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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 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.
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!
This kind of meet adds a whole new sub category for picky eaters to separate into. Those who eat meat from animals and those who eat meat from a factory lab.
For those of us who already eat anything, this only matters if the production technique produces a slab of meat that tastes as good and costs less than the old fashioned method: Feeding a real pig on everything from corn and table scraps to bits of other pigs, then chopping his head off when he gets fat enough.
BTW: They might have to get some nerve tissue into this lab meat before it can be exercised with electrical pulses (And yes. That dose sound like the best idea so far). Hmm... I wonder if I qualify for the job of "Experimental R&D Chef"
BTW: If this proves viable, expect the patent to be bought by someone who will fight/bribe tooth and nail to have "Animal Slavery" outlawed, or to protect us from the dangers of our pork addiction.
If you don't think that plausible consider what happened to hemp after nylon became viable.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Say goodbye to bacon pizzas, tasty and meaty hamburgers, hot dogs, a good grilled steak with french fries and most importantly, delicious food.
No. It means 'real beef' made from free range cows will be bought at specialty stores for top dollar rather than this mass produced anti-biotic, hormoned, rotten grain fed crap they try to pass off as 'beef' now.
Seriously... Have you ever bought and ate a real steak. No... Not the kind you buy at Western Corral, but the NY cut or Filet mignon aged beef marinated over 24 hours cooked by a professional with the right blend of herbs spices that melts in your mouth usually costing you over 30-40 or even $100 per plate (depending on where you go) combined with a matched set of alcohol. Mmmm... I'm getting hungry....
Anyways... I really doubt you're going to be able to tell the difference between the current stock meat that goes into hotdogs and McDonald's burgers and the vat grown they are talking about.
Now... I need that filet mignon.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Monoculturing any living tissue will require antibiotics of some sort. I really doubt that one can have a 100% clean factory environment for these, unless you have robots and robots to fix the robots ad-infinitum.
This kind of meet adds a whole new sub category for picky eaters to separate into. Those who eat meat from animals and those who eat meat from a factory lab.
I'm firmly in the dead-animals-only camp, not just for reasons of taste but of personal ethics. If people stop eating delicious animals then these animals will soon be endangered or even extinct. Protect biodiversity, insist on corpse-flesh.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
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?)
This meat is from a artificial "muscle" that has never received any kind of exercise or strengthened itself.
Isn't that a good thing? From Wikipedia:
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
GMO crops have a number of problems, not least of which is that companies own the rights to them and engineer varieties that don't produce viable seed so that farmers using them have to re-buy seed stock every year. And they subsidy the seeds initially to get farmers moved on to them. The end game is that the food supply becomes monopolised. I shouldn't have to explain all this. Artificial meat will in all likelihood also be encumbered by patents, at least for a while. But it's not going to become an integral part of the food supply so it wont matter. It will (probably) be fine.
;)
Albeit gross.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
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.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
> If people didn't eat meat, so much more land would be available, that we could feed everyone
> and still have a lot more land to return to the wild, thereby increasing biodiversity.
As a practical matter, real, honest-to-god oldschool "starving kids in ${poor country}" don't really exist anymore. At least, not for reasons that have anything whatsoever to do with arable land, drought, famine, or vermin. That's not to say that nobody is hungry, but most of THOSE hungry people will STILL go to bed hungry, even if every last acre of land and bushel of corn currently used to feed livestock ceases to be used for that purpose.
In America, at least, farmland no longer needed for factory farming is more likely to end up with strip malls and McMansions on it than wildlife or anything normally associated with "biodiversity".
In poor countries, animals will be grown as always. It might be cheaper to factory-produce ten million pounds of "cultured bacon" or "cultured beef" per week than to raise and slaughter the equivalent number of animals, but a poor family living in a hut somewhere isn't going to have the capital to go out and buy the necessary hardware. They're going to do what they always have... buy a few dozen newly-hatched chicks, a pig or two, and a cow. Less efficient, but equally less capital-intensive.
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.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
The laws of thermodynamics disagree with you.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
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
As a practical matter, real, honest-to-god oldschool "starving kids in ${poor country}" don't really exist anymore. At least, not for reasons that have anything whatsoever to do with arable land, drought, famine, or vermin.
This is true and the primary reason for that is poor government. African governments fail to create even the basic legal framework and proper enforcement necessary to achieve sustained economic growth . Without proper laws that protect private property and reasonably competent and non-corrupt enforcement there can be no real credit or private lending. Without credit and private lending it is difficult or impossible to engage in any large scale economic activity. In short, Africa is poor and hungry because African governments, with a few notable exceptions, have largely failed their peoples.
Finally, to add insult to injury, the vast amounts of foreign aid, and particularly food aid, serve to prevent African farmers from ever stepping onto the ladder of economic growth. Why bust your butt to bring a crop to market when every season there are trucks driving up and dropping sacks of "USA Wheat" in the marketplace for ten times less than it costs you to produce it? The African farmers are driven out of business by artificially cheap farm imports sent as "foreign aid" in the name of "helping the starving people". In the long run, nobody but farmers in wealthy nations benefits from farm subsidies. Incidentally, this is also why the trade talks generally go nowhere. The third world countries form a block to demand an end to farm subsidies while first world diplomats have been specifically instructed by their governments not to give an inch on subsidies.