Scientists Create Artificial Meat
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that scientists have created the first artificial meat by extracting cells from the muscle of a live pig and putting them in a broth of other animal products where the cells then multiplied to create muscle tissue. Described as soggy pork, researchers believe that it can be turned into something like steak if they can find a way to 'exercise' the muscle and while no one has yet tasted the artificial meat, researchers believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years' time. '"What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue. We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there," says Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University. "You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals." Animal rights group Peta has welcomed the laboratory-grown meat, announcing that "as far as we're concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there's no ethical objection while the Vegetarian Society remained skeptical. "The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust.""
The scientist raise a valid issue. This meat is from a artificial "muscle" that has never received any kind of exercise or strengthened itself. That is why it's not as steak, but I think it also affects taste of the meat too.
As a man who has run several pizzerias during my lenghty life, and as a man who respects a good steak, good bacon and good ham on a large pizza, I'm scared that this will replace the real meat at some point. This gives a stupid reason for Peta and other hippies to try to ban 'real' meat and put everybody to eat artificially produced meat.
Say goodbye to bacon pizzas, tasty and meaty hamburgers, hot dogs, a good grilled steak with french fries and most importantly, delicious food.
"The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust."
Simple: Add a gene that would make the artificial meat a recognizable color.
Instead of green eggs and ham we'll have green ham and eggs!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
For once, they make a rational and decent statement! This is a big improvement over their stupid tirade about Obama swatting a housefly.
The Vegetarian Society, OTOH, with their statement shows themselves to be still a bunch of extremists.
The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered.
I'm sure that the "artificial" meat will cost a third of traditional meats.
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
If done correctly, and without horrible hidden side effects of some sort, this could be huge. Removing the need to have an actual cow born, raised, fed, and kept in order to be able to make hamburger would remove a tremendous amount of damage to the environment, as well as opening up a lot of land to be available for use growing food for humans, rather than growing food for animals or being pasturage for animals.
I'd try and list all the different effects it could have, but I think I'd have to go on for pages...and besides, I'm sure someone else will have done it by the time I post ;-)
Dan Aris
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Is it green by any chance?
Ignoring the obvious innuendos... that leads to another interesting question:
If it was made from grown human cells, is eating it cannibalism?
What if it was grown from your own cells? I know I've consumed plenty of my own cells (don't go there, get your mind out of the gutter), but what if I grew myself some delicious Bugnuts Soggy Meat(tm)?
Agreed, we must keep the farm animal population down before they rise up and kill us all like in Animal Farm.
This Artifical Meat is going to backfire on PETA. If, in 5-10 years, this Artificial Meat market becomes big enough to surpass traditional meat harvesting techniques, what does PETA think will happen to all that cattle and other like animals? What are we just going to give them up and let them live free? No, we'll slaughter the livestock we have as we transition to the new method. Then, we expand over the previous land we used to graze and keep the animals; replacing (more or less) open land with whatever vats, structures, and buildings we need to develope SyntheSteak. Domesticated populations will plummet and wild populations will be no better off, the net result will be fewer animals in the world (but more meat!)
Don't read too much into this yammering post; I'm all for this idea.
I simply wonder why PETA still thinks being stuck in the farm is worse than what we've (historically) done to animals that don't serve as useful a purpose. If the cow or pig isn't being used, I would expect us to (intentionally or not) create conditions in their environment which pushes them out and dwindles their population, not unlike we've done to wolves or such.
Demented But Determined.
So lets see... leaving aside for the moment blood borne illness issues, right now we'd have to grow the "artificial" meat using animal fetus blood... and where will we get all that animal fetus blood? Perhaps we can just raise animal fetuses? And how will the "synthetic" solution be made? From "synthetic" fetuses? Turtles all the way down, I think.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
I find the phrasing pretty weak, about being hard to come up with a label "people" would trust. Sounds like hedging between saying "we don't want to trust the lable" but not wanting to call anyone a liar. People trust the label on organic foods; why would this be harder?
To me labeling isn't the interesting question (but then, I'm no vegitarian). To me the interesting question is economic, and only if the economics make this product something uninteresting to me do the labeling issues even come into play. I can see three possible outcomes:
1) This approach hits a dead end, and it turns out you just can't make high-quality meat that's fit for human consumption in a lab. The researchers seem convinced that won't happen, so moving on...
2) The approach works, but the cost to make this meat exceeds the cost of doing it the old-fashioned way. I'm optimistic enough to doubt this; consider all of the energy costs involved in raising livestock. But who knows what will be required to make "good" artificial meat; maybe this is how it goes down. In that case, it won't add noticably to the food supply in an economic sense, and it becomes uninteresting to me. It remains intersting to PETA (since they don't want to eat "real" meat). There's niche demand for it, but it's more expensive than "real" meat - conditions that would make it possible to have mis-labeling if the food manufacturers were very careful about it.
3) The approach works and produces meat more cheaply than you can raise "real" meat. This is the only case where I care about the idea, because in this case you actually increase the food supply; but in that case, nobody has a reason to mislabel a more expensive product and sell it to you as a less-expensive product. Even if they were just jerks who wanted to trick you into eating something you don't want to eat, they'd never be able to pull it off. (How do you hide a slaughtering operation from regulators?)
I'm not skeptical of the story, but I am skeptical that PETA won't have something to say about it if and when this hits production. This has the possibility of being revolutionary to the way we eat. If we don't have to wait for actual animals to grow, and can grow only the good parts without wasting money on all the unnecessary parts, we can grow meat faster and cheaper that would also be better (just clone the best animal to begin with!)
I will be the first in line to eat cloned meat.
or else!
I'll have me another slice of Shoggoth
"[the] Vegetarian Society remained skeptical. "The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust."""
Oh please. What you do, then, is get off your lazy skeptic butt and go to the place they are making the meat and look around. Get official people you trust as a vegetarian (whatever that means) to go investigate and report. From that report, which you trust, you should be able to know if it is coming from killed animals or from tissue generation.
This skepticism is undue and irrational. They assume that because it is possible for an animal-slaughtering meat company to 'trick' customers by pretending it was grown in tissue culture, that it may necessarily be true.... That's garbage. In reality, a company carrying out deception of this magnitude would not go unnoticed and would probably be sued.
You have to think: thousands of people work in meat processing plants. Every single one of them would have to be the best secret keeper on the planet for the suggested 'truth' to not be found out. And if there is anything we can know about secrets is that the more people that know it, the less likely it stays secret.
As a matter of fact, even when only one person (the secret creator) knows a secret, it isn't safe. People are eager to share secrets. And once the number becomes 2 or more, the odds of it remaining secret reduce dramatically.
And now I return fire with an equally ridiculous claim: The Vegetarian Society is only trying to question this so they can get me to quit eating meat, thus eat more veggies, and end up dying from rhubarb poison on accident (but on purpose because they meant to do it)!
Damn vegetarian society could probably be trying to kill us all!
Bet this stuff takes just like the "mystery meat" in the cafeteria back at my dear ol' alma mater. Yum.
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OK, how do you produce the equivalent of 1 million animals with one animal without violating the laws of thermodynamics?
In order to get the same calories out you need to get the same, or more, calories in. For meat it is in the range of 10 times the calories from veggies (e.g. corn) to get one calorie of meat.
They talk about a "meat broth". This is where the calories come from. No big change. In fact it may be worse since it is higher on the food chain, you have to first produce the meat for the broth then grow the "meat" stuff. And if they switch to veg. protein we would be better off eating soy or tempeh.
I shudder to think of the meat rendering waste they will use for the broth. And if meat is still required to make meat, PETA just screwed up.
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Cattle are one of the most successful species on the planet. Why? Because, they threw their lot in with humans. Humans do don't care about preserving something with which they have no relationship. It takes resources to keep cows, and few to none will do it unless they is an economic benefit. Therefore, one must wonder is PETA's real motive to drive cows extinct in their drive to save cows from humans?
Agreed, PETA doesn't deserve to have their existence justified by globbing a quote from one of their spokes-loons onto every article related to animals and/or food production. They should STFU, the thousands of dogs/cats/etc they "rescue" don't euthanize themselves.
I put to you that a fast-food chain, given the option to guarantee a steady supply of meat of identical quality, unaffected by drought and not "fed" (and therefore not really susceptible to BSE/etc), that takes less than two years to produce, whose cost is unaffected by fluctuations in the international grain or corn market, is likely to make the investment the second the twenty-year costs come even. I also put to you that fast food chain's burgers are flavoured less by meat and more by seasoning. As someone whose family already sold their beef ranch, and who consumes a lot of beef, I think this is a fantastic idea.
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Would you mind explaining why? I'm not in disagreement but, as I said, out of my league in this one. I read over the Laws of Thermodynamics in response to your post and I can't find one that's violated. Are you saying that the heat generated would be too great? Or maybe your saying I couldn't get more electricity out than I put in, which would be true except I thought the protein, oxygen, "food crud", etc would be an additional source of energy.
MG
It's a pain in the ass applying bronze age ethics to modern life, isn't it?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the original posters understands that. His idea would be a way of converting "food" to electricity and edible meat by way of capturing the energy inherent in the flexing of muscle required to exercise the meat.
I can point to PETA's web site, which has tons of figures about how much land is used to grow meat. You can question the veracity of the figures, but at least they're there. Do you have anything to support your claims?
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