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Test-Tube Burgers Coming Soon
ananyo writes "A burger made entirely from lab-grown meat is expected to be unveiled by October this year. But costing in excess of $250,000, it's not going to be flying off supermarket shelves quite yet. The lab meat is produced using adult stem cells, which are then grown on scaffolds in cell-culture media. Because such lab-assembled muscle is weak, it has to be 'bulked up' by exposing to electric shocks. The researchers, based in the Netherlands, had already grown goldfish fillets in 2002, then fried them in breadcrumbs before giving them to an 'odor and sight' panel to assess whether they seemed edible." While I'm not overly enthusiastic about this Dutch attempt at growing burgers, it is a huge step-up from the Japanese effort.
Does this qualify as meat during Lent? Or should I just stick to my Filet-O-Fishes (or is it Filets-O-Fish) for Friday?
I’m really excited about this stuff. Most of our food is loaded with synthetics anyway, may as well just start from there and be done with it.
The whole animal rights angle is interesting. Cows are primarily bred for food. If we eliminate the need for cow meat, we actually eliminate the need for cows. We won’t be killing a bunch of cows to feed ourselves, but the cows we would have killed won’t exist any more so in a twisted way we are kind of pre-emptively killing them.
Also, they need to come up with some kind of lab grown Dorito-esq chip that’s actually healthy for you and doesn’t taste like crap.
Made from embryonic stem cells rather than adult, of course.
I want to get my horse-cow burger soon.
Japanese can eat whale meat all they want without giving Greenpeace fits... and Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese can eat dog meat without offending PETA, Jews/Muslims can eat pork without offending their clergy... what's not to love?
That's just messed up in so many ways.
No sooner do I get over one, then you put a better one right next to me. Bastards.
I propose that the inventor of these products be force fed them for 20 years. This will, naturally (yes, sarcasm intended), dispell any doubts about their safety.
You can pry my dead cow burger from my greasy and certainly not cold dead hands.
Chicken Little
In the West we could all do with eating a bit further down the food chain really - Red meat is known to linked to bowel cancers.
Mind you, I'm Scottish, so can't really preach about good diet really :)
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Because such lab-assembled muscle is weak
It's veal!
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
so who cares how it tastes?
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
... at industrial scale that is both cost effective and as good/or better then the real thing remains to be seen.
They mean adult cattle... but my first thought: it's made of people!
Perhaps if part of training the muscle involved teaching it to hump its way up onto a bun, then pull a slice of tomato and some lettuce over itself as a kind of blanket...
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I'll gladly give you fiat currency Tuesday for a fake-meat burger today.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It might have been best to clarify what species of adult the stem cells are harvested from, since in most news stories, "adult stem cells" typically has a connotation of adult human stem cells!
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
So, right now we don't know if we are eating real food or GMO food, as it is not mandatory to have it written on the product. And my question is, are we going to be "informed" the same way about the fake meat??? What is next, fake politicians? Oh.....wait, they already fake...
This is good progressive news; global demand for meat far outstrips the resources, which pushes producers not only to destroy wilderness to attempt to supply, but convert to factory farming, abject cruelty, increase contamination likelihood, et cetera. If you want meat in your future, and have no plans to breed a little bit less for a few generations to give the poor planet a break from the burden of trying to supply for our desires, then this is basically your only course of action. Frankly, I'd feel better eating a hunk of muscle cells that never to experience pain or required the flattening of the amazon or the draining of giant aquifers to provide.
Well, they are getting better! The Japanese version makes Soylent Green look appetizing by comparison! Talk about a literal shit sandwich!!
They've done this in Better Off Ted. :)
I hope the company will take other ideas from it, that could be very interesting
Assuming this technology pans out, why would you call it fake? Just like a lab-grown emerald, it is chemically identical to the natural source without all the damage to the landscape, infection(inclusion) exposure, or unnecessary cost. (sure it costs a lot now, it's an experiment. In a couple decades time, it'll clock in at a ten, maybe a hundredth of the cost of 'real-but-otherwise-inferior' meat off the killed organism.)
It's a single cell protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs.
Kudos to the first who can identify the source.
Thanks Slashdot, for continuing your slide into sensationalist & misleading summaries.
Kinds of surprised no one has posted that. But then, I bet the vast majority of you people weren't even alive what that came out.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"it has to be 'bulked up' by exposing to electric shocks"
I don't care if it is in a test tube, PETA's gonna go apeshit over this.
They could sell the shit out of these $250K burgers they were called iBurgers and were sold by Apple.
I don't respond to AC's.
On a continent that goes apeshit over Genetically Modified and other Bioengineered Crops, it seems unlikely this will gain any traction in the commercial market place, at least not in the EU. On the other hand, the EU may take the stance that since this work was pioneered in the EU, it can't possibly be bad.
Now on Mars, or long space voyages this might have some appeal, especially Mars, where there is a possibility of finding water, thereby eliminating one of the heaviest component of any food product. Although unless making and transporting the necessary equipment and media takes up less room and less weight than a freezer full of hamburger this seems unlikely there as well. Chances are the growth media can be shipped dry as well, and reconstituted with distilled water from any source.
Even if the cost per pound could be brought in line with animal sources, it seems unlikely to be a rational method of food production here on earth, simply because significant portions of the meat supply would be put at risk by a simple power failure, or contaminant in the growth media.
The rest of this story will no doubt be filled with hand wringing posts over the amount of CO2 that cattle produce (something never attributed to Wildebeest herds), and how this will save the earth. The whole concept creates an intellectual conundrum for the Peta crowd. They would love to get animals off the farm, and this method presents a way forward, but having to embrace those huge corporations, and bio-engineering is probably more than they could stomach.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Reporters grab this story from the file every year or so. As long as it has the "ick factor", they'll continue to run it. It seems to have first appeared in 2001. Here's one from about six years ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas_section2-9.html
Tried to grow cow-less beef in Episode 2 of Better off Ted. Doing the same thing!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Better_Off_Ted_episodes#Season_1:_2009
"Heroes" Michael Fresco Victor Fresco March 25, 2009 1APX01
Ted and Veronica fake an award for Phil so he won't sue the company after getting frozen. Phil and Lem try to grow cowless beef.
When the company food taster is asked for his opinion on the beef, he stares off sadly and says, "it tastes like despair".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
To be completely ethically correct, you need a source species able to give informed consent.
At this point, we only know of one example, and only in some extraordinarily self-aware examples.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The purpose of cooking, in addition of making the food more palatable and more digestible, is also to sterilise it.
So you won't find much bacteria on your burger once it leave the grill (or the over).
Also, this is not only a mix of proteins, this is real muscle tissues obtained by growing muscle out of stem cells, exactly as in real life. The only thing which it might lack is blood (as in the body, it's produced elsewhere), but even that could be fixed (stem cells or bone marrow cells grown in a bone-marrow-like environment to produce blood).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
All these comments and not a mention of Alpha Centauri's beef vats? For shame, nerds. For shame.
They're there affecting their effect.
I don't know why but this concept gives me the creeps because we don't really understand all there is to know about genetics
No genetics involved here.
It's plain vanilla stem cells, which are grown on a media and produce muscle tissue.
It's exactly the same process which occurs naturally in a growing animal.
By creating meat in a lab, there is no way to be sure that it is exactly the same as nature intended it to be. In fact, our bodies may very well process it differently or it could be very detrimental to our health
From a dietary point of view, the only point in eating meat is to get proteins. There are some amino acid which are present in meat while being rare in most plants (that's why you can't improvise a vegan regime but need to follow a specific regime with enough specific plants which give you the otherwise rare and missing amino acids).
Everything else you get it from plants: including all the really important vitamins, and so one. Except some B vitamins which are absent in plants but present in yeast (beer!!!) and in animal products (milk).
So wherever you hamburger was vat grown, or grown on a real animal doesn't change much: You'll get what you need (protein) from both, and anything else you need comes actually from your side dish (vegetables).
If you want to be concsious about what you eat, you don't need to insist on animal meat. You need to eat more fruits and vegetables.
From a "food processing point of view", it doesn't mean much. Cooking food destroys (denaturates) most proteins anyway, so by the time it goes out of the grill, it won't be much different between vat grown and animal grown.
From a biological point of view, this is not simply proteins produced in a vat, this is real muscle tissue produced by actual stem cell, just like in a growing body. Under the microscope you won't see much difference.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
LOL at the Slashdot crowd making out that they eat meat because they DECIDED to do so. I've got news for you - you eat meat because everybody else does, because your parents did, and because your parents fed it to you from childhood.
If nobody else on Earth ate meat, would you be eating meat every day?
If nobody else on Earth drank cows' milk, would you be drinking it every day?
If nobody else on Earth ate eggs, would you be eating them every day?
You eat it and defend it because you think it's 'normal'.
You aren't supposed to eat meat, because human beings can't chase animals and catch them with our bare hands, (there's a big clue right there), and we can't kill them with our bare hands - our jaws don't open far enough to kill even a small pig, let alone a sheep, a cow, etc. Show me video footage of a human chasing down a healthy sheep, and killing it and eating it with his bare hands and teeth.
I'll then show you a deranged psychopath.
So why do you still eat meat? Because you're AFRAID of what your so-called 'friends' will say, that's why. Because you're afraid to stand alone in the crowd, and do what's right.
Lab meat will be the single greatest step towards ending animal suffering. No doubt millions of humans will poo poo it, because they're just SO 'superior'.
Instead of looking to meat (be it real or artificial) to feed people, why not try educating people to accept a vegetarian lifestyle (or at least eat less meat). By the laws of physics, plants will always take less energy, water, and effort to grow, and it's a scientific fact that plant based diets are healthier for you at every level.
Instead of using acres and acres of land to feed one person with beef, how about we grow some lentils and feed 10 people instead.
There once was a website called manbeef.com that claimed to be a source of fresh human meat for human consumption. (It was elaborate and looked real, but there was no contact information about how to actually procure the stuff, so it was a hoax.) However is there any particular reason why human stem cells shouldn't be used and human meat produced for human consumption? I think it'd be interesting. The argument goes that no poor animal has to suffer and die to satisfy our taste buds anymore, surely the same applies to people? If "human" meat tastes a certain way then some people might decide that they like the taste and it might become a delicacy. I remember reacting the same way a lot of people are probably reacting to this post right now when someone first introduced me to the concept of Sushi. "What kind of a sicko would eat raw fish?"
We treat such strange concoctions as ducks' livers and certain fish eggs as a delicacy, don't we? Why not synthetic human meat?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
*IF* you can get to the point where you do not need to sacrifice the donor animal (and from this research we are not there yet), then what difference does it make where the stem cells come from?
If no humans are harmed, is there any moral/ethical problem with eating meat derrived from human stem cells?
The biggest problem with proper cannibalism is prion diseases. Assuming that isn't an issue in this case, is there a problem at all?
There will probably have to be a lot of science regarding yeilds from stem cell donors of various species. Who knows, we may all end up eating starfish meat, or batmeat, or jaguar meat, because high yeilds make the most sense from an economic perspective.
The chances that human stem cells will outperform everything else on the planet are low. But just in case, we had better start getting fitted for some new morals on the subject.
The lab is powered by hamster wheels.
Assuming this technology pans out, why would you call it fake? Just like a lab-grown emerald, it is chemically identical to the natural source without all the damage to the landscape, infection(inclusion) exposure, or unnecessary cost. (sure it costs a lot now, it's an experiment. In a couple decades time, it'll clock in at a ten, maybe a hundredth of the cost of 'real-but-otherwise-inferior' meat off the killed organism.)
Because it won't be the same. They're not making a T-bone steak, they're making protein mush. It may well look and taste like something you get a McDonald's but it will be a far cry from 'real meat'.
And Guppy's comment is also relevant - it's unlikely to be cheaper than cows on a hoof.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Let's just say that you have to get a license to eat genuine meat.
Let's just say that part of the license qualification is an extensive tour of the slaughterhouse, and perhaps even participating in product preparation.
If you've ever seen any of the expose films on the subject, you might agree that a significant part of the population will forego the license.
Veridian Dynamics is working on it .
There are vegan meat substitutes for pretty much anything you could ever want. I've had vegan chicken, turkey, hamburger, hotdogs, sausages, bacon, even fish and chips. Grated, I've yet to see a convincing vegan steak (the closest equivilent I know of is a grilled portobello mushroom), but in general, mimicking the taste of meat isn't hard, it's getting the texture right, and I can't imagine lab grown meat can match the texture of the real thing.
Anyone* that doesn't want to harm animals can already choose** not to eat meat without giving up the taste of meat.
* Actually, 94% of people, a lot of fake meat contains wheat gluten, which 6% of the population is sensitive to.
** Not that it does much good. Thanks to government subsidies, the meat industry makes their money whether you buy their stuff or not, so voting with your wallet doesn't work.
Reminds me of chicken little in The Space Merchants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants. A major source of protein for an over-populated world was this vast mass of growing tissue, which advertising convinced people that it tasted good.
Oh yeah PETA is against killing animals. So that is what you think. PETA killed over 31,000 cats and dogs in its shelter. They didn't have the decency to feed the dead animals to the local homeless shelters. Talk about hypocrisy and waste. http://www.petakillsanimals.com/proof/
Fuck off. :-)
All I did was pass on some information that might be useful in answering the question. PETA is a bunch of fanatics about animals. If they're okay with lab meat, odds are the saner types are as well. Information, not support. Nothing more, nothing less.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
harvesting the methane gas produced
Master Blaster runs Bartertown!
Should we assume it's soylent green?
It's not just for insults any more.
And how many livestock animals will you kill to sustain that cat or dog's miserable life in a cage in a shelter...along with the millions of other unlucky pets that weren't just the right age and the right breed and the right personality to make a fashionable Valentine's Day present.
Morality is complicated.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
that Hannibal Lechter is going to changes his ways over this news.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
If test tubes have the same issues as petri dishes, will the burgers grow fur too?
I used to think this kind of research would be the holy grail to food production. 10 years after being vegetarian I think to myself now, the experience I treasure from meals now is the simple history behind how it arrives to the plate, and the symbiotic relationship between our body and nutrients it has come to rely on. The more sustainable the realisation of how we receive our energy supply, the stronger I feel as a human species living in the wild.
The very idea of ready-made nutrition sitting in the ground or hanging from branches whets my imagination's appetite more than any short lived craving for any particular chemistry.
So much can be done with tofu and seitan these days I don't see any potential lack of food creativity in the long term, or lack of better things for the mind to concentrate on than tweaking physiological pleasure. Food can be so much more than what meets the eye.
Spoken like a person who doesn't understand the complex realities surrounding animal cruelty and animal care. There are plenty of respectable animal shelters that do put animals down. Here's why: some proportion of the animals that are brought in will never, ever be re-homed. For example, around 25% of the dogs brought in to dogs homes are from police seizures of illegal fighting dogs. These dogs have been raised to fight, and used in illegal dog fights. These animals are, and will always be, dangerous. It is just not usually possible to re-home them in a family environment. The larger animal centers get tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of animals in this kind of state every year. Their funding is limited, and they can't afford to house and feed and pay veterinary bills for every animal until it reaches the end of its natural life. At this point there is a difficult choice: a) let the animal starve (obviously cruel) b) kill the animal in a humane way (not nice, but less cruel). The shelters choose option b. It should be no surprise why, even some nation's Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have spoken in favour of culling when faced with the alternative of having uncared for animals starve to death.
This is the first thing you learn in Human Evolution 101. Modern Humans (Homo Sapien Sapien) have always eaten meat. Period. It's a fact. Get over it. They didn't chase the animals, the used LANGUAGE and TOOLS in the hunt to kill the Animals.
I would venture to say, if humans hadn't always eaten meat, they may never have needed larger brains for hunting and communication.
Factory farmed meat is bad, not just because it is inhumane, but because it doesn't taste as good, because it comes out of chemical baths, because it is so eco-unfriendly. Total energy and pollution disaster. And you want to put lab meat in your mouth? It's even worse than factory farmed.
Pasture raised livestock can use land that is otherwise unusable for crops. They harvest the grass and other forages that are grown using the power of solar energy directly from the sun. There is a very good reason people pay extra for all naturally raised.
And looks like burger cooks like burger bring it on.
I love eating meat I hate killing animals.
I am all in.
My theory is that many (but far from all) vegans/vegetarians will eat meat once it is lab grown. Lab grown meat will cause much less animal suffering and maybe it can some day even be engineered to reduce it's fat & cholesterol content. Still some will hold out because at some point an animal was killed to get the original samples. Ethical brands will then pop up that certify their animals were not killed, they only had small samples taken using a humane method and then lived out their natural lives well taken care of. Still, a few will hold out because the animals had no choice in the matter. Of course, few animals that we know of can understand plus make that choice and only one could communicate it to us. So.. someday eating lab grown human meat will be commonplace.
can they make living fleshlights? if it could tense and relax to electric pulses, you'd really have something there. geeks would even give up porn
the hamsters are augmented with 200 lbs. of stem cell meat muscle, and can turn a dynamo from a locomotive
Apparently nobody on Slashdot recognizes a Willy Wonka reference when they see one.
The people that responded to your post are treating you rather badly. Personally I want to thank you. I found the information very ironic. If I had mod points I would mod your post funny. The really sick thing is that I can not put down my own dog without being charged with animal cruelty but I can pay my vet to do it for me, or let my dog go to PETA and they (who care so much for the wellbeing of animals) will kill it.
"For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice" -- God
Condiments and sauces should add and complement flavors, not remove or smother them.
If it isn't good enough to eat without smothering the flavor in obfuscating sauces, then it isn't good enough to eat period.
by Peter F Hamilton
Eating synthetic meat is so common place that when the protagonist is surreptitiously fed beef that came from a real live animal he gets violently sick (from disgust) when he finds out. He considers this perverse.
Very good book all round BTW
The way you troll others here's why I mention that. It appears that you seem to enjoy trying to create enemies for yourself here on this website and in doing so it's obvious you enjoy attempting to make others suffer, you hypocritical lying idiot. Go away idiot. We see right through your shit.