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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
toil toil grey sludge and genetically engineered eye of newt
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
If he did it in America, someone would sue him for going against Gods will.
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.
You know, as an American, I resent that remark. We do not sue for going against God's will.
We burn you at the steak.
Yes. I went there.
The price will go down eventually. Personally I look forward to meat without suffering for farm animals. Suffering for the animals is a by product of seeking to control costs, this will allow that without a nervous system that can feel suffering.
No exploding, just excited to see progress.
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();
I made the mistake of eating a hamburger in London in 2001. I was on a long business trip and just wanted something quick to eat, so I ducked into a McDonalds.
Little did I know that, thanks to the outbreak of Mad Cow Disease, this simple act would make me ineligible to become a blood donor for years to come.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
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"
There are many things American don't do well, but we are pretty good about not burning our steaks.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Reports are, it tasted lousy, due to nearly zero fat content. Additionally, "real" beef has flavor overtones resultant from the feed the animal was raised on. Thus, corn-fed beef tastes different from grass-fed beef, even if both cows came from the same cows.
I don't expect vat-raised hamburger, much less steak, being commercially available anytime soon. . . . . simply because if it doesn't TASTE good and have the "mouth feel" of genuine beef, you're not going to get enough buyers to make it a commercial success. . .
The point of that is for people who can't tolerate dairy products. I suppose vegans as well, but I think it's mainly for those that can't tolerate dairy.
And that's a much larger group than a lot of people realize, I didn't realize that I had trouble with dairy, until I moved to a part of the world where dairy is hard to get, and I felt physically better than I had in years.
I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I think your hostility is unwarranted. Frankly, you come off much worse than the guy you're responding to. For one thing, disagreeing with someone is no reason to call someone an idiot.
That aside, anti-GM groups and vegetarians have a wide variety of reasons for their beliefs and actions. I know anti-GM people who have good, well thought out reasons, but I also know some who are just anti-science. I know vegetarians who don't eat meat because they're concerned about animal welfare, economic inequality, environmental issues, health issues, or some combination of those. I also know some who just don't like the taste. I also know some for whom it's a fashion statement.
Don't try to paint over everything with the same brush. There will be some people who are afraid of this meat simply because it was "grown in a lab" which makes it comparable to Frankenstein's monster somehow. Frankly, I'm a bit concerned about the meat because I haven't read enough about what they're actually doing to know that they're not doing something strange, dangerous, or unethical. At this point, it's just my own ignorance, but I'm not going to promote the whole thing and tell people it's fine when I don't actually know what they're doing.
The amount of waste generated by livestock is astounding, not to mention the inputs needed. If inventions such as this can reduce either of those (ideally both), even by just a few percent, there is most certainly a 'point'. There are many non-vegetarians interested in more sustainable production methods.
China's populations is levelling off but its standard of living is going up. Not every one lives in a house with electricity and plumbing but most people would like to. When larger fractions of their population start living the western life you can bet they wont want to farm their own foods. We are no where near feeding the world adequately, if this can be done cheap and efficiently than its a big step in the right direction.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
The objection to GM is not just because "Ahh, not natural", though that is admittedly a component. There are many other good reasons to object, to list a few:
1) They introduces proteins (insecticides, herbicide resistance, etc) into our food supply that our bodies don't know how to deal with - at least one study shows that pigs fed an exclusively GMO'd diet displayed severe health problems compared to a control group fed an equivalent non-GMO'd diet.
2) Modified organism may have a significant survival advantage and become invasive organisms, with all the problems that entails
3) Generally speaking the modified species can cross-breed with their natural relatives, potentially making the original stock unavailable if we discover serious problems down the road.
4) GMOs tend to be patented, which means we're putting control of our food supply into the hands of a few powerful companies, and eliminating time-honored farming practices in the process, such as keeping part of your harvest to plant the next season.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I lived in London during that timeframe as well. Having eaten at McDonalds doesn't make you ineligible. Simply being in the UK for a prolonged time during the BSE outbreak will cause you to be turned down for blood donations.
The forms for blood donations don't even mention McDonalds, but they do ask if you were in the UK over certain dates. If so, you're ineligible to give blood, even if you're a vegan.
That's only because of how we raise livestock. There are other ways which do not have these problems.
Other benefits Managed Intensive Rotational Grazing include:
1. Reduction of parasites, pests, and disease vectors.
2. Less need for pharmaceuticals.
3. No need for fertilizer.
4. Less petroleum used in transporting feed and manure to/from the CAFO.
5. Increases soil fertility.
6. Increases topsoil coverage and depth.
7. Can reverse desertification.
8. Sequesters vast amounts of CO2.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
They can keep it.
Hell, I'm just trying to eat beef/animal products that are more natural than the normal stuff you see in the grocery stores.
I'd rather cut down my meat intake (quality over quantity), and have say beef, that is grass fed, allowed to eat what it normally eats, and not needing all the hormones and anti-biotics....
I'm certainly not wanting to swing the complete other day and have synthetic "dead animal".
Why are we trying to go so far away from foodstuffs that mother natures put on earth for us...?
It isn't like most of us (in the west) are starving or anything.
I would argue that if it's possible to grow meat that's just as wholesome as grass-fed beef (arguably more so because it won't have any environmental contaminants at all) and at the same price, the practice of raising and killing of animals is no longer justified in the slightest. It's a morally tough call today as it is.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Sorry, I fail to see where morality enters into this argument at all...?
Humans are just another variety of animal on this planet, like the rest of them, we eat, sleep, shit, fuck and make new little copies of ourselves.
We just happen to be on the top of the food chain, and have a lot of choices on what to eat, picking from those lower than us on the food chain.
There's nothing morally wrong with eating something lower than yourself on the food chain, that's they way nature made all of us animals.
Somewhere along the line....people have gotten so abstracted from their food, they seem to forget this.
Please don't misunderstand, I like meat and I eat it.
But I'm not so abstracted from my food that I forget that it used to be a living thing, and that it's life was taken so that I could have nutrition (and useful byproducts like bone meal, glycerin, leather, etc). 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.
We're a unique animal that need not be limited to the "natural." It's natural to piss and shit wherever, but modern sanitation sets up some rules about how piss and shit are handled so we don't contaminate our living area or food and water supplies. It's natural to breed and have women spending their childbearing years perpetually pregnant from potentially many different men, but we as a society calm things down a bit because runaway breeding is unsustainable. We've gone far beyond our evolved instincts.
More Twoson than Cupertino
I'd mod you up if I could.
So many of the anti-meat crowd are completely oblivious to how cattle ranching is primarily done these days. Managed intensive rotational grazing isn't the sought after ideal, it's reality for pretty much everyone I know who ranches and is holding on or doing well, and it's been that way for probably a decade or more now.
These idiots think cows are grown in vats and fed a steady diet of bubble gum and corn syrup in a 1920s style slaughterhouse.
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