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

Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Isnt fake meat called...

[Mazrim_Ta]

Tofu? I'll take my prize in small bills please.

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.

hmm

[strack]

I like PETA, but I couldn't eat a whole one.

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

Silly.

[jpellino]

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."

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.

For those who prefer car analogies

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

There is never any point finishing a car analogy on slashdot....

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.

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

[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

[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: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...

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

[spidercoz]

We kill flies and mosquitoes because they're pests. We kill cows and chickens because we're hungry. We kill pheasants and quails because it's fun, and we're hungry. We kill people because they're pests, and it's fun.

With apologies to George Carlin

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

[gnick]

...perhaps the PETA people might want to sponsor some genetic engineering research to allow humans to digest the plant matter that cows can eat that we can't. I actually eat grass all of the time, it just needs to be preprocessed before it's ready for direct consumption. Personally, I run it through a cow, have the butcher extract it once it's ready, and then grill it up and enjoy it. Grass can be delicious when properly prepared.

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

[DaveV1.0]

See, fish aren't warm and furry and have big doe eyes. They fail the cuteness test, so it is OK to eat them.