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In Vitro Grown Meat 'Nearly Possible'
Bruce66423 writes "An article at The Guardian discusses the prospects for food from radically different sources than the ones we're used to. 'Sweet fried crickets' anyone? Quoting: '... artificial steak is still a way off. Pizza toppings are closer. The star of the Dutch research into in-vitro meat, Dr Mark Post, promised that the first artificial hamburger, made from 10bn lab-grown cells, would be ready for "flame-grilling by Heston Blumenthal" by the end of 2012. At the time of writing it is still on the back burner. Post (who previously produced valves for heart surgery) and other Dutch scientists are currently working over the problem of how to turn the "meat" from pieces of jelly into something acceptably structured: an old-fashioned muscle. Electric shocks may be the answer. ... The technological problems of producing the new hi-tech foods are nothing compared to the trouble the industry is having with the consumers – the "yuck factor," as the food technology scientists across the world like to put it. Shoppers' squeamishness has turned the food corporations, from whom the real money for R&D will have to come, very wary, and super-secretive about their work on GM in America.'"
After encountering the notion in the Vorkosigan series and thinking about it a bit, the notion of lab-grown meat doesn't seem like a big deal. It's arguably more sanitary than an animal that's been standing in filth for its entire life, after all.
cownterfeit.
I don't understand the yuck-factor. Go buy a McChicken at the big yellow M. There's nothing recognizably chicken-ish about that product at all. The taste and texture is completely different from the chicken I tasted as a kid, when my grandfather would routinely kill and prepare his own chickens for dinner. I can tell you from personal experience that the yuck-factor in actually killing a chicken with a blade is much higher than that of an electricallly stimulated nuggy grown inside a petri dish.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
I'll bet they could make a Haggas that even PETA could love. It already doesn't resemble meat so there's no downside. I'm only half joking in that processed meats may be the inroad to wide acceptance.
the way it sounds is like get ready here it comes......
franken-burger
seriously the way good old fashioned commecial commercial hamburger is created is disgusting enough so i am not getting why the electroshock?
the shock are those sparky jacobs-ladders from the frankenstien movie---->
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://electricmuseum.com/wp-content/uploads/jacobs_ladder_1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://electricmuseum.com/?p%3D6&h=564&w=478&sz=41&tbnid=sxvgaHuFKqADVM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=76&zoom=1&usg=__sulEq7E2zJyZ3aeRgUUP_8csVOQ=&docid=cVZc4_5uNP3mJM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=JlTpUJjHB-PhiwKDyIDgDQ&sqi=2&ved=0CHoQ9QEwCw&dur=4977
still my favorite food--home made thick burger on a tall bun with all the fixings --im hungry enough to try out
What is ironic is that looking at current varieties of crops and farm animals, they have been cultivated to the point where they bear little resemblance to the original species. Also methods of generating new varieties include induced mutation, which is seen as OK by the organic lobby. Go figure.
sounds like a solution searching for a problem. meat exists, just kill and eat it, whats the beef?
I TOLD you, I was sure as hell that you were going to be able to get those extra inches!!!!!!!!!
THANKS science! :-D We at the math dept. are all very excited indeed.
In vitro meat could be a solution for multiple problems namely global warming, obesity & hunger.
I can imagine that it will use way less resources than 'regular' meat while reducing GHG. It could aid in actually replacing some of the carbs in our diet
(ie. Atkins is what many cancer patients are on which is low or no carbs; low carb diets have been shown by studies to produce the best results in losing weight without actually starving someone).
Regulated & engineered meat could also aid in battling hunger for the diet of most poor people is based mainly on grains or nothing at all. And there isn't much of that to go around either (see Arab spring, past and coming droughts).
Now if we could only solve the energy & political problems..
I don't get the yuck factor.
To me a slaughtered animals is about as yucky as it can be. Even more so when combined with the slaughter house And even more so if you consider some things like the floors and skinn processing.
There's also the hanging of the meat and for instance things like hams which have hanged around to develop flavour or whatever for three (?) years and such. I guess they keep the flies out but it looks very old and "half-rotten" with black spots and ugly surface.
Imho something fresh rather than an old body stored long after death seem fresher and less discusting. Scavaging isn't my idea of fresh and little yuckiness.
Something grown in a clean environment (though of course the bodies of the animals are likely good at keeping themself clean except for some parasites and such) imho seem less yucky and if you've got some compassion for others that's even better.
What I personally wonder is if it's still grown in bouillon made of animals because then the difference isn't all to big. You still need to kill animals and use them in the process. But then again they likely could use some scraps to make that one to get better effectiveness.
For me personally there may still be some mental issue due to what it is even if no animal had to die and the cells wasn't grown on an animal based diet/medium. That may not make much sense though, and having a protein based staple for your diet would be very convenient.
how would you not tell the consumers?
label it as "not-pork,not-beef,not-vegetarian,not-meat, mystery fun product!"
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"Dr Mark Post, promised that the first artificial hamburger, made from 10bn lab-grown cells, would be ready for "flame-grilling by Heston Blumenthal" by the end of 2012. At the time of writing it is still on the back burner."
It doesn't matter if it's on the back- or front-burner, the important thing is that it's on the BQ already.
how would you not tell the consumers?
label it as "not-pork,not-beef,not-vegetarian,not-meat, mystery fun product!"
There is food-stuffs in World of Warcraft called "mystery meat," so just slap a Blizzard and World of Warcraft logo on the package and profit!
On the bright side however, vegans can stop pretending their food actually tastes good! Oh... except those vegi burgers as they are tasty. Particularly when fried in bacon grease. ;)
I Can't Believe It's Not Meat! (r)
This migfht be closer to the truth then you think:
I Can't Believe It's Not Butter! is owned by Unilever.
Unilever is Dutch.
Dr Mark Post is Dutch doing the research in The Netherlands
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
As a vegetarian for the last 40-odd years this would certainly pose an ethical question for me - could I eat it?
Probably yes, as it's not a part of the corpse of an animal and presumably no animal has suffered or been exploited in its manufacture. But in practice no, because What's the Point!? I ate meat until my late teens and don't miss it at all. I enjoy a very tasty, healthy and nutritious diet and that's what really matters.
Smivs on the intertubes!
The reason Japanese people are so short and have yellow skins is because they have eaten nothing but fish and rice for two thousand years... If we eat McDonald's hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years we will become taller, our skin become white, and our hair blonde
Due to the heavy impact of the press and TV on the Japanese, this helped a lot. Price as a reason? For your information, for the price of a cheeseburger you get here in Japan a very decent and cooked traditional Japanese meal (Ootoya TBT, Yoshinoya ...).
Back to the story, Japanese will not eat "anything", unless TV endorses it. If TV comes to that and you want to compare this "new meat" to something: compare it to the western hamburgers - and certainly not to the traditional Japanese food that has been eaten in Japan for a very long time.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Wyngs (unlike Wings) can contain any meat you want.
MOD DOWN for stereotyping Asians and being ignorant.
Isn't that as close to lab-grown meat as you can presently get? It doesn't start with animal cells but apart from that it's completely made in a lab/factory. Straight off the assembly line it doesn't taste precisely like meat to a meat-eater, but it sure does when processed into your typical supermarket meal product.
No, not the disney Movie but the SF novel from 1952.
The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl (w/CM Kornbluth).
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?bnum=1002
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
So that's where Jimmy Hoffa went!
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
I'm still dreaming of a steak tree - doesn't have to move, grows on sunlight, doesn't need the highly interdependent energy intensive support infrastructure of industrial society, tastes delicious.
The downside would be that trees normally take a while until they can procreate, delaying breeding attempts. The other thing might be that the global greenhouse pickle we got ourselves into would rather favour movable trees, much like the ones seen in Lord of the Rings, due to the rapidity of the climate changes and weather extremes persisting for longer durations. Maybe cows with chlorophyll would be a better idea. Oh no, wait - cows move around to harvest stored energy from the grass, their own surface would never be enough at the puny photosynthesis efficiencies! They might get maybe a 1-2W assuming 100W average insolation.
Well maybe I could settle for beans with beef taste and some additional proteins.
Je me souviens.
Went out last night and had an amazing prime rib. If lab-grown meat would taste like that, I'd be all over it.
If God didn't want use to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat.
The Japanese really do eat just about everything. Live, dead, cooked, raw, they'll eat it. Even rice ground into powder and reconstituted into a rubbery paste (mochi).
Sounds better than the crap "we" eat: the waste meat parts ground into a rubbery paste (mechanically recovered meat).
This technology isn't really needed. Chinese Buddhists have been making faux meats for centuries. They are quite good.
There are also newer, Western faux meats that are quite good. Check out brands like Gardein and Beyond Meat.
Throughout most of human history, meat in the quantity Westerners are used to has been quite rare. The result are ethic cuisines thousands of years old that use little, if any meat, for tasty, complete ( and healthier ) nutrition.
I'm thinking "SMEET" or "S'MEET", not sure about the apostrophe.
I don't think you understand what mechanically recovered meat is...
as a long-term resident of the country let me assure you, fat TROLL, that you're quite wrong - the Japanese are quite conservative in what they eat, and while the quality of food has lessened somewhat in the past decade or so it is still one of the healthiest places to eat around.
Japan also has the tastiest and most expensive cattle on the planet.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It first blames monsanto for creating a scare because of its out of control actions, then argues for less control by governments.
The simple fact is that if you don't have excessive restrictions, business WILL abuse its freedom, anything from DDT, tobacco, countless medicines which turned out to be worse then the disease.
The whole reason GM food is distrusted is precisely because the US government reduced restrictions and Monsanto went wild, the article even calls it Dr Frankenstein. How can you then argue that governments should reduce restrictions?
No. MORE restrictions and let the research be done in public in universities with NO pressure to produce results for the next financial quarter OR for that matter the next decade. ONLY when research is down with pressure to perform can you be reasonably certain the scientist will put safety over results.
The risk is NOT a GM monster getting away so much as that public perception will turn against the very idea and ALL research must be shelved. Public perception matters in a democracy and it should, that is what democracies are all about.
The way the Dutch government is doing it is the right way, take taxes from the food industry and use it to fund research into food away from commercial pressures. It might or might one day produce something viable but it will do so because of scientific merits, not a CEO worried about his bonus.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
All in the sense of "print your chicken at home"
I'm really curious what someone who doesn't eat meat for "moral" reasons thinks about this? Would you eat it? Would you not? Why either way?
Everyone knows it's made out of people... PEOPLE!!!!
Does the electricity "exercise" the meat? It would be interesting to work in a field full of twitching steaks, when the power is working. They should make the meat do some work too, like tenderizing other meat. Then perhaps aged, and served as food?
I'm happily awaiting vat meat, the advantages are too great for me to ignore. Less environmental impact, no living animals harmed, a much more consistent flavour and texture.
Although I am known for my odd eating habits, picking bland and healthy over sweet and tasty.
Vegetarian speaking here. I would not eat it. The reason is pretty much the same as why you'd never eat cloned human babies. (I do hope you would not...)
suppose you became GMO, free-range yourself, and could grow (periodically) some body part that could be eaten in a loving manner by your mate !
In NSA America social networks join you!
The economics of getting the technology right, and cost of lab-based production at scale still look like a tough hill to climb to make lab-grown meat viable as a mass market food source. Also, getting consumers to change their attitudes toward fabricated meat may be harder than it looks. While the will always be an nearly adopter group that is willing to try it, mass market attitudes are actually moving in the opposite direction when it comes to modified and artificial food sources.
More here: http://changeist.com/changeism/2012/12/post-meat-world
Quorn produced from fungi already fills the role of artificial meat.
As so much of meats taste comes from its texture and the additional fat and blood in it artificial meat will never taste the same without a lot of processing.
We've already got a machine which produces meat. It's almost fully-automatic; it gathers a large proportion of its nutrients on its own, eliminates the waste products, and in the process exercises the muscle tissue to produce the desired texture (though some external work is typically required before harvesting to "finish" the meat). It requires no electricity or other energy input aside from the nutrients it gathers. In short, the cow sets a pretty high standard for meat machines.
If all they can come up with is using electric shocks to make muscle, this process is doomed.
First, it's ignorning the fact that muscle built that way is by stressing and damaging muscle fibres (now we have to invent superhard "tendon" like material to attach the muscle fiber to some solid framework to create stress and then take those fake inedible tendons out later) and allowing the muscle repair processes to make more muscles out of muscle satellite cells. Next, it takes alot a big contractions to create that kind of stress (that's why those silly electro-ab stimulators don't work). In contrast, you can make some perfectly tasty muscle w/o much stress. In a cow, the muscle from where you get the fillet (psoas major), is hardly stressed, yet tasty none-the-less.
If they are just growing muscle cells in a vat of chemicals, a repair processes must be created. W/o a repair process that all these muscle growth "techniques" that simply trigger the repair process in real animals simply don't do anything. If they design the repair process, they can probably just trigger it w/o electric shocks (kind of how like certain DNA mutations can cause huge muscle growth w/o working out).
Blah. Ugh. Lab grown meats are produced in chemicals that I don't want to be eating. It takes more energy to produce lab grown meat. It is worse for the environment than the grand efficiency of pasture raised meats. Lab grown meats are about centralized control by a few big corporations and government bodies. They're not healthy. They're garbage.
I don't believe they're cloning entire animals, though. If the entire reason that someone is a vegetarian is because they don't want to support animals being slaughtered, then this should resolve that concern. I suppose they could also think that eating meat is entirely wrong, but I don't see why that would be.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Yoshinoya? Traditional? Yeah, because the shin meat of elderly Australian dairy cattle mixed with gristle was SO part of the samurai diet circa 1640...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The reason is pretty much the same as why you'd never eat cloned human babies.
So...taste?
If the point of this meat is to develop a new food source, overlooking the culinary uses of its own unique form could be a mistake. There might be excellent & tasty uses for meat jelly or even liquid meat that aren't currently possible with the cuts of tissue that we already know.
Gelatin is already prominent in food production, for example. It's possible that meat jelly could create similar structural effects while enhancing nutritional content.
Where did the writer of that story get the idea that artificial meat is genetically modified? Does the writer know anything at all about the subject of their story?
Professional Idiot
Just dreaming, if we can do this why can't we eventually have a home lab were we grow the stuff and just print a steak or two for dinner?
Why not the print of the whole meal? download a recipe then print it. all ingredients could be sourced from your home "farm" or you could buy them of course.
Has the author ever seen a slaughterhouse? Huge animals hanging from bleed rails, their throats cut, blood gushing out of the gaping wound, snot and saliva hanging down from their mouths and noses, secretions on their eyes?
Ever smelled a cow, or a pig?
Now, don't get me wrong. I like fried chicken strips. Salami. Bacon. Steak. But after it's cleaned and well-prepared.
If someone wants to educate themselves, they can just go to youtube or liveleak and type in "cow slaughter" or "pig slaughter" and compare whether the yuck factor of a laboratory-grown meat is greater-than, equal-to, or less-than the yuck factor of a farm and a slaughterhouse.
Unless things have changed since the last time this story came around, the synthetic meat stuff is still grown using meat-based nutrients (chicken broth, etc.), so it's still not vegetarian even if you aren't counting the animal cells that were used to start the culture growing. So I still won't be eating it, unless they can feed it veggies instead, but even for carnivores, it'll be pretty much a lab curiosity unless they can do that anyway. (I suppose it's possible that they could get some economic benefits by feeding it the leftover animal bits that would otherwise have become Pink Slime (TM) or Animal Byproducts, but not much.)
As far as yuck factor of some processed animal products goes, if you eat microbially-modified foods like cheese or tempeh or beer, you don't really get to complain. (I'd include natto in that list, but it's pretty gross.) There are some vegetarians who object to vegetarian fake meats because "Eww, yuck, how can you eat anything that's trying to be fake dead animal!", but I'm not usually bothered by that - we've evolved as omnivores that use fire, so cooked dead animals are tasty even though we can now choose not to eat them, and most fake meats are really just patties or chunks of vegetable protein with optional umami flavors that can be used in traditional recipes.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
How hard can it be? The fast-food industry figured out how to do the reverse decades ago.
Why would you think a replacement for meat would be healthy when the replacements for butter (margarine) and natural fats (transfer fats) turned out to be even less healthful?
... which meat of any sort does not have: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
Phytonutrients act in part as dailyanti-cancer chemotherapy for your cells, and are vital building blocks like for the pigments in your eyes, and are essential for the immune system to work well, and on and on. When you eat a lot of meat, which generally has a lot of fat these days, or eat a lot of other animal products, you crowd essential phytonutrients out of your diet. Still, it is true that animal products can concentrate other vital nutrients, like iodine, that may otherwise be hard to come by in vegetables grown on depleted soils (unless you eat sea vegetables with a lot of iodine).
Here is how to recalibrate your taste buds for healthy eating:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
That said, perhaps this in vitro meat can be engineered to have a large amount of phytonutrients as well as things like omega-3s (also originally from plants ingested by animals)?
But we don't need many animal products of any sort to be healthy or happy, as above. But we do need to learn a lot about nutrition. Starch-focused vegan diets, for example, tend to be very unhealthy, compared to vegetable-focused vegan diets.
But at least in vitro meat would be an improvement over the current situation:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/links.html
And another innovation in this area would include producing oranges without the tree, or orange juice without the orange, perhaps in indoor farms (with LED lights maybe powered by hot or cold fusion energy someday).
Even for in vitro meat, in vitro meat broth might be easier, an idea I can thank Bryan Bishop for suggesting.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
...already tested this. Tastes like... despair?
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
Being an omnivore makes an animal far more adaptive. If a climate change robs the animal of its accustomed food source, it can just shift to whatever else is now more available, and chow down.
But, while being an omnivore means one can eat just about anything, that does not mean that one must eat everything that is available. Omnivores, due to the abundance of options on their menu, can exercise a higher level of discrimination than their less-advantaged counterparts.
Humans, for example, can choose to be vegetarians precisely because they are omnivores. If they were carnivores, that option would not be available.
So, it seems clear to me that being a vegetarian isn't so unnatural for humans: it is the exercise of choice that is natural to all omnivores (when they are in a climate that offers sufficient variety, of course). Since plants are sufficient to meet a human's nutritional needs, humans are built to make this choice (whenever they find reason).
Of course, you are just as free to eat all the meat you want; that choice is just as natural. I just don't see much justification for your attitude that an all-plant diet is unnatural, nor that a distaste for meat qualifies as a mental illness.
If the meat did not come from an animal, which rolled in shit when it was growing up, and which then was panicking when it was lead for slaughter, then briefly (or not so briefly) screamed in pain when it was killed, it's not real meat. It's just some... substitute, though probably with less hormones, antibiotics and pesticide remnants, more tender yet less fatty, and with very few bacterial contaminants. But still, substitute!
Now excuse me while I go to the outhouse, the crops need fertilizer next year too.
If it due to the tissue being inert? So, you shock the lump of yummy meat jelly in order to stimulate muscle formation? Or is there a problem with cell differentiation? Maybe if so, you'd want to emulate notch signalling- probably rendering it an incredibly expensive lump of flesh, and not even a tasty one at that.
Throughout most of human history, meat in the quantity Westerners are used to has been quite rare
This is one of the key points that the anti-vegan crusade is oblivious to. Human beings evolved eating meat occasionally -- NOT with every meal. The bulk of what they ate was comprised of (drum roll please) a vegan diet! And the proof is in the pudding: the skyrockting rates of heart disease, cancer, and various other health issues since the advent of factory farming -- especially in the US, the world's undisputed champion of quantity-over-quality factory farming.
But just so the anti-organic crusade doesn't feel left out, note that before the technological revolution, *everything* human beings ate (or could possibly eat) was organic! That's right, only a tiny fraction of thousands of years of human evolution have human beings eaten anything other than 100% all-natural food ("organic" to use the popular term of the day). You must feel really dirty now!
I'm sure this isn't a top priority for most folks here, but as someone who keeps somewhat Kosher I'm interested to see what implications artificial meat holds for Judaism's Kosher laws.
When it comes to land animal (but not bird) meat, the basic rule is cloven hooves and chews its cud. (This is why pigs are out. Cloven hooves, but no cud-chewing.) In addition, the animal needs to be slaughtered in a certain way. So would an artificial steak be considered to be "cow" because it genetically descends from cow? Is it still fine if the lab grown vat "animal" didn't have hooves or a stomach, but was just a hunk of meat? Would it be considered Kosher at all because it wasn't "slaughtered" but was just lab-grown? Would it even be considered meat or would a "artificial meat cheeseburger" be acceptable?
There will probably be differing opinions (varying from "it's fine/not meat" to "it's fine/meat" to "not allowed at all"). It should be interesting to hear the debates rage on among the rabbis.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I'll just leave This here.