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$375,000 Lab-Grown Beef Burger To Debut On Monday
sciencehabit writes "If you take some scientists' word for it, the biggest agricultural revolution since the domestication of livestock is starting on Monday — in an arts center in London. At a carefully orchestrated media event, Dutch stem cell researcher Mark Post is planning to present the world's first test-tube hamburger. Its patty — financed by an anonymous billionaire — is made from meat that Post has laboriously grown from bovine stem cells in his lab at an estimated cost of $375,000, just to prove a point: that it is possible to produce meat without slaughtering animals."
Cue the Better of Ted jokes...
Scientist says you can't beat meat. Now that's cultured!
Because part of it stems from the fat
Sell now all of the taste is from stems.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Personally I'd be more worried about texture.
Good result.
Yes, it's expensive now. It's a prototype. Aluminum once cost more than gold.
> It will take a lot to ever convince me that something synthetic can taste the same as something that
> was alive and running around with blood
No, it will take as long as it takes to bite it and taste it. You'll be able to make a snap judgement immediately.
Given the reaction to GM crops you think the EU will embrace the Frankenburger? Much like the monster it will be vilified, misunderstood and eventually driven out and destroyed.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's just a $375,000 failed lab experiment until somebody dares eat it.
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That's why it's a hamburger. The entire point of mechanically pre-chewing cheap meat is to destroy its tough, inedible texture. You can make a somewhat passable simulation of ground beef out of soy beans, for heavens' sake.
Just remember that God invented cows to make grass fit for human consumption!!!!
Symbiotica did this before in 2003 by growing tissue from skeletal muscle cells harvested from pre-natal sheep. And they ate the results.
There are two major hurdles with non-violent cultured meat for eating though:
1) Edible meat is a very complex tissue with muscles, fat, blood vessels, etc. and the precise relation of these cell types and their physical placement in the meat affects the taste and texture.
2) Most cell culturing media is not vegetarian - the nutrient baths are generally processed from living animals.
It sounds like this new effort is basically the same thing - culturing myoblasts and feeding them with fetal calf serum.
At the same time, I look forward to these challenges being overcome, and glad to see new funding!
FTA:
There are other problems: Cultured meat is now grown in medium with fetal calf serum, a supplement made from blood collected at slaughterhouses; scientists have yet to find an alternative that doesn't involve dead animals.
Well, of course, I seriously doubt it will be as tasty or have nearly as good mouthfeel as a burger from a real cow, but this is a very important, early step in a long chain of necessary inventions to truly replace animals as a meat source.
However, if culture medium *does* matter, then that become yet another variable to tweak in producing the tastiest meat, and it's almost certain that we'll be able to improve on nature by, say, eliminating the taste of fear and stress in meat.
We'll also theoretically have the ability to grow sterile meat if we can use sterile inputs. Imagine meat that can stay vacuum sealed on the shelf with no refrigeration for months and still taste fresh!
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I don't think that is the case, because I think there will remain in most people this knowledge that it "is not from a real cow" which will affect the taste. Maybe not objectively (as in, the Pepsi/Coke taste test), but in the same way that someone is certain they can discern the flavor of a $100/bottle wine and a $500/bottle of wine, until you give them a taste test where they can't tell the difference. This is why I think it would be something that current generations would have a hard time accepting, but future generations would simply take as matter of fact.
You can make a somewhat passable simulation of ground beef out of soy beans, for heavens' sake.
No. No you cannot.
Look, I admit I'm a heterotroph. That means I eat things. There's no way around that. I'm not photosynthetic. I'm not chemoautotrophic. It doesn't matter if it's plant or animal or fungus or various prokaryotes, I live thanks to the death of other living creatures. My heritage has been heterotrophic since sometime when the first eukaryotes started clumping together into multicellular creatures back almost a billion years ago, and some of them realized it was easier to raid other critters and burn it with oxygen than to grow their own. That choice was made a long, long time ago, long before I had enough differentiated nerve cells clumped together to enable me to make a conscious choice about it. Even if they're cultured cells sitting in a growth medium, I'm still responsible for their death. Even if I'm vegetarian, it's a formerly living plant that I'm eating. They die so I can live.
My main and almost only moral concern is that I don't eat other sentient creatures (obviously) and if I do eat reasonably intelligent creatures (e.g., pigs), that they are treated reasonably well during their lifetime until I decide to eat them. I'd sooner ensure a basic standard like that is strictly adhered to than waste $375k on a lab hamburger for the sake of the vain illusion that I'm not killing things to survive. I still am, even at that kind of cost and hassle.
Because part of it stems from the fat the animal grows; part from it's diet; I would even go as far as to say from the landscape the animal was grown in.
Will this meat flavor depend on the culture medium it was grown?
I seem to recall the guy did a TED talk a few months ago where he pointed out this fact -- growing muscle from stem cells has been doable for quite some time; the trick was (and is) to grow all the parts that make it tasty. He still hasn't (or at least hadn't back then) been able to reproduce marbled meat, but he's been able to grow the right proportions of meat, fat, and tissue cells to make a ground beef substitute. I presume he could do the quantities to order, for different tastes. I'd think the culture medium would also have an effect, as it would influence what extra minerals etc. were included.
If you want to worry about the taste and texture of synthetic meat, try this one on for size:
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2011/06/15/shit-burger-japanese-researcher-creates-artificial-meat-from-human-feces-video/
Imagine meat that can stay vacuum sealed on the shelf with no refrigeration for months and still taste fresh!
That's available now. Irradiated meat is available, but not widely sold. There are some tricks to preserving taste, one being to vacuum-pack and freeze to -30C before irradiation.
could have fed a lot of people regular cows. Or anything else for that matter.
Just sayin'.
How much does a regular cow really cost?
At least with his $375,000 you've got most of the costs all in one place; this is almost exactly what it costs with the current no-scale inefficient techniques he used. Probably (but not necessarily, depending on the resources needed) be significantly cheaper than animal-grown meat when scaled up to the same volume and the inefficiencies in mass production limited.
Assuming the price comes down once the economy of scale kicks in, this would be a far less destructive staple than traditional meat.
You claim you have pangs of guilt for supporting the realities of the meat industry.
Yet you would reject the product unless it tastes nearly identical (and has additional nutritional advantages).
Basically you're saying, if it doesn't taste exactly like what I'm used to eating, I don't give a fuck how many billions of gallons of water are wasted raising cattle, I don't care how much pollution modern industrial farming produces, I don't care how many billions of animals will experience cramped, noisy conditions for their brief, unpleasant lives, I am going to continue to demand traditional meat.
Fuck you, you self-centered piece of shit.
There can be a huge range of processes building this beef in the future. If current processed food is a model, this stuff could turn out to suck big time. Not because of physical necessity but corporate/government decisions.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
You can make a somewhat passable simulation of ground beef out of soy beans, for heavens' sake.
No. No you cannot.
Yes you can. You might not like it, but as a carnivore who enjoys a cool center rare steak, I can tell you that a lot of those soy protein burgers taste okay. Do they taste exactly like hamburger? nope. But not everything in life has to taste like hamburger. Ice cream for instance.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2011/06/15/shit-burger-japanese-researcher-creates-artificial-meat-from-human-feces-video/
What, that asshole is at it again?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
IMHO, soy is at its worst when its trying to be something else.
Its sort of like the uncanny valley. If you come out and say "hi, Im tofu", its fine. If you try to be steak, everyone will know something is wrong (even if theyre not sure what) and it will taste terrible.
I had that problem with convincing my dad to eat meat substitutes - he kept treating them like meat, and expecting them to taste and behave the same way. Ultimately he dismissed the whole category. Ridiculous. A black bean / chipotle veggie burger is fuckin' delicious, it doesn't matter if it doesn't taste like meat.
Since you try to sell them as meat substitutes he damn sure wants something that doesn't make him miss meat at every bit
People will look back at us and find it disgusting we ate corpses.
> Of course, what you ARE going to have is a major backlash from the farming conglomerates who will see their profits vanishing.
Or they'll replace racks of chick-filled trays with racks of cultured meat once it becomes more profitable, if only as a premium high-margin item.
The big thing that's going to keep this from ever becoming cost-effective is the electricity it's going to take to exercise it by contracting the fibers over the course of their "life". Remember, most of what we call "meat" is REALLY "muscle", with incidental amounts of fat. Flabby muscle doesn't taste the same as exercised muscle. That's 90% of the reason why cows raised for meat are allowed to roam mostly out in the open instead of being kept in pens as veal. Pigs and chickens in close quarters will climb over each other and spend their lives trying to avoid getting trampled. Cows are just too big & heavy for that to work. They HAVE to be allowed to roam around for exercise. Otherwise, half of them would kill the other half long before they were old enough to slaughter.
As for opposition from "farmers", think about it for a minute. The poultry industry has basically perfected large-scale vertically-integrated corporate factory farming. The likelihood that any cultured meat could be even remotely cost-competitive with it is basically "nonexistent". That leaves beef, where there's a clear divide between ranchers and slaughterhouses. If ranchers decide it's more profitable to culture meat instead of ranch it, there's nothing the slaughterhouses can do about it. If slaughterhouses decide it's more profitable to culture meat than kill it, there's not much the farmers can do about it. More importantly, the states where ranchers are powerful aren't quite the states where slaughterhouses are powerful, so there's not going to be any kind of "united front".
The truth is, ranchers don't *like* sending animals to be slaughtered any more than the people who own the slaughterhouses *like* killing them. If they could cost-effectively get away with herding cattle into a robotic slaughter chamber, closing the soundproof doors, pressing the "go" button, and walking away to watch neatly-packaged meat emerge (regardless of the horrors that might occur inside the chamber), they'd do it in an instant.
Cultured meat will never replace good steak, and can't possibly be cost-competitive with factory-farmed poultry. That leaves hamburger & sausage as potentially-viable markets. My guess is that someday, nouveau-vegetarians will be able to enjoy guilt-free cultured hamburgers & sausage that's certified to be slaughter-free, and everyone else will eat hamburgers & sausage that are some cost-effective combination of ground beef/pork and cultured beef/pork.
We'll probably get to have some entertaining theatre when various sects of Judaism gets around to arguing about the 21st-century definition of "Kosher" in the context of meat that was technically never slaughtered, and might even see something truly perverse, like Kosher cultured meat guaranteed to be cloned from the cells of humanely-slaughtered animals (vs non-slaughtered animals), and a huge media orgy someday when Kosher cultured beef ends up getting served to a NewVegan who ordered cultured beef cloned from cells harvested from calves released into nature parks (where they're promptly killed & eaten by bears, cougars, wolves, and (in Florida) pythons).
Every time someone says "mouthfeel" I have an inexplicable desire to punch something.
Might I suggest a bottle of Fiji water? You may find that the soft mouthfeel of the artesian water translates into a soft fistfeel and spares your knuckles from the consequences of your aggression.
Pink slime looks disgusting, but the truth is, if you were given a hamburger containing pink slime (with the usual artificial flavors and processing), and another hamburger made from low-quality pure ground beef, you'd probably think the one made with pink slime tasted better. At the very least, in double-blind taste tests, you'd probably give the pink slime burger a 4 or 5 out of 5 for "authentic barbecue flavor" and "savory texture", and say the all-beef (low-quality) burger was dry & tasteless. You'd be amazed/horrified if you knew about the miracles things like artificial smokehouse flavoring and MSG can work on your tastebuds.
The only reason why they don't sell artificial flavorings like the ones added to Burger King's hamburgers at grocery stores is because consumers would abuse them and consume levels a thousand times beyond any amount ever approved for direct human consumption by the FDA (or even tested for safety, period). I forget who it was, but some university actually did some studies with test kitchens and people allowed to prepare their own foods, just to see how much artificial flavor real people would put into their own food if they were allowed to. The researchers were *horrified*. One described it as being like giving a pound of crack to an addict & wishing him a Merry Christmas. People literally went *nuts* with the stuff. Supposedly, one lady actually basted her finger with the stuff, started to suck it, and got so caught up in the moment, she accidentally BIT IT badly enough to end up at the hospital.
It's the same reason why it's damn near impossible to get cats who've grown up with dry food to voluntarily switch to premium wet food. A cat who's grown up eating "kitty crack" will literally *starve himself* to death before voluntarily eating real tuna if you try to switch them "cold turkey" (yes, I know pure tuna isn't nutritionally-complete... I was using it as an example of something I literally tried to get my cats to eat at one time as an experiment after they rejected multiple brands of premium cat food. They wouldn't even look at it until I crumbled ground-up dry food over it, at which point they licked the dryfood-powder from the top).
Synthesizing meat will consume just about the same resources as the animal would
What makes you think that? Cows aren't a very efficient mechanism for converting grain into beef; about 90% of the grain's calories are wasted in the process. I have no idea how efficient synthesizing beef could become, but it's not like there's no room for improvement there.
If we allow the animals to live in the same numbers AND we grow synthetic meat, we've just graduated to consuming twice as much resources.
Most likely the synthesized meat would cannibalize (sorry) the real-meat market instead.
And if we start culling the former food animals to reduce their numbers to make way for the synthmeat and because we're not biting chunks out of their asses any more, well doesn't that just put us on even shakier ill-informed moral ground than we were on when we were slaughtering and eating them?
That's not what would happen either. The existing cows would be used in the same ways they've always been, but not as many new cows would be conceived/born/raised in the future. And that, so the argument goes, would be a good thing.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
which is the other major cost in producing meat. Also land. Electricity has the potential to become cheap if we can get over our fear of nuclear and keep large corporations from disabling/ignoring safety measures to save a buck (re: Tokyo Electric Power).
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The prey is certainly aware when it dies, just some predators make that awareness shorter than others.
I think the shortest time period would be like if you passed a stop sign, and halfway into the intersection you catch a glimpse as somebody else blows right past it and straight into you, followed by approximately 15 seconds of slowly fading to black, with or without struggling. That split second of fear would be the minimum that the prey feels IMHO, with an endorphin and/or adrenaline spike potentially canceling out the rest.
I think it would be exceptionally rare for an instant kill that lacks the feeling that I just described. At least in nature anyways; farm kills almost always involve a captive bolt pistol which truly is an instant kill (animal knocked unconscious immediately and the brain matter swells and crushes itself.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr00arV2XIw
All of those PETA videos about cows being tortured are just propaganda material - doing things those ways tends to make things more difficult and labor intensive. In fact, PETA abuses animals in its care much worse than any slaughterhouse. To be honest, I'm shocked people actually give them money.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-j-winograd/peta-kills-puppies-kittens_b_2979220.html
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But hamburger ought to taste like hamburger. If you're using substitute hamburger "meat" to make a hamburger, it ought to be like hamburger. It's irrelevant that ice cream doesn't taste like hamburger, because ice cream isn't being passed off as hamburger.
But first you have to decide what hamburger tastes like. I had my first veggie burger during a long day of public service work. Earlier in the day, I had a regular burger. This was cooked by a guy who really enjoyed flame action on the grill. The hamburger really didn't taste very good at all. So I went back later in the day, and decided to give the veggie burger a try. It tasted pretty good, and a whole lot better than the "real" hamburger.
Now don't get me wrong - I'm a dedicated carnivore, think that most vegetarians are neurotic, and vegans are almost universally pretentious assholes, but this weird litmus test of everything that seems to be almost universal doesn't mean that thinking that a veggie burger tastes good means anything other than thinking something tastes good.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.