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In-Vitro Muscle Cells, It's What's For Dinner
wanzeo writes "Within the last decade, many of us have experienced the encroachment of ethics into our mealtime. Phrases such as vegetarian, vegan, organic, bST, GMO, etc. have become part of common grocery store advertising. The most recent addition to the list of ethically charged food is in-vitro meat, or meat that was cultured in a petri dish, and was never part of a live animal. The project has been brought to fruition by Mark Post, a biologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. Grown using animal stem-cells on a nutrient medium, the nearly see-through strips of muscle would need to be stacked nearly 3,000 times to approach the thickness of a burger. The practice promises to be more humane, sustainable, and efficient than conventional meats, with one analysis suggesting it would, 'use 35 to 60 percent less energy, emit 80 to 95 percent less greenhouse gas and use around 98 percent less land.' In a world where nearly half of all crop production is used to feed livestock, a move towards artificial meat may be inevitable."
Soylent Green. Because you're what's for dinner.
Monsanto will patent it, claim real meat infringes, then make us all eat it. No labelling of fake meat will be allowed, so we won't know what we are eating. At that time maybe I'll try the frankensalmon.
Sounds too lean.
Synthetic meat is still too expensive. This process will be optimized to a fabricated protein paste fed through a tube to power your assigned functions until you wear out and are flushed. Witness the progress of humanity.
If I want non meat protein, there's plenty of plant-based sources. If I want meat, I prefer it come from an animal. I have no qualms about killing an animal for meat. I also find sanitized supermarket packaging retarded. Trying to detach meat from the idea an animal died for it is twisted. People shouldn't hind from that fact and be respectful an animal died for the meat.
Offtopic I know,
but are we stuck with that big square box now?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Vegetarians like to say that they're getting all the protein they need. And by the numbers, beans and grains do have good amounts of protein... But these proteins are locked up for storage, and have Protease inhibitors to interfere with their digestion. Trypsin is what makes Soybeans so inedible...
Potatoes are the best vegan source of protein, because potatoes' defenses are against the microbes that cause rotting, whereas the above-ground portions of the plants have all sorts of defenses against animals.
Gelatin is a good source of protein because of the kinds of amino acids that it has, and does NOT have. The recent news about synthetic human gelatin is a bit more important than this form of synthetic meat, methinks.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Just because PETA says something is unethical doesn't mean it is.
There is nothing unethical about eating meat.
There is nothing unethical about eating whale, they are about as smart as pigs.
There is nothing unethical about eating dog or cat. It's just what you are used to.
It is unethical to try to impose your opinions on others. I'm looking at you herbivores.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
From The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl (w/CM Kornbluth).
Published by St. Martin's Press in 1952
Read the link for the references to the REAL "Chicken Little" experiment that started it all.
If you need to stack the sheets 3000 times in order to approach the thickness of meat, you only have to fold them 12 times.
That's what they used to say about fungus/yeast. Unfortunately, it gives folks like me migrines and I would suspect this frankencrap will have its own health risks, but it will keep the doctors busy, so I'm sure they're cremin' in their jeans about it. Deliver me from this kind of "progress."
The world is over populated. Why waste money on this when there already is an abundant supply of meat?
Cue "organic" and "wholesome" varieties of in-vitro meat that were cultured in "fair trade" nutrient mediums.
I like it. Followed the link and discovered autoap. Been passively looking for something like that for a while.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I my opinion, biologist's energy and intellect are misdirected. Let's get him something else to do. What about focusing on getting the reason and possible cure of one terrible disease like diabetes?
In type 1 diabetes, folks cannot produce enough insulin and in the type 2, they are resistant to its action. This is one disease that will explode this century.
Next, i am gonna send him an email, urging him to direct his energy to what I'd call more [potentially] useful outcomes.
You mean exactly like what we do with farm animals?
It is one of the very few science fiction books that predicted the future, right down to context sensitive advertising on flat screens and the takeover of government by capitalism gone berserk. I'm surprised it isn't as well known as 1984, because Orwell got most of it wrong while Pohl and Kornbluth got an awful lot right.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
There was an art piece at the MOMA's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit titled "Victimless Leather" which involved growing a batch of stem cells into the shape of a tiny jacket. The piece eventually had to be "killed" when it grew out of control... as stem cells tend to do (and why their promise is over-exaggerated because they give you cancer).
I appreciate people working on innovations like this, but we are decades and decades away from getting anything practical out of it. The meat we get from mother nature has billions of years of natural selection going into it, making it grow more efficiently. We co-evolved with it, meaning we are selected to make to the most efficient use of its nutrients. It's going to take a lot of time in the lab to match the nutrition and efficiency of muscle meat produced from 3.5 billion years of evolution.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
How long until he can grow bacon?
I, for one, am glad to know that even when global warming has killed all other species in the world we'll still have meat to eat.
The meat won't have the right texture or flavor as meat off-the-bone. Part of the flavor comes from the animal using its body, exercising and consuming foods which contribute to the whole meat experience. In-vitro meat is the first step, now they have to figure out how to prepare it before it goes to market.
(Post) hasn't yet sampled his own creation, but reviews from others are not great.
Please, you first! FAIL
If it's so important, why aren't you doing it? Oh, your strengths and desires lie in other areas? Well, so do his (obviously). And frankly, if he did as you suggest, and someone beat him to the cure, most likely all his effort would have been a waste. Not all biology is the same, just as not all computer science or software engineering is the same.
Serious question - if you clone pig meat, without the animal ever being grown, it won't have hooves - so is it kosher? What if you clone human meat from a volunteer? Is that cannibalism?
Have you considered that maybe like say, programming, biology is also a big field with a lot of room for specialization?
Just because somebody can do a good job of writing an operating system doesn't mean they'd be a good game programmer. Same way, I don't see why this guy would necessarily have the right skills to work on diabetes.
Also, on what grounds do you think you can command people to do whatever research you think is important? If it's that big of a deal for you, why aren't you doing the research yourself, or at least funding it?
People who think meat is inefficient compared to vegetable don't understand that Grazing animal use the massive tracts of un-airable land and don't require labor and oil and pesticide intensive production techniques. Water is our most precious resource and growing crops uses massive amounts of it, and the run off poisons streams. It can even leave land too salty or nutrient deprived for anything but specialized fertilizer fed crops. You can of course over graze too, as seen by the desertification of some areas. The point is that saying crop growing is always more efficient that raising cattle shows a profound misunderstanding of the earth. Eat a banana and it probably traveled 2500 miles, was grown in a chopped-down rain forest, with massive amounts of pesticide.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Well research in this vein (ha ha) should continue if for no other reason than it would be great to be able to have a big juicy steak on a space ship! Of course one could see all sorts of interesting (bad) things happening due to the combination of zero-g, cosmic rays and endlessly multiplying cells!
Does anyone know if there are any experiments in trying to make fish meat (sushi) along these lines? Pound for pound (or ounce for ounce) perfectly made uniform slabs of high grade fish have got to be the most expensive/valuable bits of non-human protein on the planet. I mean when a single (big) tuna costs several hundred thousand dollars in the Tokyo fish market, you know there could be profit for even an expensive technology.
Finally, (I know this is gross), would eating synthesized human flesh be considered cannibalism? I mean is cannibalism bad because you had to kill someone to eat or is it bad because you are eating meat with similar DNA? (Actually, it's probably the latter because it exposes you to all sorts of diseases that normally wouldn't survive because you'd be eating a different species). And would it taste like chicken?
No doubt for at least a generation or two, precious land mass will be devoted to growing real critters for rich gourmands, but as the population increases I suspect that you'll see less and less of that. An ironic side effect to this is that some species of livestock could go extinct because it's more profitable to sell the farm to real estate developers. Though hopefully by then we could just preserve their gene sequences and whip up some new ones if we ever needs some. I actually hope cloning outpaces development of this stuff so we can go through a phase of cloning extinct or endangered animals for food. Then I could put brontosaur, zebra and dodo in my chili!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
it tastes like dispare
Jerome [tasting meat made in lab]: It tastes familiar.
Ted: Beef?
Jerome: No.
Linda: Chicken? We'll take chicken.
Ted: What does it taste like?
Jerome: Despair.
Ted: Is it possible it just needs salt?
The guys at veridian dynamics already did this a LONG time ago!
[Insert Witty Sig Here]
Lem: "Don't name it or you won't want to eat it. Remember Chester the carrot?" (Better Off Ted)
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
The GGO-fearing scaremongers created the inventive name "Frankenfood". Now let the zombiemongering begin!
http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/vol7-2/stephens.asp
Semen. If a person swallows it, they are NOT going to get A: pregnant or B: arrested (barring some silly rules that are probably just internet legends in some US states).
As for Jews, the idea of it all is to show reference to god, you don't show reference by coming up with loop holes just because you grave a bit of bacon. The laws are constantly interpreted to fit in the modern world but that is just the same as real laws. Example, Jews are allowed to have a pig heart valve installed because the sanctity of life out rules dietary laws. Forcing a Jew to eat a pig or else you will kill him does nothing. It is not how that fate or indeed most fates work.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yes, because we all know that all scientists are equally brilliant doctors and a scientist is a scientists who can work in any field. You don't study microbiologist or human medicine or whatever. No you study the glory field of "Scientist". And suddenly you are a know-it-all. Now you can swiftly switch between inventing a doomsday weapon and inventing a pill to regrow organs. It's the science!
Or is it?
I don't see how this is any different to those vegetarian mycoproteins and meat substitutes, like Quorn. They're just vats of organic material derived from something that occurs in nature. The fact that, in this case, the original source happened to be an animal means little.
Let's put aside the ethics bullshit and concentrate on the efficiency claims. The problem is, just because people eat less meat it's not guaranteed that the food excess will get to places with famine. Also, this method is still less effective than grains or vegetables, so transporting it to poor regions won't help. I'm not even sure that the problem is a lack of food, in most places with famine it's the fault of the political leadership.
I am also sceptical about the sustainability claims which seem to be backed only by an old study from '99. Such a massive increase in consumption would mean 10 billion people by 2030, or a huge shift in people's diet.
No, I'd say your energy is misdirected. There already are many researchers dedicated to finding a cure for diabetes. Your energy would be better spent doing something besides hounding someone who's already busy trying to solve a major problem.
http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats
That's great!
I'm only responding to the overpowering size and placement, and maybe lack of a toggle option.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Meat is too environmentally inefficient. The human race cannot carry on its current levels of meat consumption for much longer, and it's good to see researchers pushing towards another alternative for meat eaters. Personally, I don't mind soy burgers (they're really pretty good; very healthy too), but I understand where people who prefer actual meat are coming from.
I for one welcome the introduction of vacuum-packed burgers from vacuum-sucking cows.
But doesn't it take more energy to get them to the moon (the closest "un-airable" land) than it would to just use ordinary air-breathing cows?
Why, this destroys cells. The very basis of all life! It must be stopped!
You're such a villian that you even do it to your own cells!
How many cells did you callously murder last night when you took a drink of alcohol? Or even accidently bite the inside of your cheek.
And what about the flesh in between your fingers in the womb that you thoughtlessly put to cell death so you could selfishly have fingers. Or the skin cells you made thirst to death as formerly living shields against the outside world?
Your whole existance is dedicated to torturing and murdering cellular life!
This could be the start of whole industries of advocacy groups.
Synthetically Produced Animal Matter: SPAM.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
... from The Space Merchants by Pohn and Kornbluth, or would that really be a thinly disguised attempt to rename SoyLent Green...
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean
For human consumption, soybeans must be cooked with "wet" heat to destroy the trypsin inhibitors (serine protease inhibitors). Raw soybeans, including the immature green form, are toxic to humans, swine, chickens, and in fact, all monogastric animals.[12]
gelatin, for its limited range of benefits that can easily be found in plants, is rather controversial too, as its potential to transmit BSE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelatin#Safety_concerns why not try some hempseed or flax seed instead?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp_seed
Good people go to bed earlier.
Been passively looking for something like that for a while.
Here you are. Seriously, if I want to visit Sourceforge, I will go to Sourceforge, not go to /. and then follow a link.
'use 35 to 60 percent less energy, emit 80 to 95 percent less greenhouse gas and use around 98 percent less land.' ...and is 100 percent less tasty. thanks, i'll keep eating the real animals.
I thought KFC has been doing this for years...
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/kfc.asp
Human flesh tastes like pign. Search for "long pig". Also, the Mercury astronauts were, as part of their survival training, taught that the tenderest cuts are from just under the ribcage.
Complete directions for preparing long pig (warning: very "Dexter"-like)
It would probably taste weird and far from what we know, so taste is probably not the goal. So if feeding humanity is the goal, elaborating techniques for culture and multiplication of protein food such as quinoa or amaranto makes much more sens.
I seriously doubt that. These are the two most grave concerns:
Animal pain. Animals do feel pain, and from the universal viewpoint of ethics, it doesn't matter whether it's you, me, some other human, an ape or a chicken that gets tortured. Pain is pain and our practices in factory farming causes a lot of it for only a little benefit, which is extremely unethical. (I know there are other approaches to animal's status, but there is no notable modern moral philosopher who disputes that the suffering of animals is a serious concern)
Environment. Did you know that animal production accounts for more greenhouse gases than all of the world's transportation? Yup, and that's not some veggie organization that claims that, but the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It also takes up a lot of water, energy and is responsible for much of the destruction of the jungle.
I'm sure this meat will still be more expensive than the deer I shoot with my blackpowder rifle.
~Donald / Just RTFM
since real meat and fake meat are interchangable, manufacturers will use whichever 'supply stream' is cheapest, based on the current world market prices... which will be set at places like NYMEX and ICE.
Then Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan will be able to hoard and manipulate prices. If you were able to find out which 'supply stream' went into your 'protein product' this would screw everything up, as it would remove the illusory 'fungibility' of the commodity.
the major 'protein retailers' like McDonalds would simply mix it all together, much like they now mix beef from several different continents together to get a single patty.
Than a nice MEATSHAKE...
Wait, maybe not..
Also, Kornbluth sadly died young, before Kingsley Amis (writing in the UK) argued for the respectability of science fiction.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
And by meek I mean pussies. I'm sure this will sell great, even if it tastes like garbage and costs hundreds of times what real meat does. Anything to keep all the poor little animals from being harmed.
Agreed. It's just an advertisement. My karma being good enough that I can, and do, disable adverts, it seems like a violation.
It wouldn't bother me so much if it didn't show the top downloads. As it is now, all I ever see are the same four projects every time, all of which I already knew about. I suspect 95% of the other people who see it already knew about them before, too. All in all, rather pointless.
I'm not touching the stuff until
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
I mean, would it still be soylent green? Or just soylent lime-green
If it cannot moo, then it isn't real meat...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Milk cows have to be allowed pregnancies to keep producing milk. What happens to all those calves? (Disclaimer: we buy all our meat in small quantities from a sustainable producer. We don't eat much meat, but what we do is of very high quality). If the USA changed direction from quantity to quality, a lot of problems would evaporate.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Agreed. It's just an advertisement. My karma being good enough that I can, and do, disable adverts, it seems like a violation.
It's an easy one-word fix. All Slashdot needs to do is add the word "occasionally" in front of "disable advertising".
#DeleteChrome
It's predicted that meat will be too expensive for most of the world's population by 2050, and some scientists have proposed that westerners should eat insects instead. See entomophagy.
I'd quite like to try some of the big insects. I've tried some tiny ones (waxworms and crickets) and found them tasteless except for the sauce they were served in.
Insects have some advantages over mammals, birds and fish. They like to live in colonies, which is good for factory farming. They're very high in protein -- sometimes as much as 70%, compared to about 15% by mass for a cow. They take a lot less energy to produce. And many humans already eat them, unlike in-vitro muscle.
I guess now we know what mystery meat is. :-)
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick with lamb, cow, bison, goat, and other natural meat sources. Animals are tasty! :)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Seriously, if it is going to be there, show us "up and coming" stuff, not the same top apps that are generally always going to have those spots.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
. . . it will be sold. There is no morality on the bottom line.
If it's not animals, you'd be giving PETA a hard job...maybe even a rebranding: People for the Ethical Treatment of Substitute meats (PETS)
So you are suggesting that every single biologist/chemist/scientist in the world should get together, write a very long list of all the problems in the world ordered by importance. And then go down the list from 1 to n, all working on the exact same problem at the same time?
So how do you get the nutrients to cultivate the lab-grown meat?
Twinstiq, game news
From the research labs. "It tastes like despair."
Thank you, thank you, thank you for posting this! It wouldn't be such a big deal if it didn't push everything else down so you don't see it, or if you could turn it off.
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It's not fake, artificial, or synthetic. It is cultured meat. I guess you could even call it vat meat, sci-fi has since before I was born.
:)
But in no way shape or form is it fake/artificial/synthetic. It was just grown without the rest of the animal.
For those of you that think it would be a generic meat slurry, that's not correct either. It would actually be chicken, or beef, or mutton, or albacore tuna, or whatever species provided the cell sample for that batch. It's true that diet of the animal changes the meat flavors (some species more than others), but that can be duplicated by changing the nutrient feed.
Again, this isn't a new idea, and some people have thought a lot about it, even though they didn't have the technology to do it yet. Three big things seem to keep coming up as it's big points. Efficiency, Product Control, No animal slaughters.
Would I eat it? You know, the opportunity hasn't arisen, but I'd be willing to give it a try.
At the moment, it's in kind of a primitive state, but eventually I'd expect those products to be of a higher quality than the old style.
Although the first person to request a 'test tube steak' needs to get hit with a cutting board to the face, unless they're 12, in which case it's to be expected.
Oh, one final thought for you. I know this idea seems strange at first, but really, do you actually know what you are eating right now? Do you actually claim to know what a twinkie is made of? Or for that matter, what is Disodium Inosinate, TBHQ, or Acesulfame Potassium? Sure you can find out, but you haven't, and yet you eat foods with these and many other 'mystery' ingredients all the time. So why raise a huge fuss over actual chicken meat that was grown a lab as opposed to a poop covered chicken hutch? Think about it.
It seems to me easier to stack 3000 sheets of lab meat than it is to first fold 3000 sheets of lab meat 12 times, then glue together the resulting 3000 hamburger-thick columns of meat into a patty of normal thickness and diameter... or alternatively, to grow a 100 sq. foot sheet and carefully fold it over 12 times to create a single hamburger.
A short story about a future trade in cloned Celebrity Meat:
http://www.omegacom.demon.co.uk/meat.htm
Like a lot of cleaners, I started out in public health, running DNA analyses in a forensic laboratory. That was ten years ago, when the meat trade was at its height. We were processing ten thousand samples a day. Most were fakes. 'Princess Di' for instance, was originally a basal cell cancer excised from a fifty-eight-year-old Albanian woman, but it didn't stop the meatleggers moving twenty tonnes of product. Then fans started doing their own DNA analyses, and growing their own supplies. Once someone has started a cloned cell line, anyone with an incubator, access to a few common biochemicals, and basic knowledge about cell culture can keep it going indefinitely. By the time I joined one of the vat-busting teams, most of the meat we were chasing was one hundred per cent genuine cloned celebrity. As soon as anyone managed to get a viable scrap of tissue, that was it. The meat was out there. The only way to stop it was to bust the places where it was grown.
Slig for dinner anyone?
the meat substitute made from sewage (a.k.a human feces).
You know...if you already do all the hard work and essentially make it profitable. But hey, a million is a million: http://www.peta.org/features/In-Vitro-Meat-Contest.aspx
They have the right to control their own lives. But much of the time the signal comes from outside them! You have them so oppressed and in the slave mindset that they nearly always obey your order to die. They release those caspases to rip their own genetic material apart just for your sick pleasure.
In fact, when they don't you often call them derogatory names, like cancer.
Talk about taking Franken-food to the next level - geesh!
Seriously, I don't care where it comes from as long as it tastes like the real deal and doesn't have negative effects on our health.
Believe me, AC. If Im going to troll, it's going to be a whole lot more subtle than that. ;)
You know the one the "chicken" is now grown in vats? Awesome.
Considering some farm animals can convert two pounds of feed into more than a pound of food, a 60% savings means that 0.8 pounds of feed could become a pound of feed. It's as plausible as a perpetual motion machine. Besides, where I live, most of the cattle graze on grass, which I can't digest.
If this somehow makes it okay to eat meat, I wonder: what about cannibalism? Would it be okay to eat human tissue grown in vats? Will humanity finally do away with the taboo that created so many psycho killers? Will soylent green have a different ending?
I feel bad for the cows, who will go the way of draught horses very quickly. It has been a long and prosperous partnership between us. For that we will now stop feeding them and providing them with land.
I use adblock plus with the extra add-on called "element hiding helper" and just selected the box and added it to the list of things to block. It's like it was never there.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And I think this will be popular just because I think you all rather enjoy talking about eating my meat. It's not spelled the same but most people pronounce them both the same. So anyways. Yeah, please, eat my meat. This wine is my blood. LOL. Eat my Petrie meat. Too grand.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
So if you belong to a culture/religion that does not allow eating pork, for example, would you be allowed to eat synthetic pork since it didn't come from a pig?
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
No, it's an easy one-filter fix.
slashdot.org##div#my_forgebox
Standard tissue culture techniques grow cells on fetal calf serum -- that is, blood serum taken from fetal calves, which are found in slaughterhouses when pregnant cows are slaughtered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_calf_serum
If we stopped slaughtering animals, they couldn't grow this stuff in vitro. So this isn't a vegetarian solution. It isn't even a low-resource solution.
AFAIK, it's not possible to grow animal cells in culture media entirely from plant sources.
Anybody know otherwise?
Dude, have you not seen Temple of Doom?!
If it tastes like meat, I'm all for it. But it doesn't say what it tastes like. But how could it possibly taste good? It may well be chemically identical to real meat, but I will bet dollars to soy based corn oil fried pastry replacements that it will taste like concentrated butthole. What is so wrong with normal, delicious, non factory meat? IM FROM MURIKA, SON, THATS WITH AN M. THE M STANDS FOR MEAT. WHERE IS IT?!
This sounds awesome. I love meat, best part of any meal, however I don't like the whole killing cattle thing, but it's a necessary evil for me, as I'm not willing to give it up. However, this would be the best of both worlds.
It will be able to be mass manufactured in large quantities, and hopefully cheaply. It reduces energy usage. Reduces carbon emissions. Reduces land usage.
These are all HUGE wins. As long as food companies get serious on it (which they likely would), then you can get flawless, tasty steaks, for cheap as fuck. I don't care if it's not "authentic", I wan't my pseudo-lamb meat!
My guess is it would take a while before they were able to get it up to the mass manufacturing stage, and even further before they're producing meat with the nice tasting fat, and other impurities. Though, once it's at the mass manufacturing stage, people will start eating it, mainly people who like gamey meat though.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
So this is in my view what is wrong: Being vegetarian or vegan or whatever is only viewed from an ethical perspective, i.e. people that don't eat meat do it just because of those ethical reasons. Almost never is that lifestyle viewed as being the much more energy and resource preserving choice. As in this summary, the no-meat choice is labeled as something directly linked to ethical views, which is not always the case. There are huge energy and resource related issues with todays meat production that nobody really wants to take in, no matter the ethical component of it. Much of the benefits described in the end of this article are so staggering just because the livestock industry is so hideously demanding, not because the method is incredibly effective.
Awesome!!!!!!!!! Thanks!!!!!!!!
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The concept is okay, but I'm sure there will be issues with the execution. Companies will attempt to grow this stuff using the lowest-cost possible inputs, and the result will more than likely not be something that you'd want to put into your body. Garbage in, garbage out. Think of farmed fish, for instance. While it could be a good idea, the reality is that fish farmers use the cheapest possible fish feed (often including waste products from other animal industries) and try to maximize the number of fish per pen. The result is lots of diseased fish in a small volume, so then they add in the antibiotics... and things go downhill from there.
The dirty little secret no one is talking about is that these muscle cells are utterly dependent on a working immune system to survive. If one microbe gets into the culture (which it will), it's all over, unless you saturate the works with antibiotics. So, now you have another way to get your antibiotics, AND the attendant superbugs that go along with their widespread (ab)use.
Meat, it's what is not for dinner for me. Ever.
... delicious!
I wish there was more information on how to culture and harvest these cells. 8 dishes of protein to one dish of fat cells.
Even better would be the ability to grow complete muscles. Don't think steak, think veal filet mignon!
Well, yeah. Line one is mostly straw man.
Line two is an emotional appeal to guilt.
Line 3 and 4, are misdirection and deceit by calling something murder as though it was premeditated (and implying it was unlawful killing, when in fact it's not).
Line 5 through 7, implying ill gotten gain from suffering that is actually nonexistant. Again, that's an appeal to guilt.
Line 8, reduction of an entire complex entity, a life, to being solely for one tiny thing. A bit like saying, the US spends hundreds of billions on defense just to protect a blade of grass in YOUR back yard. Both use the same fallacy.
The last line links all this ridiculousness to something that sometimes sounds a little like this, but is in actuality pretty unrelated.
I see most of these used slightly less blatantly every day, online, in daily life, and in politics. Sadly, those using them are usually quite earnest.
Finally, there's an old saying from usenet that no ironic humor can be so blatant that someone won't take it seriously. That gets proven repeatedly here on slashdot. ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tg3-93jKvc
Man, I can't wait until it will be this easy to get chicken.
From the OP's description: "... meat that was cultured in a petri dish, and was never part of a live animal"
From the article: "Using stem cells harvested from leftover animal material from slaughterhouses..."
Seems like leftover slaughterhouse animal material may contain some animal material. Is the description wrong?
Look up "The Food of the Gods" (Arthur C Clarke short story) from 1961. It was also published in The Wind from the Sun. He actually thought of this very topic!
Is the vegetarians final end-game to ensure that there's only humans and vegetables left on the planet? That way land won't be "wasted".
I mourn the potential loss of cows once they become useless to us humans. I think they have been symbiotic with many peoples of the world for some time.
So do we create this stuff because it was on Star Trek? Here is another invention that was featured on Star Trek many many moons ago.
Please travel down the slippery slope with me...isn't it possible that since replications invariably have some degree of error, that eventually this cloning of meat will lead us into a situation where we can no longer eat the cloned meat due to the lack of ability to reconcile global deleterious mutations in humans with those that might occur but can't possibly be accounted for in bovine populations? I don't know. I'm just asking.
I for one welcome our new animal 57 overlords.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
That problem's got a solution using millennia-old technology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durex
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Nice post
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This will be especially beneficial for cannibals, as now they can legally grow their human flesh..
so all your cannibals out there, get out of your closet !
And yet they took the poll off the front page ages ago... I've now forgotten it exists.
./ version one is use.
Old school
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..when they sell meat grown from human stem cells?
When I was a kid I read a short story set in a future where all meat was artificially grown.. then company came a long with a new hit meat product... the problem was it turned out to be artificial human flesh....
A cultured meat is just one specific type of cell. A great steak is many types of muscle cells and fax mixed together and has a resulting texture and flavor depending on the method of cooking. We are decades away from self growing bags of sirloin or chuck roast.
What is more exciting is the work that has been done making organs. Scientists discovered that organs have a clear gelatin like scaffolding that we don't know how to grow yet but we can take an organ that already exists from an animal or human and wash it clean of cells. They can then graft stem cells on the organ which conform to the scaffolding. We can already grow hearts and the hearts will beat and pump blood once activated. Very exciting stuff.
The premise is that most humans do better eating properly-raised dairy & meat than plant seeds and too many raw vegetables. Most plants need to be cooked because of the anti-nutrients. Even potatoes are problematic because they have so much starch - I can eat starch, but people who want to lose weight need to juice their potatoes and cook that.
Fruits are great, as long as they're not taken in excess.
Polyunsaturated oils have been proven to be toxic. Coconut oil is the best plant oil, even though it doesn't have vitamin A. Palm oil is pretty good, but we can get too much beta carotene (very high in unrefined palm oil) too.
hth. :)
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Do you literally believe that the earth can support an infinite human population without any adjustments in lifestyle, ever?
If not, then guess what? You agree with Malthus in principle. You might disagree about when the population limit will be hit, but you understand that resources are limited and necessary.
Given the rate that we've been exhausting our natural resources (depleting oil, overfishing the oceans, destroying arable land through climate change), we'll be lucky if we find some radical adaptation to sustain the population. Most likely billions of people will starve and your "free markets" are going to sit back and watch it happen.
Human moral progress isn't linear -- it's cyclical. War quickly eliminates the facade of human progress. In any war the enemy must become subhuman to all soldiers, returning mankind to its most base state. The dehumanization of our enemies is necessary for the execution of war because it is the only way soldiers will kill effectively. In war civilians are routinely murdered, mutilated, and raped. Those who object to war or its brutality are isolated, mocked, and can even find the brutality of war turned upon them.
World Peace isn't dawning. War isn't going away. All it takes is one war to dispel the illusions of human progress.
FTA: "In a world where nearly half of all crop production is used to feed livestock, a move towards artificial meat may be inevitable."
Is this accurate? Not that it could happen this quickly, but assume that tomorrow we said "OK! Time to go synthetic!". What would happen to the crops industry worldwide? Would the price of other grown crops increase exponentially to cover the loss of revenue from feeding production animals?
I think the scariest thing for me as I get older is seeing how these possible technological shifts have the potential to destroy certain industries and in turn the livelihood of those involved. Especially considering where the world economy currently rests.
If cows are not farmed, and no longer become important to raise, who will bother? Will they become pets? Will they roam free? Or will their numbers just fade away.
One way to increase the odds of survival of your species is to be eaten by humans.
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Isn't this what Tofu is already?
I don't see any sourceforge thing.
AdBlock is your friend...
Didn't 'Better off Ted' predict this?
Was the researcher on acid at the time? Seriously.
BTW 'Some researchers suggest' is guaranteed to precede an unfounded assertion.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You vegetarians won't be eating my food's food anymore!
You've put some words in my mouth, and I disagree with some of your other points.
No argument here: varied diets with low to moderate intake of cholesterol, fats, and refined sugars are the way to go.
Cholesterol is important because it's what the hormones are made out of. There's a nice graphic on the "Progestogen" wikipedia page... Refined sugar isn't nearly as bad as starch. HFCS is undesirable because it's made from corn, and there can be significant contaminates.
Raw food diets are for idiots that want to spend money following trends. But eating uncooked meat is not good for you either.
I used to eat a lot of raw meat, and it never caused me any trouble, but neither did I notice much of a benefit. Agree that many ppl spend a lot of money on the "raw" trend...
To be fair; people that want to lose weight need to eat fewer calories than they burn. It doesn't matter if they eat cardboard or drink nothing but Mountain Dew. To lose weight healthfully is a bit more complicated.
Disagree. People can put on weight with 800 calories/day if they have poor thyroid function, for example. The thyroid gland does not respond favorably to the polyunsaturated oils.
Palm oil increases the risk of esophageal cancer. Asia has proven an wealth of information about how bad for us processed food is and palm oil is no exception; rates of esophageal cancer went from negligible to as-problematic-as-the-West as soon as it was introduced.
Palm oil comes from Asia and Africa, so it was never "introduced". Basically: Citation Required.
(For those that don't know, anything labeled "vegetable oil" probably contains palm oil.)
In the United States, Vegetable oil is always made from corn, soy, rapeseed, safflower, or a blend.
Polyunsaturated oils are not even remotely toxic in moderation.
Says who? I gave a link to "lipid peroxidation", which CANNOT happen when the fat is Saturated.
They are readily oxidized fats, making them a preferred energy source for bacteria in the gut.
IF you're an ruminant that has four stomachs, then your digestive system has time and space to biohydrogenate those nasty oils. If you're a single-stomach'd animal, your body fat composition generally reflects the type of fats in your diet
In return for eating these fats, they secrete all sorts of beneficial metabolites.
Never heard of this. Link?
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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Meat from cows is made of molecules.
Meat from a lab can be made from the same molecules.
If your tongue and your stomach can't tell the difference, what does it matter? *shrug*