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

Everybody will still want the real thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Soylent Green. Because you're what's for dinner.

But is it kosher?

[blowdart]

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?

Re:But is it kosher?

[Anonymous Coward]

Genuine kashrut rabbi and lurker from about '98 here, if they culture the cells from a freshly kosher slaughtered kosher animal then it would be forever kosher.
If the animal were not killed first it would be ever min hachai or flesh stripped from a living animal and a rarity for Jewish kosher law considered forbidden to all humans(from the law given to Noah when humans were first permitted meat rathen for the Jews at Mt Sinai).
Since the kosher status is for meat of the animal there might be room for an interpretation that subsequent cells grown form any animal are no longer that creature but simply a vat grown blob removing any kosher concerns and considering it something akin to candy made from all synthetic materials.

Re:Monsanto

[ArcherB]

I'm actually fine with this idea of 'fake meat', as long as it's done well. If it tastes and behaves similarly to 'real meat', and is made from actual real animal cells... I'm just fine with the idea...

I don't see this tasting or feeling anything like real meat. Sure, it may be layers of mean protein stacked on top of each other, but meat is more than that. Meat comes with fat. That's the stuff that makes meat juicy. Sometimes, meat comes on a bone. That's like a handle. Meat can be light or dark depending on what part of the animal it comes from. It may be tough, meaning that it must be cooked for hours to tender it up. It may be tender, meaning that it should be flash cooked. And finally, meat has a texture, or "grain" that needs to be adhered to. You must cut meat AGAINST the grain or else it becomes stringy and tough. I don't care how well a piece of meat is cooked, if it's cut wrong, it's tough.

Anyway, my point is that petri-meat will have none of these qualities. The only thing I see this good for is ground meat where the texture doesn't matter, and even then, animal fat will have to be added from another petri dish from a biproduct of a real animal, which kinda defeats the purpose. That may not work either because I don't know if there is a flavor difference between fat grown on a cows back vs the fat that grows in the skin. Come to think of it, bacon fat tastes a whole to different than pork chop fat.

We will not have a synthetic steak that will fool anyone until we are capable of growing full organs as layers of muscle protein is not going to full anyone that has ever eaten meat before.