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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 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?
claimed by KFC.
(I'm joking)
Sounds like it's time to get in on the Long Pork market.
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.
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.
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
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?
Do you really think the farmers of America (or any other country with lobbyists, for that matter) are going to let this happen? They're going to demonize the shit out of lab meat and complain to congress that they derk er jerbs, Then they'll be made some protected industry or subsidized by the government or some equally retarded bullshit. As I understand it the meat industry in America has a LOT of political weight to throw around.
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. :)
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
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
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."
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.
Cows will be around for a while. We've had several different milk substitutes around for many years and people still drink plain old milk. Work on artificial cheese has come about as far as artificial meat due to the complexities of trying to make soy proteins act like milk proteins.
One thing that is forgotten (or ignored) when discussing land use with regards to cattle is that a large majority of the rangeland in the u.s. is unsuitable for farming. In addition, certain breeds of cow can fatten up on land that would starve another breed; proper herd management can allow the animals to fatten up without destroying the soil and plants. This is why it always irks me a bit to hear people talk about how one cow uses enough land to grow wheat for 40 people or some nonsense. Here, take these seeds- go try to grow them out west in the free ranges.
This meat-in-a-vat project has a long way to go- they need to figure out how to tone the muscle, marble it with fat, configure the nutrients to make the meat not taste like a chewable vitamin, etc.
There's a taco bell near here; in 5 years I'll go sample the vat-meat.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
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.
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
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.
---
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.
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
> 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.
Hey Kids!
Sick of that boring old vat hamburger? Dive into Kraft's Ultracheese Burgernator! We genetically modified sentient meat into producing it's own cheese, which layers itself thick and rich with genuine Kraft-like flavor! We promise that it won't cause the zombie apocalypse!*
*Guarantees against the zombie apocalypse not guaranteed.
If that's what it takes to get the kids outside to play, then so be it.
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.