Slashdot Mirror
Engineering the $325,000 Burger
Dr. Mark Post hopes to bring the dream of cultured meat one step closer to reality when he unveils his high tech hamburger in London. The five ounce burger is composed of 20,000 strips of beef muscle tissue grown in a laboratory at a cost of $325,000 (provided by an anonymous donor.) From the article: "The hamburger, assembled from tiny bits of beef muscle tissue grown in a laboratory and to be cooked and eaten at an event in London, perhaps in a few weeks, is meant to show the world — including potential sources of research funds — that so-called in-Vitro meat, or cultured meat, is a reality."
You get lots of fries for that price
(And your coke in a real glass, not a plastic cup)
the nanny-state mentality that is gripping government first world countries will soon forbid the growing of beef-life tissue because of its increasing the risk of arterial clogging, etc.
the second is a quality consideration, I will accept nothing less than the flavor and texture of the very finest beef cuts in vat cultured tissue. else I will continue to support the inhumane raising and slaughtering of cattle. Also, I reserve the right to throw tissue cultures on the grill over charcoal, concerns of carcinogens be damned.
if it tastes as good as dead animal muscles and has equivalent or better nutritional value, I'm all for it
Does this meat technically qualify as vegetarian, as no animal was killed to make it?
Only on
This might be a very cardboard and dry burger - all meat tissues, no fat.
Japanese would prefer something of quality and not just because something is expensive. They have their Kobe beef. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobe_beef
Q: How can you know why somebody is a vegan?
A: Don't worry. He'll tell you.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yeah, just because the first computer took millions to build and maintain didn't make it real.
Why are you so negative about lab grown meat? No more animal suffering, a lot less impact on the environment, what's not to like?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Common additional "ingredients" in your "normal" burger:
* puss
* feces
* lead and other hazardous materials
* human hair
* insect parts
* insect larva
* bacterial waste
* lots of other disgusting things
And you want to complain about something grown in a nice clean lab?
Also the expensive things are affordable. Not for everyone, of course, but for the upper 1%.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The price is perfectly realistic, really; in fact, it's quite well thought-out. By the time these are ready for large-scale roll-out, inflation will have caught up nicely.
GMO agriculture by a fascist system (Monsanto and govt) HFCS in one form or another is in almost everything, now this (lab grown meat), i seen enough of this planet and i want off
The upside is that you're still going to be able to have burgers without having to figure out how to herd cattle in space.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I guess both of you have a point. I can summarize the issue stating the obvious: the techniques (on vitro beef, GMO, etc) are not the problem; the problem consists of the organizations controlling these techniques (Monsanto, etc). And the problem is this: monopoly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAFO
Yup, not cultured at all.
Mostly random stuff.
Ted: "We're talking about growing meat in a lab without cows."
Linda: "Ugh! That's creepy!... Right?... Oh, I see, we're doing that."
Artificial Beef Taste Tester: "It tastes... familiar..."
Ted: "Beef?"
Taste Tester: "No..."
Linda: "Chicken? We'll take chicken."
Taste Tester: Shakes his head
Ted: "What does it taste like?"
Taste Tester: "Despair?"
Ted: "Is it possible it just needs salt?"
Taste Tester: Shakes his head very slowly
Better Off Ted, Season 1 Episode 2
I feel that eating meat which was not once running through the fields, robs me of the deep sense of superiority I get from being at the top of the food chain. Who knows how long we may remain here (alien invasion or pending zombie apocalypse)? I say let's enjoy our dominant position while we have it and not waste our time on defenseless lab meat.
Unless and until we get unpatented GMO crops, and no more lawsuits against farmers who got cross-pollination from GMO crops, I'll be against GMO crops, regardless of its other merits or non-merits. Buying GM crops means supporting an abusive industry.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
First they replaced my natural flavor with imitation, and I ate it anyways.
Second they replaced sugar with corn syrup, and I kept on getting fatter.
Then they replaced my natural crops with genetic modified crops, and I kept eating.
Now they are trying to replace my natural cow grown meat with vat grown meat? WTF?
When will this stop? We are very close to losing bacon in the name of progress.
Think of the bacon, this must be stopped.
Be seeing you...
Eventually there could be several advantages over your "real" burger actually.
1) No need to grind it up. Grow it in the proper shape/texture and cook.
2) You can cook it as rare as you like.
3) Get the exact amount of fat you want so your burger is in fact juicy.
4) High quality cuts might be mass producible.
Taste, texture, and have the nutritional charactersitics of beef? Not without engineering them well past anything you could properly call a soybean anymore...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I only use virtual machines
rewriting history since 2109
How much worse can it be than what you get at McDonald's?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Don't jump to conclusions. Every attempt I've ever heard of at cultured meat, or any other tissue for that matter, has been highly dependent upon nutrient solutions derived from living animals. Many are based on animal blood, some on liver or other tissue. I'd bet far FAR more animals went into this over prices burger than would have been necessary for the McDonalds my family had for lunch yesterday.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
If vat grown becomes a reality. Beef production produces huge amounts of methane which is a big contributor to climate change. You don't have to be animal welfare nut to advocate for this development.
Actually, the suffering makes the meat taste worse :
Here the animal is subjected to severe anxiety and fright caused by manhandling, fighting in the pens and bad stunning techniques. All this may result in biochemical processes in the muscle in particular in rapid breakdown of muscle glycogen and the meat becoming very pale with pronounced acidity (pH values of 5.4-5.6 immediately after slaughter) and poor flavour.
There was a short story in Analog long ago that touched on that. A husband-wife team were famous for selling the best and most exotic cloned meat. He was the scientist, she was marketing. In a competitive industry, everyone was trying to out do each other.
In the end, he confessed to his wife that their latest blockbuster was cloned from a sample taken from her ass.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
http://baconsalt.com/
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I used to work in a company that grows animal tissue cultures. You certainly CAN grow lots of tissue types without horse serum or any animal-related products. In fact, lots of lab protocols require that.
Cyberax is correct, and the main driving force behind the shift has been the FDA; they've been pushing hard for chemically-defined culture media, with elimination of serum-type materials whenever possible. Although bio-pharm materials are closely examined for both known and unknown pathogens, their concern is that animal derived substances may yet harbor pathogens too novel to be detected by conventional methods. We're used to defined media for microbes being simple and cheap, but the ones used for mammalian cells are more complex and frequently must be tailored to each particular cell lineage, with comparatively exorbitant costs.
In any case, if you've got the capability to do large-scale mammalian cell culture, you'd be a fool to use it for a product that sells for dollars-per-pound, when that capacity could be put to work performing contract manufacturing of bio-pharmaceuticals that sell for for thousands-of-dollars-per-gram.
From the article: "starting with a particular type of cell removed from cow necks obtained at a slaughterhouse."
There was also a mention that there's an ongoing need for animal products to produce the growth medium.
There's work going on to be animal independent, but for now this meat is also slightly murderous.
Not A Sig
As per the wiki article, the Tajima cow is the only cow considered for this meat, what it fails to mention is that the Tajima is just an Angus, and indeed an Angus that is brought up in conditions I do not agree with. They are brought up in a very small area, not allowed to exercise so as to get that delicious marbling. After visiting these farms I feel much better about how my cows are brought up in Australia, with one cow having an average of 2 acres as opposed to 20 square feet.
Anyway, rant aside Kobe beef just isn't all that good in comparison to the other meats available in Japan as they're all the same damned breed being brought up exactly the same, Japanese tradition just dictates that it's more expensive and 'better'.
Anonymous McDonor?
1. Meat tastes terrible. It's the fat that tastes good. Go make a burger from steak tartar, no cheese, if you don't believe me.
2. Red meat, because of carnetines and gut bacterial, may be causing the lion's share of heart disease problems.
So we've been fooled by science fiction for 80 years. Meat is a useless substrate to convey delicious fats to the mouth, and give you something to chew on while savoring them. And it's a hideously unhealthy substrate.
Some tofu burger, but with beef fat, is probably the way to go. Lack of fats is why tofu, like plain baked taters, taste...boring, to be kind to both.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Not only do you eat McDonald's for lunch, you bring your family there?
Do you want your children to be obese and have health problems?
Do poor people simply dislike money?
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan