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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.
The obvious solution is some sort of horrid electrode array.
Weak-kneed members of the public will have to be kept away from the giant culture vats, where hideous amorphous flesh lumps, studded with electrodes, thrash and strain; but they should be able to get exactly as much exercise as they need, without becoming excessively tough.
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
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Is it green by any chance?
The implications for space travel are cool. The implications for feeding people who currently live with hunger could be cool. I doubt they would ever completely do away with natural meat. It will probably always be available for those who can pay for it, but if this becomes cheaper and easier to make than raising animals I could see it becoming pretty big. I would think that if the process can be refined then we could get more meat with less environmental impact.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Or a delicious slice of Chicken Little...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants
Ruling out some kind of vegetarian theocracy, that's not how economics works.
Butchers sell sausages, most of which are cheap and tasty. Why do they do this? After all, how are they going to sell those expensive Wagu steaks if there's cheap sausages available in the same display cabinet. Are butchers just stupid? Clearly not. It's called growing the market. People who can't afford expensive steak don't go become vegetarians and never step into a butchers, they eat the cheaper meat, and on occasion they splurge on steak. A "cheaper than sausages" artificial meat will have the same effect.. for a start, people with ethical considerations will now be eating meat.. some of those people will lose those ethical considerations later in life and be tempted to sample the more expensive meat varieties.
How we know is more important than what we know.
claimed by KFC.
(I'm joking)
So this could be a way to have guilt-free veal, I guess. Or foie gras.
I would not be surprised if this is widely adopted in, say, 50 years' time. Epicureans will extol the values of "real" meat over vat meat, environmentalists will fight to make vat meat more affordable, and a generation of kids will wonder what the big deal is, meat is meat and they'd still rather play with the mashed potatoes.
Actually I am a lab rat in an elaborate plot to take over the world.
Sounds like it's time to get in on the Long Pork market.
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.
PETA could demand it but how would that be any different than today?
I think the only way real meat would disappear is if it's the result of the market. If artificial meat could be produced more cheaply than natural meat then you should start to worry, especially if the quality is somewhat inferior but not so inferior that people don't buy it.
However, I think there will always be a market for natural meat. There's already plenty of proof that people are willing to pay more for grocery products viewed as superior in some way (Whole Foods for example).
What, Eindhoven University doesn't have "student food service"? My alma mater would have served up the stuff in a New York minute along with the usual by-products, fillers, and cereals....
My Hope is that this technology can one day provide us with cheap easily produced bacon-wrapped steak and other meats. My true hope is that some sort of animal will be produced that will grow in some sort of bacon wrapped configuration because I want to gaze upon this delicious animal frolicking mouth-waterlingly in an open field before I eat it.
As a foodie, all I have to say is that a large part of the taste of a good steak comes from the FAT content of the meat, and that _pure_ 'cultivated' muscle tissue would make for a terrible steak, and an even worse hamburger.
Until they manage to grow a well-marbled piece of meat, they won't be any better than a tofu burger.
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!
It's not PETA or some vegetarian group that would cause the dominance of faux meat, it's simple quality and economy. If faux meat tastes good and is cheaper to produce, THEN it's time to say goodbye to real meat. If not, your exemplary diet and admirable lust for the blood of animals have nothing to fear from this development.
Now, I'm going to go home and apply heat, butter, and spices to part of the delicious carcass of a recently deceased animal, which I will then consume without regard to it's ethical implications or environmental consequences. Mmmmm. Maybe I'll complement it with a nice, leafy salad.
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 ?
somehow I do not see this ever stopping me from hunting and eating venison, duck, goose ect..
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)
Reminds me of an episode of "Better Off Ted" called "Test Tube Meat" where they have to figure out a way to exercise there lump of grown meat because the unexercised attempt it tasted like "despair".
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.
It's an odd scenario, and I suspect it would go different ways depending on the rabbi you ask. I suspect many rabbis would still forbid meat cloned from trafe animals, but I suspect vat-beef would be acceptable. But IANAR (I am not a rabbi) so I can't say for sure.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Could it be contracted and expanded with electric shocks?
It's amazing that a vat full of electrified meat is more appetizing than current factory farms...
Better Off Ted Episode 2: "Heroes": Phil and Lem, of Veridian Dynamics, try to grow cow-less meat... Reportedly, the meat currently tastes like "despair".
Veridian Dynamics. We're the future of food, developing the next generation of food and food-like products. Tomatoes... the size of this baby, lemon-flavored fish, chicken that lay 16 eggs a day, which is a lot for a chicken, organic vegetables chock-full of antidepressants. At Veridian Dynamics, we can even make radishes so spicy that people can't eat them, but we're not, because people can't eat them. Veridian Dynamics. Food. Yum.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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
Cherry/orange/banana flavoured anything aren't made entirely of cherry/orange/banana, this meat is made of meat. It IS meat. A banana grown in the lab tastes quite a lot like a banana.
The implications for space travel are cool. The very long term implications for the meat industry are interesting. But the implications for those living with hunger are minimal. It's almost certainly still going to be more efficient to just live off grains, pulses et al. There might be some possibility that this stuff can be grown somewhat efficiently by feeding it with off low-cost nutrients that aren't fit for human consumption... but it will be a long time before that becomes cost effective and the supporting costs for growing this stuff (vats, heating, pumps, antibiotics or whatever else is required to keep growing meat without a supporting immune system healthy and pure) will also offset its cost effectiveness against vegetarian food sources.
It's not impossible, but we already have means to turn low-quality nutrients (from a human point of view) into a nutritious textured product, and it's called Quorn
I don't pretend to speak for all vegetarians, but speaking personally, I think this has potential to be a great thing in replacing natural meat in people's diets. But I've no desire to eat it myself. Aside from general *yuck*, I'm quite happy with a healthy vegetarian diet and I know a lot of other vegetarians are also. We don't need to punish our colons by giving that up. But for those that might otherwise eat natural meat, this is probably a good thing. It is certainly interesting. I'm disappointed at the lack of pictures, but I guess they know it wouldn't help future marketing to have some Dr. Who alien slopping around in a tank.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
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?)
Slig, it's what's for dinner.
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!
Once this working, how soon will we see one of the processors start growing human cells? Seriously, it seems like Germany and other countries (including America) have a fetish these days for cannibalism. There would be no legal means of obtaining the meat from a real source, so no competition, though hopefully a SMALL market.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The sustenance angle is all well and good; however, what I want to know is how long till the "real flesh" fleshlight?
You're horrible. Meat is murder! Tasty, tasty murder.
...but the NY cut or Filet mignon aged beef marinated over 24 hours cooked by a professional with the right blend of herbs spices...
As a classically trained chef I can tell you that marinating filet mignon for 24 hours is a terribly bad idea. With such a small amount of connective tissue and fat it would be mushy and over seasoned. Although I do agree with the rest of your post. :)
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!
If people stop eating actual animals, we'll be overrun with chickens in a decade. Up to our friggin' ears I tells ya! We'll have to carve our way through with machetes while wearing goalie masks.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
Human flesh is found to grow quickly and cheaply under certain laboratory conditions. In other news, Oscar Meyer has just announced a new "Long Pork" flavor hot dog.
If there is one thing I am sure of, it's that the Japanese will pervert that into porn.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
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.
now we can fill in the rest of the Soylent rainbow
save me some Soylent Purple
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
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.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
There's a Mitchell & Webb for that. Favorite line:"There might be a few polar bears left if more people wanted one for breakfast."
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....
Yeah, and that $5/bottle water tastes so much better than tap water. You're paying a lot, so you expect it will be good, and since taste is wholly subjective you're experiencing confirmation bias. Yeah, I've had $50/plate steak. It's never as good as when I make it myself, which is just another instance of confirmation bias.
Save yourself some money, buy your fillet from the butcher, and learn to make a steak. Then you'll be impressing women with actual skills instead of how much money you make. That attracts a more desirable demographic, and as a bonus she's already at your place.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Not "Soylent Green" . . . The Space Merchants.
Pohl & Kornbluth's novel features a conflict between the integrated advertising/production complex that is stripping the world of resources and manipulating the populace and the benighted Consies (conservationists). The lead is kidnapped, stripped of his identity, and forced into a contract labor job. He works in an urban algea farm. Most of the goop isn't consumed by humans. It is processed into blood substitute that feeds Chicken Little, a giant pulsing wad of chicken heart cells. One of the workers slices off pieces which are packaged and shipped off for consumption.
This, in a 1952 novel by WWII veterans who worked in the advertising industry.
If faux meat tastes good and is cheaper to produce, THEN it's time to say goodbye to real meat.
I would say it would just come down to cheaper to produce. Take a look at todays beef. Fed on corn as this fattens them up the quickest and little if any exercise. Meat tastes ok until you taste free range grass fed beef (the way they used to do it).
Free range grass fed is WAY tastier but people dont buy it because it costs twice as much. It costs more because corn fed cows hit the weight requirements in 9 months instead of the two years for the natural way.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
and have absolutely no idea where their food comes from or how it got there
Exactly. I love meat, but current factory farming practices are horrendous, from a: 1) animal welfare point of view, 2) worker safety point of view, and 3) clean and safe food supply point of view.
It's almost sad to think about, but unless you are a hunter, vat-made food will probably be universally more appealing than current meat industry practices. Plus, no living organism = harder for meat to contract and carry diseases such as e-coli, mad cow, hoof and mouth, ect.
They also need to synthesize fat for flavor and not work out the meat *too* much, less it becomes too lean and flavorless.
Weak-kneed members of the public will have to be kept away from the giant culture vats, where hideous amorphous flesh lumps, studded with electrodes, thrash and strain
This is the best thinly-disguised metaquote about Slashdot I've seen in a long time.
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?
I don't know about that. Whole Foods may be doing OK, but I don't see them ever overtaking Wal*Mart.
By and large people want to buy stuff that is cheap, filling and tastes good regardless of health issues (at least here in the US from what I've seen).
If the artificial meat is more expensive, then it will satisfy a niche market just as organic food does today.
I just keep picturing the flesh walls in various first person shooters like Quake....
Think I'll be buying a double barrel in the next five years...
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
Breweries do a pretty good job of maintaining a clean environment for the yeast to do its job, and they've never needed robots for that purpose.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
If we get overrun with chickens we can send muscle powered robots out to kill them. The meat needs to be exercised, so let's put them in robots programmed to hunt down chickens. Then we can blame all the chicken deaths on the meat-bots and then, in turn, hunt down the meat-bots and eat them.
But seriously, if the meat needs to be exercised, it seems obvious to have them do some sort of useful work. Of course, the best cuts of meat (the tenderloins and rib roasts that sit up high - which is where the phrase "eating high on the hog" comes from) do some, but not much work. So if the value of work that the muscle does offsets the price of the meat, we'd still have more expensive, tenderer cuts and tougher, harder working, but cheaper cuts.
Meet the meat
---
Genetic Engineering Feed @ Feed Distiller
Guess i'll order Tea, Earl Grey, hot to go with that meat then.
You can order that. However, what you will get is a drink that is almost, but not entirely unlike tea...
No sig for the moment.
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.
As I said in another post, biological systems are extremely complex; too complex to accurately copy, in many cases. A banana grown from seed in a lab will taste like a banana (obviously), but what about cells from a banana replicated on an artificial matrix? Reproducing the taste, texture, density, ripening characteristics and so on of the natural fruit takes more than just a mass of cells. When something as simple as an isomer of a chemical can alter how our senses react to it, keeping every factor identical to the natural system becomes very difficult.
The real question is not whether this will be identical to natural meat, but how much it will differ and how detrimental (or indeed beneficial) those differences will be to the finished product.
If people stop eating actual animals, we'll be overrun with chickens in a decade. Up to our friggin' ears I tells ya! We'll have to carve our way through with machetes while wearing goalie masks.
You say this like it's a bad thing.
I hate to tell you this, but "add a gene" isn't the simple solution. The simple solution, which also covers BSE-infected meat, salmonella outbreaks, and any other food safety issue, involves implementing a tracking system from farm to table. It's not difficult, and should have been done years ago. In fact, Canadian produce farmers already have nearly 100% tracking of their goods, while the US is at 5%. It's good for consumers, and it's good for producers.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
my guess is that the factories at Intel or AMD are pretty clean (you could probably safely eat off the floor but in doing so you would horribly contaminate the factory) of course if this meat costs the same amount per ounce as a computer chip then I am pretty sure there will be no sale lol
Not saying your not right about creating meat in a factory is just dirty work.
Just saying that keeping it clean is not science fiction and may be possible.
> 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.
It would be much easier to breed some very stupid, ugly and disgusting pigs, which nobody would ever think of protecting and defending ... our current breeds are way too cute, especially when they are very young. Some vermiform and really dumb cows would be nice, too.
Breweries do a pretty good job of maintaining a clean environment for the yeast to do its job, and they've never needed robots for that purpose.
That's because yeast doesn't like it when other micro organisms tries to come on its turf. And yeast can get nasty.
The best way to keep the nasties away isn't to keep a clean room. It's to keep friendly germs around to do the job for you. That's why (for example) completely sterilised cheese is stupid.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
as another classically trained chef, you CAN marinade filet for 24 hours but it very much depends on what you marinade in- honey and white pepper marinated filet is delicious for a 24hr marinade although 12 will do. traditional marinades with high acidity (penetrative and corrosive vinegar or citrus for example) will, as the man says, destroy the integrity of the meat. filet or any good steak is best served in my opinion with as little seasoning as possible (and never salt- not ever- i mean ever! it will ruin any good steak)
so you can tasty its natural meaty goodness.
We can already feed everyone. It's down to economics that we don't. The West produces vast amounts more food than we need, and the majority of it that is sold doesn't even get to our plates. Every year less farmland is worked in parts of Europe as it becomes unprofitable.
As for conditions - well, our beef here in Ireland comes from cattle who are raised on grass (apparently means the meat is far healthier than corn-fed or even the grain mixtures used elsewhere in Europe). You can see them out grazing for yourself, most people would know someone on a farm and have visited a farm or two, and while slaughterhouses aren't pretty, EU legislation is so strict that there are few cases of people getting away with mistreatment of animals. One can buy free-range eggs and chickens, and even on a large scale that just fits the definition, it's fairly reasonable (certainly compared to battery chickens). Tastes better too.
People do need to eat less meat though - even just from dietary perspective. I'm not talking about something regimental either - reasonable portions daily would still be a lot less than many people are currently eating.
This synthetic meat thing I have to say sounds absolutely grim from a taste and dietary perspective. If it comes to market, it will not be due to any superior qualities or advantages save one - that it will make some people a lot more money.
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It's a pain in the ass applying bronze age ethics to modern life, isn't it?
If that's what it takes to get the kids outside to play, then so be it.
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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Only very few animal type make up most of human consumed meat
You haven't been to china have you
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
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.
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"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell