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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?
I think I've got a winning idea, thanks to this film. Hopefully those PETA folks won't ask too many questions. Then things might get... unpleasant.
Tofu? I'll take my prize in small bills please.
My work here is dung.
I like PETA, but I couldn't eat a whole one.
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
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
If they're vegans for more than one narrow reason (which they seem to be) this will not make them happy.
I can't recall the comedian, but someone once noted "Why do vegetarians need to make their food (tofu pups, veggieburgers) look like meat they simply wont eat? You don't see monks keeping blow-up dolls just hanging around."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
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.
There is never any point finishing a car analogy on slashdot....
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
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.
PETA loves meat. You do know it stands for People Eating Tasty Animals, right? :)
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
My experience leads me to believe that you are unusual among vegans, or even among people who are fashionably vegetarian for some short period of time.
For many of your dietary bretheren giving up the opportunity to sit in coffee shop wearing pantaloons and blurt out pseudo facts about how meat eaters are killing themselves and the planet and all the animals would be too much to bear. I think they would continue to oppose in vitro meat just to preserve that pastime.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
"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?"
... ever seen a farm pig or a farm cow in the wild?
... freeing them is not the answer. Treating them well and with respect is.
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
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
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
If scientists are swiping there ideas from Torchwood episodes nowadays, they'd better be prepared to start shagging each other and coming back from the dead on a regular basis as well.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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.
"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.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
There are actually some really good medical reasons for not being a cannibal...Basically you're probably not going to catch anything from the cow, because it's a cow, but a human? Make sure yours is extra well-done.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
You know, we evolved canine teeth for a reason. Do you really think it's healthy not to use them?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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!
Umm.. M&Ms are make of MILK chocolate. Last time I checked, milk isn't made in petri dishes.
crowbar??
They'll fry up really nicely. And then we can start on the Chinese and the Indians. There's lots of them, so that's a herd that'll take a long time to cull out. In fact, we may never even need to eat the bony butts of east africa.
Just a modest proposal is all I'm suggesting...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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
"Can I finish? Can I finish?
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).
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...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Yes, and they are an ecological disaster.