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

Cloning Tissue or Whole Animal?

[eldavojohn]

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? Are they cloning the sample or the animal? If it's just a sample piece of tissue, I would imagine most would be fine with it. If they are cloning the entire animal, it's still a physically separate organism with a central nervous system that is attached to a cerebrum. It's still feeling pain so I would think all Vegans would be opposed to it.

Vegans != Hive mind.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

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?

Just like people who comment on slashdot, vegans have a wider variety of opinions & reasons to arrive at their dietary choice. Trying to ask them collectively what they think about something like this is useless.

It would be like asking the slashdot crowd "would you buy Microsoft products if they open sourced them"

For those who prefer car analogies, it would be like asking

Re:Answer to your question

[R2.0]

"vat-o-meat will have just as much fat and cholesterol as the real stuff."

Actually, probably not. As I understand it, all the techniques of "culturing" cells are directed toward making all the cells the same - if there are different types of cells in the culture, it is considered a failure. So "cultured meat" would be ALL muscle cells, with no fat cells or connective tissue. Which, while pleasing the health conscious, would be a culinary disaster - picture the toughest, driest steak on the planet.

One solution would be to culture genetically engineered fat cells with little bad cholesterol, and then grind it in with the cultured meat. So the choices would be hamburgers and sausages that probably taste worse than tofu, or real "once had hooves" meat.

I'm thinking that prize will remain unclaimed for a long time.

A paradise predicted in "The Space Merchants"

[originalhack]

Skum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America. Every hour you could drink from your canteen and take a salt tablet. Every two hours you could take five minutes. At sunset you turned in your coveralls and went to dinner --- more slices from Chicken Little --- and then you were on your own. You could talk, you could read, you could go into trance before the dayroom hypnoteleset, you could shop, you could pick fights, you could drive yourself crazy thinking of what might have been, you could go to sleep.

In The Space Merchants (Frederick Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth, 1952), Chicken Little was a huge amorphous blob of growing meat that fed all of society. Much of the rest of Pohl's vision has become eerily true, consumers.

Re:Hmm...

[trolltalk.com]

You can have my soylent green when you pry it from my cold dead ... ummm, on second thought ...

So, PETA's offering a million bucks. Chump change compared to what it's worth.

Anyone remember the sci-fi story with "chicken little" - that one piece of repeatedly cloned, vat-grown chicken flesh that was made into chicken breast, leg, etc.? If they could throw in some Octopus genes, everyone'd get a drumstick!

Re:a farm pig or a farm cow in the wild?

[raddan]

Yes, and they are an ecological disaster.

Re:They are unpleasant already

[Xiaran]

100 years ago we didn't have the weird idea that eating an animal was a tragedy

Who is *we* exactly?

Jainism

Re:They are unpleasant already

[mog007]

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.

Well, when you consider that PETA's ideal world would ban honey, pets of any sort, circuses, seeing eye dogs for the blind, and most importantly they would totally stop all animal testing in medicine which would cause the medical field to practically grind to a halt. I wouldn't put it past them to put cells above the person they came out of, these people would rather a person died from diabetes then get insulin which was created by use of animal testing.

Unless your name is Mary Beth Sweetland.