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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.
Made from embryonic stem cells rather than adult, of course.
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.
Nothing wrong with killing animals for food. But if they can make it just as good (or even better) in the lab, I'm all for it.
Can I light a sig ?
I'm excited too. Apparently not even the Vulcans got this far.
You can pry my dead cow burger from my greasy and certainly not cold dead hands.
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."
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?
Since the whole point of abstaining from meat during Lent is "mortification of the flesh", you could probably go either way.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Mostly my opinion.
I don't have a problem with animals being killed for food per se. I have more of a problem with the way some of these farms are run / animals are treated. Also farming uses a lot of land, a lot of resources, and generates a tonne of pollution (all of which the lab solution might do as well of course).
Ultimately if a lab solution can replace the need to kill animals, I'm all for it (assuming as you said, it's just as good or better). If for no other reason than no longer having to listen to the animal rights people. I'm sure they will be replaced by an equally annoying anti-synthetic food group in time, but at least it would be a change in the whitenoise.
Oh but they will be replaced by an anti-synthetics group.
At least it will be a different ringing in the ears.
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.
The real question I have is how are they going to reproduce everything that's in the meat. I mean, the core stuff, fine. But there are a myriad of different stuff in meat, including bacteria of all kinds, microbes, all types of things. Sometimes we get ill because of it, but for the most part we ingest it just fine.
What will happen when nothing of that sort goes into our body anymore? Will we take "dirt pills"? I know people have been making Tannin pills to prevent from having to drink wine ...
This will be a sad day IMO.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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?
They ret-con these things, but if it's 'flesh' in the religious eyes then you can't eat it on Fridays.
Except for beaver, because it spends most of its time in the water (no, really). So, have your Fillets 'O Beaver and be content in your righteousness. Or, read 1 Timothy 4 - your call.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Help stop the slaughter of baby Naugas.
(no more naugahide)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Nothing wrong with killing animals for food....
My mind has been changed on the ethics of that and it was Peter Singer who convinced me of the fact. It's an argument rooted not only in minimizing harm to sentient creatures (and avoiding speciesism), but also on the arguably more distasteful issue another poster mentioned, that of how animals are treated in farms.
Singer's article here provides the latter argument, but I can't recall sources for his former argument. Perhaps here.
I am looking forward to the wide availability of lab-grown meat. It'll be an altogether more humane alternative to what we are engaging in now. Plus, on a personal note, it'll make me less of a hypocrite, because I still eat meat. As they say, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
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.
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.
Beef Jerky. Reasonably low fat and low carb and mostly paleo diet. "Cow Chip" might actually sell as an extreme marketing term.
I once made a meatloaf in a Pyrex pie plate. When I served it I discovered why meatloaf is traditionally formed into a rectangle, when my son said "Mmm, cow pie!"
I love eating beaver.
Bow before me, for I am root.
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
As they say, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
That (according to TFA) can be fixed with electric shocks.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Now here's another interesting philosophical question. I eat a vegan diet for health reasons, mostly to do with the quality of food and how it goes from "animal" to "edible".
Is test-tube meat something that I would eat? What about an ethical vegan? (They don't want animals to suffer.)
---
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Too bad, I give it 10-20 years from the moment this stuff hits the shelves until the first leftist country bans real meat.
Really? With all the anti-GMO propaganda and fear I figure it's more likely the synthetic stuff will be much more likely to be banned. The anti-meat folks are a pretty small minority compared to the OMG-evil-science crowd
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
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. . . .
Have you seen the inside of some labs these days? Disgusting. Doritos everywhere. Chemicals piled up on racks. Blue LEDs.
You'd want to eat something that came out of that environment?
Not me. I'll go for stuff raised in manure any time.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I spent a weekend listening to a string theorist explain multiple universes. I felt much the same way.
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 ]
practice and practice with a high powered rifle, then hunt your own meat with head shots. no suffering, no processing, no preservatives.
There will be two types of cell lines. One is extracted from living animals, and the other is extracted through butchering. The latter will provide a great deal more meat more cheaply (as these cells can only divide so many times).
So it depends on where you want to draw the line. If you don't mind taking, say, 1/1000th of the life of a cow to eat a burger every week for the rest of your life, then it is fine either way. If you don't want any part of a dead animal on your hands, then you will have to go with the more expensive extraction method.
Of course, if you don't want ANY part in any animal death, you should know that pretty much everything you use has animal parts in it somewhere. Hell, tires are black because of carbon black sourced from charred animal carcasses.
Brand new? Buddhism is 600 years older than Christianity.
Religion is a spiritual crutch for people who can't handle God.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Right and if you can't avoid the inhumane treatment of animals in one microcosm of your life, you better just start clubbing baby seals to death because shades of gray are for people more sophisticated than us.
No or little suffering unless your headshot is just a little bit off. That happened to me my first time out hunting. While I'd hypothetically go hunting again, I felt like a major asshole when my friend said "You shot the front of its head off" and it was bouncing up and down off the ground in what must have been horrific pain until my friend got close enough to blow the rest of its brains out.
Been there, done that.
I like mine rare, thank you.
Seriously, grow up.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Veridian Dynamics is working on it .
Ask me again when Obama forces us all to eat hamburgers made out of test-tube babies.
Clearly, as President-to-be Santorum has said, Satan is attacking America:
I am comforted by a presidential candidate who talks about Satan's evil plan to destroy America, using "sensuality". So when Satan/Obama comes do destroy America, he will force us to eat hamburgers made of test-tube babies at Hooters! We need a president like Rick Santorum. That's why I encourage all of you to visit spreadingsantorum.com where you can donate to the cause.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What about an ethical vegan?
No such thing.
The Japanese version made out of sewage, was, in fact a hoax.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
With due respect, you haven't got a clue about farming if you think it "uses a lot of land, a lot of resources and generates a tonne of pollution." Would it be any less land wasting, polluting and resource consuming if we paved all the land and dropped a city on it? Or maybe a data center like Facebook that consumes as much power as the rest of the county it's situated in? Farms covered in green crops and grass suck up a hell of a lot of that CO2 that you city people are spewing into the air, not to mention filling the air with oxygen for you to breath. I'm a beef cattle producer myself and can assure you my production methods are as close to natural as possible. My cattle graze as long as possible to naturally harvest grass and I cut and bale hay for winter feeding. Yes, I burn diesel for that. Now, I don't grow grain but I pay attention to what those guys do and can assure you that modern technology such as zero-till and GPS have drastically cut back (as in a 50% drop) on burning fossil fuels for grain production and do not leave the land exposed to wind and water erosion like conventional tillage does. I grew up in the 80s when a lot of tillage was still going on and do not fondly remember the dust storms.
As I drive by the outskirts of ever-expanding cities with their new estates and McMansions, it brings a tear to my eye. I'd rather see that land turned back into agriculture.
PETA has come out in favor of this research and said it is a great thing. They're interested in the animals and suffering, not muscle tissue in the abstract.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The ultimate authority on this should be the Vegan Society in the UK. They (well, Donald Watson) coined and defined the term 'vegan' in 1944. Based on their ideas, since this doesn't at all challenge the idea that animals shouldn't be harmed or exploited (there is no ethical foundation in lab meat), it probably wouldn't be considered vegan - even if they could somehow do away with using blood, etc.. It still came from an animal without consent, even if it were just one cell. (Consent being the opposite of exploitative activity, which is why oral sex, breastfeeding babies, etc.. are considered vegan although 'animal products' are being...err....consumed.)
This, however, brings up an interesting question: why not use human tissue for this? To run a parallel question to the above author: would eating lab-grown human 'meat' constitute cannibalism? If the cells were willingly donated, and presumably no vectors for illness, why not?
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.
Would it be any less land wasting, polluting and resource consuming if we paved all the land and dropped a city on it? Or maybe a data center like Facebook that consumes as much power as the rest of the county it's situated in?
Strawman. Those aren't the only possibilities. One could simply use the land to cultivate food for direct human consumption.
Farms covered in green crops and grass suck up a hell of a lot of that CO2 that you city people are spewing into the air, not to mention filling the air with oxygen for you to breath
The problem is not the green crops and grass, but the animals.
Firstly, there's this:
Globally, ruminant livestock produce about 80 million metric tons of methane annually, accounting for about 28% of global methane emissions from human-related activities.
And secondly, the whole process of growing vegetables, feeding it to cattle and then eating the cattle is much less efficient than taking the animals out of the equation.
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I agree absolutely. I support Rick Santorum without apology.
The great Santorum recently had this to say in an interview:
We clearly need a president who is willing to die to prevent gay people from getting married.
I think that's why we're seeing Santorum surging everywhere. On Sunday morning, the TV news programs were covered with Santorum. Santorum was everywhere.
If I lived in Michigan, I would absolutely vote for Santorum. I love Santorum and I wear that proudly. It gets a little sticky after a while, but I wear it proudly.
You are welcome on my lawn.
d it was bouncing up and down off the ground in what must have been horrific pain until my friend got close enough to blow the rest of its brains out.
Still a much kinder dead than most wild animals get. e.g. slow starvation, disease, or having your guts ripped out by a predator.
The only animals than can expect a quick dignified death are our pets. Certainly not us.
You're as sharp as a whip. Can't get anything over on you, Attila. Your mama didn't raise no fools. No sir.
You saw right through my carefully-crafted ruse to make you think I was a supporter of Rick Santorum, when really it's his namesake I support because I use it in my Satanic rituals. Yes, I throw santorum into the eyes of all the god-fearing teabaggers. Out of the frothy santorum, I create a liberal golem, to spread evil with a thin coat of the slimy substance.
But I would still vote for Santorum in the Michigan primary if I was a resident of Michigan, and I pray to The Great Prince of Lies, my master, Satan, that Santorum should become the Republican nominee. Because, yes, I am "scared to death" of Rick Santorum. That's exactly why I hope he becomes the nominee. It's my insidious Saul Alinsky super-triple jujitsu, wherein I hope that Santorum becomes the nominee because I fear him so. This way, he becomes imprisoned in the White House where he cannot do any harm to my cause instead of becoming a Fox News Pundit (like every other failed GOP candidate) and becomes more powerful than I could have ever dreamed and where he can do REAL damage to my crypto-islamo-marxist agenda.
But now that you have uncovered my filthy plans, you have neutralized me entirely. CURSES, YOU HAVE FOILED ME AGAIN!
You are welcome on my lawn.