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First Ever Public Tasting of Lab-Grown Cultured Beef Burger
vikingpower writes "Today, at 14:00 Western European Time (9:00 am Eastern), Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University (the Netherlands) will present a world first: he will cook and serve a burger made from Cultured Beef in front of an invited audience in London. The event will include a brief explanation of the science behind the burger. You can watch the event live, online. The project's fact sheet is to be found here (pdf)." The BBC is reporting that Sergey Brin is the mystery backer behind the project.
This way they can produce human meat for canibals... and curious people asking if we taste like chicken to them.
.... putting his money where his mouth is
dupe
. . . .trying to roll-out a hamburger, you'd do it somewhere in the States, with a strong biotech presence. One generally doesn't associate "London" with "Hamburger": "Fish and Chips" or "Vindaloo" come more to mind. . .
toil toil grey sludge and genetically engineered eye of newt
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
Mystic eye of toad, jizz of newt, or samzenpus failing to do his job?
will we be burned at the steak?
This will divide the extremists. The anti-GM Luddites will go crazy because this is arguably the most anti-organic food on the planet. The vegetarians will celebrate because they get to eat 'meat' once more without killing animals. The vegans will note that animal byproducts are still required for this process to exist at all and still turn their noses up at it.
Will brains explode with delight with the idea that humans can have their meat without killing cows and all of their related carbon emissions? Will brains explode because the lab grown meat is so expensive that only the very rich can afford it? What will the conscious do with the idea that people get to have meat at all? Will the meat connoisseur snub this lab grown meat versus a nice hamburger from cow #156? Will the greens go nuts because a carbon based food source is being replaced with a lab equivalent that will inevitably be owned by the giant food corps?
So many heads to explode, so little popcorn.
I think lab-grown meat is the future. For quite a lot of people, meat is just too tasty to be given up completely. At the same time, it is an environmental disaster, with the United Nations estimating that animal farming has a greater effect on climate change than ALL of the worlds transportation (that is, cars, trucks, trains, ships and airplanes) combined. Some even say it's responsible for 51% of greenhouse gases emissions. Additionally, factory farming causes billions of animals to suffer, which is highly unethical. Lab-grown meat avoids both problems.
Until we can buy lab-grown meat, we should still go Veg, but once lab-grown meat is available, the abolishment of the mass factory farming is much more realistic.
But who witches the witchers ?
A programme about this was on BBC Radio 4 a couple of years back. IIRC both the scientist and the presenter tried a little bit of "burger" grown in a lab and it was tasteless. Not horrible - just.... nothing much. Also the texture wasn't quite right.
I think the scientist said that meat (muscle) derives a lot of its taste from the surrounding fat when it's cooked - and, of course, this had no fat.
The next stage on was to make it taste nice - perhaps in the past two years they've got somewhere with it.
while (true != false) process_more_stupid_code();
Predicted results, in order of severity (best results first)
1) "But when are you starting to serve the lab-grown meat?"
2) "Tasty!"
3) "Not bad"
4) "Tastes like chicken"
5) Vomiting
6) Addictive; taster cannot stop eating... literally
7) Turns taster into cow
8) Turns taster into cannibalistic mutant psychotics
9) Triggers the Rapture
10) "Tastes like McDonalds"
The main protein in milk and meat is casein. However casein has been linked to adverse health effects. So just as when people say "scientists invented new way to grow mice? Just what we need, more mice!" I have to comment that casein isn't the protein we should be culturing for. From a health perspective a bean burger is much better for you, safer (ground chuck is the riskiest meat from a contamination perspective) and is in my experience just as yummy or more-so if you don't like that rubbery meat texture.
Before you get all on me for seeming like a vegan, I still eat about 8oz of beef a week. I'm transitioning off of risky and unhealthy foods, but I don't think I'll ever be able to give up meat entirely, That said, the american diet is still emphasizing the wrong foods by orders of magnitudes.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Tastes like despair.
Many a true word is spoken in jest.
The zombie apocalypse begins...
No Soylent Green jokes yet? Somebody.. please step up!
Silence is a state of mime.
So what does it taste like?
Also, does it respond to music?
I am not a crackpot.
honestly, I think you could make sausages, or sausage-like meat products (kebabs, meatloaf, dim sims, etc) that would be barely distinguishable from the "real" thing, right now - and that's not even mentioning Soylent Green...
The anti-GM Luddites will go crazy because this is arguably the most anti-organic food on the planet.
I just have a problem with food being controlled by IP law.
I have a problem with farmers being sued by Monsanto because they are using their own seed, but are buried by legal costs because said multi-national is scared that their precious IP is being used without them collecting their pound of flesh.
I also do not believe the GM food industry's claim of safety. Because it has been shown time and time again that Big Corp will say and do anything to protect their profits.
9:00 am Eastern what? Eastern Europe doesn't have that much difference with Western Europe.
Are lab produced "meats" subject to Kosher laws?!? If not, the most important next project is lab bacon...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu
Mmm. This is a tasty burger!
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Of course, it's still not from a cud-chewing cloven-hoofed animal. Whether it is meat is a more philosophical question.
Coz organic is for the 1%. You can buy it too but you can't afford it.
I'm still skeptical these will do so well because, quite frankly, vege burgers and other meat substitutes are actually very good alternatives to meat already. I won't claim they're as good, but they are pretty damned close and, considering that they are easier to make, less chance of food borne illness, and healthier for you and the environment, I'd recommend giving them a shot. If the vat grown stuff can be better in cost and taste, then maybe it will do well, but I think the main advantage it has is that there is stigma on the concept of vege burgers and the like. And if protein is a concern, between things like various beans and quinoa, that can be handled without meat too.
This is a cool idea and I hope no foodie luddites start with the fearmongering (I guarantee in a sooner or later someone out there will start claiming vat grown meat causes cancer), but really I think there is a suitable, and quite possibly superior, technology already here.
When this is something backed by someone that doesn't use deliberate exclusion as a business model, perhaps it might mean something.
Until then, it's a parlor trick.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I'm wondering if they replicated the fractional horse meat content in their vat meat.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Depends where you get your milk. There's a farm pretty close to me that sells milk and you can go see the cows wandering around in a field grazing. They may not be 100% as happy as some theoretical happiest cow, but I find it hard to picture anyone finding a serious problem with it who isn't espousing some extreme fringe ideal of animal freedom and independence.
All of that is to say that someone might be a vegetarian for animal welfare reasons and drink milk from such a place and that would be logically consistent.
...violating his "don't be evil" motto.
Just a "lab-grown meat will have a milkshake texture and taste like tofu" stereotype joke. In reality, I'm really all kinds of excited about this proof of concept because when it eventually becomes commercially viable, it will greatly diminish animal suffering and at the same time allow us to feed more people off the limited agricultural resources on the planet. And now some food experts say it doesn't taste half bad, what more do you want?!
It's a morally tough call today as it is.
It is? It contains far too much easily-digestible protein for my life style, and the foods and agricultural areas needed are more than 10 times than if I just ate vegetables in the first place. If everybody did it, much fewer humans would starve. We pump money which are converted into weapons into corrupt third state countries which use both to render peasants without land and income in order to produce our lifestock food and defend it from starving people. The high levels of purine and easily digestible animal protein are the most relevant health danger in "civilized" countries.
On the other hand, it tastes well if you are used to it.
Man, what a morally tough call. Makes me wonder whether the U.S. is not actually well represented by their currently somewhat morally challenged government.
If we ever reach a level of technology where there are no health or taste reasons why a synthetic meat would be undesirable, I simply wouldn't ever buy meat that used to be alive.
Get off it. There are health and taste reasons (taste is acquired after all) why conventionally butchered meat is undesirable, and that does not faze you.
Yeah, I support the idea, but I won't be eating this if the American Food Industry is going to be growing this stuff. We're too lax on labeling, too focused on cost and profit, and not careful enough about consumer health over here. who knows what kind of ingenious additives they'll throw in the mix to further engage our taste buds or cut costs at the expense of our health?
And everyone can be happy.
I like meat, I do.
But you know who seems to be really obsessed with meat? Vegetarians.
For people who don't like meat, they seem to eat a lot of vegetables that are mashed up and shaped to look like meat. [In his "vegetarian" voice]: "I find meat repulsive. I'll have a veggie burger with fake bacon, and can you serve it to me dressed like a cow? I don't like meat; I just like to call meat late at night and hang up. Let's drive by meat's house. Does meat ever ask about me? [singing] I don't care! I ain't missin' you at all...missin' youuuuuu...."
You never see that the other way: [meat eater's voice]: "I will have the steak and can you make it taste like tofu?"
-J. Gaffigan
http://plif.courageunfettered.com/archive/wc263.gif
Captcha: "organs"
The waiter approached.
"Would you like to see the menu?" he said, "or would you like meet the Dish of the Day?"
"Huh?" said Ford.
"Huh?" said Arthur.
"Huh?" said Trillian.
"That's cool," said Zaphod, "we'll meet the meat."
--Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
I've been following this story for what seems forever now. I'd like to know how he's kept his beef fresh all this time. Did he lace it with preservatives? Freeze it? Cure it?
In general, things that are so small they're invisible to the naked eye tend to be Halachically irrelevant. So the fact that a few stem cells from a pig were involved might not render it pork. I can see it being judged Kosher.
Of course, IANAR.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
This so reminds me of: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbp8jzAI-HY&t=7m40s
John_Chalisque