Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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!
I say make it an option and let people decide.
Personally, I'm all for it, but I recognize there is always a risk when something is untested. The same can be said for any drug. You can't tell what the effects will be in 30 years until, well, people have been using it for 30 years. You can make soem very good guesses (which is what will happen with the synthetic meat) but you won't really _know_ until a generation actually lives off it.
There's gonna be people who won't trust this stuff (and probably never will), and that's fine.
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)
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.
I love eating beaver.
Bow before me, for I am root.
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.)
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
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 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..."
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.
And this is different in what why when compared to meat from Cattle or Pigs, or Lettuce, or tomatoes? We really don't know all there is to know about ANYTHING, and we never will. Yet I bet you eat these things with impunity.
Interestingly enough, Tomatoes are one of the first bio-engineered foods. Originally no bigger than a berry, it had already been engineered by indigenous farmers in South America to be about the size of a large grape when the Spanish arrived. Only after it was spread to Europe was it widely cultivated, crossbred, and selected until it reached its current size. Every once in a while someone decides to make tea out of tomato leaves. Bad Idea. And we don't know All there is to Know about tomatoes yet, but we eat them by the ton.
This "We don't know all there is to know" is just another version of the rallying cry There are some things science can't explain! which is thrown out by the "back to the earth" crowd any time anything challenging is presented.
I haven't decided if this an example of the Fallacy of False Dilemma, or the Fallacy of the Appeal to Ignorance, but its pretty annoying in any case.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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.
Jewish rabbis get a prohibition on cheeseburgers from this lone (half-)verse:
Exodus 34:26b: Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.
From here, they have entire separate milk and meat dishes and can't have even chicken with cheese.
If you even applied logic to the verses themselves, there are already a great number of things that Jewish people could eat, but don't because a rabbi put a fence around the law.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
If they could come up with a food substitute that was purely for sensation / making you feel full, and we all just took pills to actually get nutritional content.. I'd be all for it.
I dunno, they did something similar to that with chewing gum in the early 1970s that was supposed to approximate a three course meal. If I remember correctly, it ended up badly with the blueberry pie dessert course.
I think they made a hard-hitting movie dramatisation of it...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).