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."

Comments

Chicken Little

[tomhudson]

I for one welcome our Vat-Grown Overlords

Chicken Little, a huge mass of cultured chicken breast, was kept alive by algae skimmed by nearly-slave labor from multistory towers of ponds surrounded by mirrors to focus the sunlight onto the ponds.

Scum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America.

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.

Re:Food myths

[affenhund]

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. [...] Eat a banana and it probably traveled 2500 miles, was grown in a chopped-down rain forest, with massive amounts of pesticide.

Excuse me, but you are either extremely naive or an idiot! You really think that the animals that were farmed for meat all grazed happily on green meadows? Yeah sure! These are all lies after all: "The escalation in forest destruction is driven by the global livestock industry. The vast majority (above 80%) of soybeans are bound for animal feedlots, providing protein for cattle, hogs and poultry. The European Union (EU) is the largest importer of Argentinian soybean meal, with imports to EU agribusinesses accounting for almost 50% of all global trade in soymeal (3)." http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/the-expanding-soybean-frontier.pdf

Re:No thanks

[ElectricTurtle]

You're the one talking out of your ass. Iodine levels in the US population are considered on average higher than they should be, according to the World Health Organization. Maybe you should check your information before you parrot.

Re:Ethics?

[The Grim Reefer2]

NO. Cultured meat is the product of a factory. Cow meat is the product of an inhumane series of tortures inflicted on a helpless animal.

Cows have been domesticated to the point that I seriously doubt the species could survive on it's own. If it ever comes to pass that synthetic meat supplants them then I'd guess that they'd quickly become an endangered/extinct species. At that point no one will be intentionally setting aside huge pastures for them to graze in . They would become a large destructive animal that has little to no natural habitat left.

bullshit.

[nimbius]

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

Re:Everybody will still want the real thing

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The movie is titled . Soylent Green . Charlton Heston played the lead. It is a whodunnit set in future where the Earth has completely exhausted resources and the government is distributing the soylent red and soylent green wafers, ostensibly derived from sea weed. Shocking revelation is that oceans have turned caustic and they do not support life. Then where do these wafers come from? Charlton finds out, but could not escape the goons chasing him. He just manages to deliver one short message to others, "Soylent.... Green... is.... people".