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

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: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