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.'"

Comments

A matter of perspective...

[nine932038]

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.

Re:A matter of perspective...

[Man On Pink Corner]

You might be right - but it's your choice whether to eat that sort of meat, or not. I'm prepared to pay more - sometimes a lot more - for free-range meat.

My guess is that this choice will go away very quickly once synthmeat becomes practical. It will become socially unacceptable to kill any actual animals for food at that point, even if the vat-grown stuff isn't as tasty at first.

Not saying that this will be a good or bad thing, just that it's inevitable.

you know what they should call it...

[swampfriend]

cownterfeit.

Re:you know what they should call it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Godda...Fu...*sigh*

There is a hatred I cannot convey, while simultaneously congratulating.

Processed beyond recognition

[Beetjebrak]

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.

Re:Processed beyond recognition

[MagusSlurpy]

You know, you could grow perfectly healthly, perfectly clean, healthy animals with a 24x7 medical care and monitoring, a personal trainer and hospital level cleaning. We don't because at the end of the day it's the price that counts, not the quality.

You mean bonsai kittens?

Speaking as a vegan

[aliquis]

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.

Re:Speaking as a vegan

[drinkypoo]

To me a slaughtered animals is about as yucky as it can be.

Did you know there are no indigenous vegetarians? There may have been some, but they were probably eaten. Your distaste for what is one of the most natural processes on the world (before blood existed, there were predators and prey) would make you unfit to survive in the wild.

or 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,

You're hardly the only person I know who is grossed out by meat. To me, though, that's not just a mental issue, it's mental illness. We are omnivores. Actual predators often don't even wait until an animal stops moving before they eat it. They have no sense of nicety.

You've convinced yourself of something arbitrary and false.

The simple truth is that an animal has an immune system and a vat of meat doesn't, so from any logical standpoint, it's the vat-grown meat that's "yucky". Animals are self-cleaning and self-repairing. With that said, CAFOs are the devil's work.

Re:Speaking as a vegan

[EvolutionInAction]

You need to study formal logic a bit more. What you are committing is popularly known as the naturalistic fallacy. This is the assumption that what is natural is good, and what is good must be natural.

Which is stupid when you actually stop and think about it. Dolphins rape each other, perfectly natural. Not good.

Re:Speaking as a vegan

[cheekyjohnson]

So now you want to conflate eating meat with rape, and then tell me I need to study formal logic a bit more?

What he used is called an "analogy." Using an analogy is not at all the same as saying that two things are exactly alike. Rather, what he was trying to say is that just because something is natural, that doesn't mean it's automatically good. So no, he very likely wasn't trying to say that eating meat is like raping someone.

Re:Speaking as a vegan

[guises]

You actually used two fallacies in your original post: one was the naturalistic fallacy, claiming that eating meat was good because it was natural, while the second was a straw man fallacy, where you made an argument claiming that eating meat was natural (and therefore good) in counter to an argument by OP that modern meat processing was yucky (an unnatural process).

In your second post you have used two fallacies again: the first was another straw man fallacy - GP gave a perfectly reasonable, though unrelated, example of the naturalistic fallacy and you have made an argument against some concoction of your own, where you've put the GP's example together with the previous topic. Your second fallacy is called an appeal to ridicule. Example: you used the appeal to ridicule fallacy because you are an obstinate idiot incapable of critical thought and resentful of those who are, the very idea that you have anything worthwhile to say is preposterous.

Doesn't matter.

[nospam007]

"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.

Re:why not use meat

[Anonymous Coward]

The amount of grain and water it takes to raise the meat eaten by Americans alone could feed everyone in the entire world.

Most of the grains we feed to livestock aren't worth a shit to humans from a nutritional point of view. I wish every stupid hippie who propagates this bullshit would go out, pick up a couple bales of alfalfa, and try actually surviving on it. Doesn't work so fucking well, because you're a human and not a goddamn cow.

Look, out in your back yard all that grass? Goats can get fat eating that stuff. So do us all a favor and next time you feel like spreading this type of FUD, go cut your lawn and put the trimmings on your plate, and try living off that.

Ethics for veggies

[Smivs]

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.

Re:Ethics for veggies

[MagusSlurpy]

The only reason your diet is tasty to you is because you haven't had bacon in forty years. And if ever we needed proof that greys were replacing humans with pod people, that would be it.

Re:Ethics for veggies

[FireFury03]

If you're a vegetarian for that specific reason it would be quite hypocritical to eat "animal-free meat" that was developed from the suffering of all those poor cuddly cows, mice and rats...

Seems like an extension of the sunk cost fallacy - if the cost has already been paid, refusing to use the product doesn't really make sense.

TBH, this is something that really winds me up about vegitarians - If you want to reduce animal suffering by not eating meat, or reduce environmental impact, then fair enough. But refusing to eat anything that has been grilled on the same bars as meat makes no sense - no extra suffering is going to happen because someone didn't wash the grill pan between cooking their bacon and your vegi-burgers. Similarly, flatly refusing to eat some meat that is only going to be thrown away if no one eats it is completely nonsensical. The best way to reduce your environmental impact is to use as much of the produce as possible, rather than refusing to eat left over meat and grilling up some vegi-burgers instead!

Re:The Japanese eat anything..

[hcs_$reboot]

Wrong. You stereotype a whole country. Japanese eat things that they have been eating for decades or centuries, a lot of that may look strange to Westerners. Recently, Japanese have been eating a lot of western food. Den Fujita opened the 1st Mac Donalds in Japan in 1971. Because it was tasting better? Because "Fujita was amazed by its efficiency and popularity [in the US]" - read "a better way to make money". To sell his hamburgers, he said to the Japanese

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.

Re:why not use meat

[aliquis]

Not true and you could also grow other crops.

True for areas which isn't suitable for farming grains though.

Chinese Faux Meats

[assertation]

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.

Re:why not use meat

[The Master Control P]

If the area currently devoted to making feed for ruminants weren't needed for that, we wouldn't be farming grass and alfalfa on it now would we?

Regardless, you can't deny that the biological growth process is staggeringly inefficient from an energy in / energy in biomass standpoint. There's a reason why prey:predator biomass relationships tend to fan in something like 100:1 per level. It's possible given a large effort to farm a whole bunch of meat, but we're doing severe damage to water tables, river systems and everything within 100 miles of the Mississippi river delta due to farm runoff, a significant part of which is making feedstock for animals.

And no, I'm not confused about why I have sharp front teeth and I enjoy a good steak'n'taters as much as anyone. I simply see a situation whose energy/resource consumption is a Bad Idea (tm) in an era of imminent resource constraints. We should eat meat, but a whole lot less would be much healthier.

Re:why not use meat

[bogjobber]

Because Americans eat a lot of goat meat, right?

Most of the meat eaten in the US is beef and chicken. What do we feed most of the beef and chicken? There's some forage, sure. But the majority of it is corn and soy, grown on commercial farms. This is particularly true in large-scale commercial lots where the overwhelming majority of our meat is produced.

And I hate to burst your bubble, but alfalfa doesn't come falling out of the sky into fully formed hay bails. You have to plant it, fertilized it, and harvest it like all the other crops. That requires arable land, water, gasoline, and labor costs that could easily be used in a much more efficient way than producing meat, which was the GP poster's point.

But I guess having a understanding of basic economics makes us stupid goddamn hippies.