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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?
Since the whole point of abstaining from meat during Lent is "mortification of the flesh", you could probably go either way.
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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.
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.)
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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.
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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.
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.