't see why we shouldn't eat cows, chickens, and things. I grew up near a farm, and maybe that's why I just don't see it; no matter how much I value human life.

Re:They are unpleasant already

[Gription]

I would like to popularize a term:
"Civilized to death"

"Civilized" is an illusion. It is a consensual illusionary construct of your social conditioning. We do need some sort of social structure so we can all get along, but when you start to think that there is some innate 'higher truth' in your view of what is civilized then you are stepping into fantasy world.

100 years ago we didn't have the weird idea that eating an animal was a tragedy. We weren't less civilized then either. (Watch some TV. After that if you still think we were less 'civilized' then you need to get off your high horse so you can be trampled...) We just had different social norms and we weren't so divorced from our food supply.

Re:They are unpleasant already

[nostriluu]

I totally agree with you. I also consider slavery and torture to be completely natural. How about you?

Totally unnatural - sending spaceships to the moon, or food cultivation (that habit that creates reliable food sources so you don't need handy scavengers like chickens and pigs, until we mass produced animal farming with buildings full of thousands of creatures packed in shit).

Those shows you are watching are highlighting certain aspects of animal existence. How about you go to the zoo and watch how the monkeys act naturally all day, and do a report on how we should be acting. Or look in an aquarium at the natural creatures and tell us how we should be acting, and emulate it yourself.

Sorry, I just find people who use your kind of logic a bit simple, but I guess if you want to justify your lifestyle and continue stuffing dead animals in your mouth three times a day, backed by completely natural factory farms and a host of ghouls who enjoy working in meat packing plants (I've known a couple of them) then just do it.

Personally (and I know you couldn't care less ;)) I stopped eating meat 8 years ago because I got bored of it. There is a whole world of other foods to explore. I also find the non thinking attitude about food to be disturbing, like I was a beef, chicken, or pork eating automaton. All the potential environmental, ethical and health reasons are just nifty bonuses to me, and I really think if we freed all the cows, chickens and pigs it would quite annoying.

Re:They are unpleasant already

[kwerle]

The reason I don't eat meat is because of the way food animals are treated while they are alive - not because they are animals. There are plenty of vegetarians who take this stance.

I recommend any of the documentaries on the farming process in america.

If meat-in-a-vat became economically feasible, there are plenty of vegetarians who would eat it.

(details: it is easier for me, personally, to say "no meat" than to be picky about which meat I'm eating and where it is from, etc. It's just the easy line for me to draw)

Re:They are unpleasant already

[Rei]

Oy, where to start with this one?

If they are at all awake they will either realize that the whole world is designed around the idea of one thing eating another.

1) Simply untrue. By your logic, autotrophs don't exist. Unless you call absorbing light, hydrogen sulfide, methane, or whatnot "one thing eating another".
2) Moral equivalency. You are declaring eating any form of life as equivalent to any other. The ~99%** of people who find the concept of raising humans for meat abhorrent would disagree with you.

** -- I did specify 99% because on occasion, I have found people who find nothing wrong with this. Thankfully, they're rare.

Let's focus a little more on #2. What is so abhorrent about eating other humans to most people? Usually, it's some variant on the destruction of the self. Call it a soul, call it a conscience, self-awareness, whatever you will. Raising a sentient being and deliberately killing them for their meat when you don't need to is generally seen as abhorrent.

So, what's sentience? One ancient standard is the ability to reflect on one's own thoughts. Well, that standard certainly doesn't hold up as an argument against eating meat now that we know that even rats do that. So what's the cutoff point? Problem solving or reasoning ability? Chimps, depending on the task, often have the reasoning ability of a 4-6 year old. Parrots, 2-6 year old, depending on the task. Pigs, same general range. None of them have anywhere near the sort of *communication* skill that humans have, but communication is hardly a reason not to eat something, now isn't it?

From my perspective, the simpler the mind, the less of a moral issue there is. Sure, even plants have at least some forms of stimulus response; every cell in existence does. But none of it approaches the complexity in external stimulus-processing as a neural net. A change in light may cause guard cells to open or close a stoma, but you're just looking at a predictable biochemical cascade. That stoma will never, for example, "learn" not to keep opening and closing if you shine a flashlight on and off at it. It is this spark of intelligence in animals, particularly higher animals, that I find tragic to snuff out needlessly.

In a choice between the life of a pig and a human, which do I side with? The human, undeniably, indisputably, every last time. I don't fault in the least, for example, innuit cultures that traditionally survived on sealing; what choice, exactly, do they have? But in this world, I have all of the choices under the sun. I can choose to eat whatever the heck I want. Having that choice, I eat a vegetarian diet.

Of course, I know very well that not everyone will agree with me on this. But that's hardly the only reason. Most people have no clue how extreme of an impact eating meat has on the environment. A staggering, mind-boggling big impact. 1/3 of the world's non-ice-covered land is dedicated, directly or indirectly, to growing meat. Despite programs to abate it, we're losing 1,250 square miles of rainforest in Brazil per month to cattle land. Meat growing releases more greenhouse gasses than transportation (and no, we're not just talking about methane from ruminants; the energy aspect is the big portion, since it takes many pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat), plus huge amounts of water pollution (3/4 of the water pollution in the US, for example), as well as breeding antibiotic resistance.

Re:They are unpleasant already

[pragma_x]

I am not a dietitian.

I know a lot of fat vegans. I don't know how they do it, they must trough all day on their bean and hummus pittas. A lot of the meat eaters are reasonable weights on the other hand.

That's not all that shocking seeing as how the latest culprits of the "american obesity epidemic" are refined sugar and starch. Second to that are hydrogenated oils, which are made from vegetable products and can be best thought of as a form of "synthetic lard" since it fills the same role in cooking.

In short: calories and fats with no vitamins and/or minerals (salt doesn't count) are the real culprit here. Hummus and pita on the other hand still has some rudimentary nutritional value to it thanks to the chick peas and olive oil.

So you can still be a strict vegetarian and develop metabolic syndrome. Odds are your tubby vegan friends are having plenty of doritos and pepsi along with their beans and rice, or think that "corn-on-the-cob, biscuits, rice and potatoes" is a well balanced meal.

Re:They are unpleasant already

[Rei]

Look, even as a vegetarian, I have a lot of big problems with PETA, but that's just ridiculous. You're not destroying a thinking being or causing incredible environmental damage (like eating meat does -- the scale is truly staggering. See my later post for details). Do you think PETA feels that if you surgically remove someone's injured spleen, you're committing some tragedy because you're "killing living animal cells"? Give me a break.

Kudos to PETA for offering this prize. It's one of the first reasonable things I've ever seen to come out of that organization. I might not even have gone vegetarian had this existed at the time; I would have just switched. Not sure I'd eat vat meat now, as I've grown accustomed to a vegetarian diet and see no reason to switch back, mind you.

Re:They are unpleasant already

[gnuman99]

Liver stores *6 year supply* of Vitamin B12. And it is not from animal meat but bacteria. Animals just store their own supply and we "eat it" (the supply) while eating the animals. Today, all of the B12 you get at a stores is made from bacteria cultures. And since your body retains lots of it, you don't need to eat the supplement all the time. Just once a week, a month or whatever. You can get those 1000mcg pills and take once a month and never have any problems. That way you'll get more B12 than meat eating people anyway.

From wikipedia:

"Vitamin B-12 cannot be made by plants or animals[5] as only bacteria have the enzymes required for its synthesis"

"The total amount of vitamin B-12 stored in body is about 2,000-5,000 mcg in adults. Around 80% of this is stored in the liver[2]. 0.1 % of this is lost per day by secretions into the gut as not all these secretions are reabsorbed. How fast B-12 levels change depends on the balance between how much B-12 is obtained from the diet, how much is secreted and how much is absorbed. B-12 deficiency may arise in a year if initial stores are low and genetic factors unfavourable or may not appear for decades."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12

As a side node, I'm not a vegan. But B12 deficiency takes *years*, and does not happen overnight because you stopped eating meat. Hell, you can eat termites or even dirt with B12 bacteria and you'll get enough B12.

Freaking FUD about stupid B12.

Re:Interesting...

[Jodaxia]

Umm.. M&Ms are make of MILK chocolate. Last time I checked, milk isn't made in petri dishes.

Re:Isnt fake meat called...

[jasen666]

I can't wait for the cloned meat. Tasty steak, but never having been exposed to parasites, virus, pesticides, herbicides, etc. Also no fat, gristle, tendons, blood vessels or bones to worry about. Although I suppose if they can engineer cloned muscle cell, they can clone fat cells in that meat as well if they wanted, for flavor.
And if they can do this for seafood? Cloned lobster and crab meat? (Swordfish steaks.. nomnomnom.) Once in full production, the prices would likely be much cheaper than ocean caught meat. And no worries about pollution or mercury poisoning.
It would be great for wild animal populations, although bad for farmers and fisherman.

easy

[circletimessquare]

because they taste good and we evolved to eat them

the only reason eating animals is a problem is suddenly because we evolved higher mental faculties like empathy, morality

luckily, we also developed science, which will soon give us meat vats, and we can go on with our carnivorous delights and not a single animal need be killed anymore

but if you try to ask people to give up meat just because the animals suffer, you have just as much success asking people to stop having sex because of disease and overpopulation

it is a compulsion, hard wired into us. do not underestimate it. it is deeper and stronger this compulsion than our higher faculties

so much as birth control and penicillin sidesteps the issue of disease and too many babies as byproduct of our love of sex, so will meat vats sidestep the issue of cruelty and our love of meat

but you are really insane if you think a nice morality lecture will stop people from eating meat just because its cruel. as if a "just say no to sex" because of disease and overpopulation approach would work

Re:easy

[Bombula]

There's nothing morally wrong with eating meat. The moral problems are with how the meat is grown. Growing meat in a vat would be nice, but what PETA ignores is that if this was the only way we ever farmed meat, then billions of creatures would never even have the privilege of existing in the first place.

The real moral issue is about suffering: do farmed animals suffer while they live or suffer while they die? If so, then farming is immoral. If not, well, then it's hard to argue farming is immoral. All things die. It may be morally wrong for humans to decide when an animal should die, but that's a much harder issue to resolve. What is easy to resolve is that animals should live comfortable, pleasant, healthy, hygenic lives and then be slaughtered instantly and painlessly without any prior fear or anxiety. This is readily achievable, though it is more expensive than growing animals in filthy boxes and pumping them full of drugs. Farmed in this way, it's pretty difficult to categorically condemn livestock agriculture.

Nice idea, but...

[Duck of Death]

I've often had the same sort of idea - if a cow can take grass, water and energy and make steaks, why shouldn't we be able to do the same thing? Recently, however, I've decided that even if they figured out how to do it tomorrow, it would not be to our benefit. It would end up being like baby formula - a product that's been around for decades, keeps getting tweaked to add this or that nutrient or remove or reduce undesirable components, yet still can't compare to breast milk. Or it will end up being like margarine, touted for decades as healthier than butter until they discovered that trans fats in the margarine were much worse for you than the saturated fats in the butter.

If they could grow meat, they would be unable to resist the temptation to fiddle with it. Rather that simply duplicate the meat from a grass fed, non-corn finished animal, they would reduce the cholesterol, boost the omega-3's (or whatever omega is good for you right now), add beta-carotene, and fortify it with vitamin C and calcium ("a full day's supply in every burger"). Then, ten years later, there will be a report that eating too much factory meat causes liver failure. The food scientists will tweak the recipe, declare it safe and healthy and we're off to the races again.

I do think they'll figure out how to do it (the cow can do it, after all). I just think the food industry has a very consistent record that demonstrates their inability to improve on or even match what mother nature can do, despite all their claims that they can.

DD

Torture? Murder?

[phorm]

Torturing animals doesn't serve a purpose. Killing them for the purpose of nourishment and consumption does.

Yes, perhaps it's in some ways distasteful, but - being omnivores - it's also part of our natural biological process. I'm sure this will cue the rant about vegetable and pill-based alternatives, but it's still not the way we're built to function.

You can't compare murdering somebody to the consumption of a food animal. It's not the same thing. And before you get into the "would killing be OK if we eat each other," that's also a no, as - except in cases of starvation - most mammals don't eat their own species either, and in many cases they don't kill each other except under a certain set of rules (territory, etc).

Re:Interesting...

[Stanistani]

You don't chew with canines - you tear stuff apart. I use my canines every time I eat chicken off the bone, or ribs, or even some fruit and veggies.

*RIP-SNARL-GNASH-TEAR-GRRR*

Another dead carrot...