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Meat the Food of the Future
Hugh Pickens writes writes "BBC reports that rising food prices, the growing population, and environmental concerns are just a few issues that have food futurologists thinking about what we will eat in the future and how we will eat it. In the UK, meat prices are anticipated to have a huge impact on our diets as some in the food industry prognosticate meat prices could double in the next five to seven years, making meat a luxury item. 'In the West many of us have grown up with cheap, abundant meat,' says Morgaine Gaye. 'Rising prices mean we are now starting to see the return of meat as a luxury. As a result we are looking for new ways to fill the meat gap.' Insects will become a staple of our diet. They cost less to raise than cattle, consume less water and do not have much of a carbon footprint. Plus, there are an estimated 1,400 species that are edible to man. 'Things like crickets and grasshoppers will be ground down and used as an ingredient in things like burgers.' But insects will need an image overhaul if they are to become more palatable to the squeamish Europeans and North Americans, says Gaye. 'They will become popular when we get away from the word insects and use something like mini-livestock (PDF).' Another alternative would be lab grown meat as a recent study by Oxford University found growing meat in a lab rather than slaughtering animals would significantly reduce greenhouse gases, energy consumption and water use. Prof Mark Post, who led the Dutch team of scientists at Maastricht University that grew strips of muscle tissue using stem cells taken from cows, says he wants to make lab meat "indistinguishable" from the real stuff, but it could potentially look very different. Finally algae could provide a solution to some the world's most complex problems, including food shortages as some in the sustainable food industry predict algae farming could become the world's biggest cropping industry. Like insects, algae could be worked into our diet without us really knowing by using seaweed granules to replace salt in bread and processed foods. 'The great thing about seaweed is it grows at a phenomenal rate,' says Dr Craig Rose, executive director of the Seaweed Health Foundation. 'It's the fastest growing plant on earth.'"
It worked for rape seed oil, err, I mean "canola" and for mechanically reclaimed meat in place of "lips, ringpieces and bits of meat blasted off the bones".
It will work for grasshoppers.
"Gamey" to me means it has a metallic, "liver-ish" aftertaste. But I happen to like that. Most Americans won't touch organ meat, but you get a hint of that flavor in game muscle tissue.
I once had a huge wild duck pig-out with a hunter friend of mine. The drumsticks, which wild ducks hardly use, were indistinguishable from domestic duck. If anything they were sweeter. The breast (which the animal uses to fly) was a much more powerful muscle, and it was distinctly gamey. I actually enjoyed the gamey breast better, because domestic duck I can have any day of the week. It also helped that the duck was cooked to perfection -- there isn't a lot of margin for error in cooking game if you don't want it to end up like shoe leather. This was at a Chinese restaurant that was willing to cook its customers game -- how cool is that?
I've had rattlesnake, which wasn't exactly chicken-like, but it did have a remote resemblance. I think the "tastes like chicken" thing means "leaner than marbled beef". When I was young, pork tasted quite different than it does now. Hog farmers, conscious of the negative public attitude toward fat, are producing lean pork that is very close to chicken in flavor. Recently I had some wild boar, and it was a revelation. The flavor was so intense I wasn't sure at first that I liked it. Imagine the taste difference between a pork chop and a chicken breast, then multiply that by 100x.
The plant equivalent of chicken, by the way, is "asparagus". For some reason many wild plants seem to remind people of asparagus.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Ironically, the best beef for you is not from a cow being fed corn from giant trough which is also sludged up with manure, dead cow parts, and days-old standing water. How about a cow eating grass, seeing as they happen to be ruminants?
So yes, GOOD meat would be less expensive if the government stopped subsidizing the corn industries. In fact, the whole idea of massive farms growing nothing but corn is the stupidest waste of land possible. Corn has very low benefit for both humans and cows, but it just happens to be easy to ship long-distance. Ask yourself "Why do they need subsidies to survive?" It's just like the "too big to fail" banking system that must be subsidized at the cost of huge segments of our economy. Politics and power never seem to collude in our benefit.
The whole concept of the monoculture industrial farming system has ruined generations of farmland. The age-old concept of rotational grazing as well as other sustainable methods has actually been shown to produce much more return for square acre than typical large-scale industrial farming, but our whole government and food-regulation system makes it very hard for these kinds of farms to compete. Check out Joel Salatin's book "Everything I Want to do is Illegal".