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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!
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
> 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).