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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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
And what do you think all those burgers ate when they were still cows? Soja and corn that was grown especially for them. For the soja alone, massive amounts of rainforest are cut down in countries like Brazil every year.
-- Cheers!
Grazing animal use the massive tracts of un-airable land and don't require labor and oil and pesticide intensive production techniques.
Unfortunately, these same Grazing animals don't graze any more, and we have to bring the food to them. Oh, sure, there are "Free Range" animals, but the meat produced from them is more expensive. The majority of the meat produced from these Grazing Animals does require labor and oil and pesticide... because we must grow the food for these animals, harvest the food for these animals, and transport the food for these animals. That requires pesticide, labor, and oil.
Thus meat production *IS* more inefficient than growing vegetables, because it involves the process *OF* growing vegetables, plus a whole lot more.
Ok, ok... so Hay isn't any kind of vegetable you or I would eat. But it is still sown, grown, harvested and transported.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
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
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.
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.
its soy
and no. the best meat is grassfed.
But MOST meat (at least in the US and I believe in Europe) is NOT grassfed. It's feedlotted (there, I made something up). And as tsa said, that takes a lot of resources.
That said, I can't imagine that vat grown 'meat' would take less resources - you're talking about a complicated industrial process with a lot of feedstock.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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)
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.
"much like they now mix beef from several different continents together to get a single patty."
Do you have a source for this? I am from the UK and they claim on their webpage that their beef is from British cows. Is there something to back up that this is a lie, or is it based on the theory of self-evidence?
It's just a lie. There's absolutely no reason for McDonald's to mix together meat from different continents. Not only would it be stupid since it would make it all but impossible to track down where tainted meat originated from, but it would be more expensive than just buying local beef.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
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.
Yes, doctors ejaculate at the thought of a technology that would cause increased health risks in the population. I don't think they really need to make us ill. Shifting demographics and greater emphasis on regular screening and preventative medicine kind of pays quite well enough without them wishing for people to be struck down by "frankenfoods". You, sir, are an arse
If it cannot moo, then it isn't real meat...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
You need to get out more. try driving in the southwest. many many many grazing animals.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
. . . it will be sold. There is no morality on the bottom line.
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.
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.
Especially if that first language is Catalan, French, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbian, or Spanish (and probably several others I'm not thinking of right now), where the word is actually "soja".
He's right, you're a retard. The crops don't salinate the soil, the irrigation does. Water from the sky has much less dissolved in it for the very reason that it had to evaporate to get there, but water from irrigation has been running all over the ground dissolving whatever it wants on the way. When it reaches the fields this dissolved material stays after the water is used by the crops and/or evaporates. It has been a problem with irrigation since it was invented.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Mmmmmmm... veal...
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
You are wrong. I don't know about McDonalds, but large-chain supermarkets mix meat from different continents as a matter of course. Since in the Western world we have a fat surplus, they import lean beef from Botswana and mix the two to produce mince. About 60% of your store bought mince comes from Botswana if you shop at large chains owned by Ahold (to name just one).
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.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/switching-to-grass-fed-beef/
"Grass-fed beef has a distinctly different and “grassy” flavor compared with feed-lot beef and also costs more. A recent comparison in The Village Voice cooked up one-pound grass-fed and grain-fed steaks. The grass-fed meat tasted better, according to the article, but at $26 a pound, also cost about three times more."
Sure, there are tons of grazing animals. They still cost three times more per pound than cornfed or CAFO operation beef.
"Meat is my friend, not my food"?
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
You know the one the "chicken" is now grown in vats? Awesome.
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.
I suppose that depends on WHY your culture/religion does not allow eating pork. If the reason is because a pig suffers then yeah. If the reason is 'cuz god says so' yer pretty much screwed.