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Vegan Mayonnaise Company Starts Growing Its Own Meat In Labs, Says It Will Get To Stores First (qz.com)
Chase Purdy reports via Quartz: The maker of vegan mayonnaise has been working on getting lab-made meat onto dinner tables everywhere. It's just that nobody knew about it. Hampton Creek -- a company that built its name on plant-based condiments and vegan-friendly cookie doughs -- today revealed that, for the last year, it has been secretly developing the technology necessary for producing lab-made meat and seafood, or as the industry likes to call it, "clean meat." Perhaps even more surprising is that Hampton Creek expects to beat its closest competitor to market by more than two years. Since it was founded in 2015, Memphis Meats has raised at least $3 million from five investors for the development of its meat products, according to Crunchbase. By contrast, Hampton Creek -- just a 20-mile drive from its Silicon Valley rival -- has raised more than $120 million since 2011. It's one of Silicon Valley's unicorns -- a company that has a valuation that exceeds $1 billion.
Growing meat in their Axlotl tanks......
The Gholas... They're made of meat!
Huh?
...when you have perfectly good animals that are already made out of food?
Silly vegans, always trying to outsmart Nature.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
> or as the industry likes to call it, "clean meat."
I mean just call it what it is... artificial or fake (shorter, and more precise) meat. So annoying this "industry", always have to imply that something they do is "better", cleaner, or moral (implying at the same time, that what we do is the opposite and wrong).
What's up with this ?
Also, if you don't eat meat, why make (or EAT) fake meat ? Why not stick to grass, nuts, carrots and potatoes and just leave it be ?
It's like mormons. Going around the world and trying to make people think same way they think (the correct way, mind you)..
Just another religion. Keep it to yourself.
This is clearly against the heart of the philosophy.
They are still torturing and exploiting the device of life in an artificial situation.
The real point of vegetarianism/veganism is to live in harmony with the Earth, reducing your consumption of energy by choosing the simplest path available to sustain yourself.
Spending tons of energy and cash to grow flesh in a laboratory is antithetical to this in every way.
Nifty fucking shit. Hey, I could get a jackass in a green visor to say my car has a valuation that exceeds $1 billion - think I can get the guy at the dealership to call me a "unicorn?"
"Memphis Meats is a food technology company headquartered in San Francisco"
I'm totally going to try this stuff, but I think I'm going to call it decepticon meat instead.
Calling it fake meat would be inaccurate. Soy deli slices are fake meat. This would be meat, just not from an anaimal.
As for "if you dont eat meat why eat this?", anyone who doesnt eat meat because they have an ethical issue with killing an animal but still enjoys the taste and values the level of nutrition provided by meat would be very interested in this.
On top of that, there are many of us who love eating meat but recognize that it's a very inefficient means of making food in a world where food and water scarcity is becoming more and more of an issue and who believe this could be a great way to get meat with less resources used.
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I can't imagine anyone being able to afford Vegan mayo. Not only is it prohibitively expensive to import it from Vega, but the Customs charges added on have to make it unobtanium.
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Vegan mayonnaise does not exist. By definition, mayonnaise contains egg. That's not just me speaking, it's US law.
so the computer can understand what meat is.
dyslexic jihadists get 27 vegans.
Table-ized A.I.
Can we instead just let all the dumbass vegetarians die off? Humans are designed to eat meat. We require large amounts of unique amino acids that are virtually impossible to get from plants. Why cater to those idiots? I suppose since cows are destroying the planet, it's not all bad, but then again it's a vegan mayonnaise company.
Cows consume grass -- and in very high volumes. What is the lab grown meat consuming?
I would want to make sure the "lab grown meat" is similar to the real meat, not fed a chemical stew.
Real meat has small quantities iron, zinc and magnesium. Where is lab meat getting these trace contents?
"Still, there’s a lot of work left to complete before the company is ready to sell a product, Tetrick says"
Superficially it will look like meat, but when you study the details, I'm sure you'll find plenty of differences. The chemicals that make up a piece of steak, for instance, are not all made locally in the muscle that it's cut from. For instance, the iron comes from red blood cells that are made in the bone marrow. The B12 vitamins are made by bacteria in the gut of the animal. Other things are made in the liver, spleen, gut, kidneys, and even the skin, and all transported through the bloodstream, where they infuse the muscle. Other things come the animal's food, or are made by microorganisms that form a symbiotic relationship with the animal. For instances, cows can survive on grass, but grass contains very little protein. The cow's stomachs work as fermentation tanks, using fungi and bacteria to create proteins (among other things) from grass. If you do a chemical analysis, you'd probably find thousands of different chemicals, made in different places. Some of these chemicals may be vital for our health. Some of them, we haven't even identified yet.
The problem with "fake meat" is that all these nutritional deficiencies are hidden. People just a piece of meat by taste, smell, and texture, not by availability of nutrients. At the same time, the industrial producer is only interested in profit, so they have every motivation to cut corners and produce a cheap but tasty piece of food, with little regard for nutrition.
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Soon I'll be able to sell regular meat as lab meat to those dirty vegans.
The big misconception going on here is that Hampton Creek is developing lab meat for vegan consumption. Actually this will be a totally different market, sold first to environmentally conscious meat eaters and then, as the process scales up and comes down in cost, as a replacement for meat in the regular marketplace.
Vegetarians might eat lab meat because their objection to meat is specifically the idea of killing for it, but veganism is a religious movement that is going to automatically reject it as being 'artificial' and therefore objectionable as a cheat around the pose of self-denial inherent in eating nothing but plant matter. Hampton Creek is in this because the company is already a supplier of those vegan products that are made to resemble meat in cuisine, without being close enough for vegans to consider it cheating.
Schmeat.. Yum
I'd like to grow my meat ;) If it has to be in a lab, so be it.
A lot of vegetarians can't handle meat without getting sick because their body stops producing enzymes to help digest it. A lot of people are going to get sick and confirmation bias kicks in. It will be the new MSG.
As long as its GMO free, grass-fed, and organic I'm in! /s All in all a cool concept though. Thinking globally, perhaps if it becomes more affordable this is something that could be used to combat world hunger in areas of the world where it isn't practical/possible to raise traditional livestock.
You're an animal. A perfectly good one. Made out of food. But we don't eat you. Why? Because we respect the life and potential and feelings you represent, and find the idea of causing you pain, or harm, or loss of life, to be repugnant.
Some of us extend that to other animals. Consequently, we don't want to eat those other animals any more than we want to eat you.
For us, "clean meat" as TFS has it, is very welcome.
So that's the point.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Off the top of my head it seems to me these guys were caught doing some pretty heavy channel stuffing in the last few months.
For hire.
It's only fair to warn you, Mr. Chairman, that much of my evidence will be highly nauseating; it involves aspects of human nature that are very seldom discussed in public, and certainly not before a congressional committee. But I am afraid that they have to be faced,; there are times when the veil of hypocrisy has to be ripped away, and this is one them.
You and I, gentlemen, have descended from a long line of carnivores. I see from you expressions that most of you don't recognize the term. Well, that's not surprising-it comes from a language that has been obsolete for two thousand years. Perhaps I had better avoid euphemisms and be brutally frank, even if I have to use words that are never heard in polite society. I apologize in advance to anyone I may offend.
Until a few centuries ago, the favorite food of almost all men was meat-the flesh of once living animals. I'm not trying to turn your stomachs; this is a simple statement of fact, which you can check in any history book...
Why, certainly, Mr. Chairman, I'm quite prepared to wait until Senator Irving feels better. We professionals sometimes forget how laymen may react to statements like that. At the same time, I must warn the committee that there is very much worse to come. If any of you gentlemen are at all squeamish, I suggest you follow the senator before it's to late...
Well, if I may continue. Until modern times, all food fell into two categories. Most of it was produced from plants-cereals, fruits, plankton, algae and other forms of vegetation. It's hard for us to realize that the vast majority of our ancestors were farmers, winning food from the land or sea by primitive and often back breaking techniques; but that is the truth.
The second type of food, if I may return to this unpleasant subject, was meat, produced from a relatively small number of animals. You may be familiar with some of them-cows, pigs, sheep, whales. Most people-I am sorry to stress this, but the fact is beyond dispute-preferred meat to any other food, though only the wealthiest were able to indulge this appetite. To most of mankind, meat was a rare and occasional delicacy in a diet that was more than ninety-percent vegetable.
If we look at the matter calmly and dispassionately-as I hope Senator Irving is now in a position to do-we can see that meat was bound to be rare and expensive, for its production is an extremely inefficient process. To make a kilo of meat, the animal concerned had to eat at least ten kilo's of vegetable food â"very often food that could have been consumed directly by human beings. Quite apart from any consideration of aesthetics, this state of affairs could not be tolerated after the population explosion of the twentieth century. Every man who ate meat was condemning ten or more of his fellow humans to starvation...
Luckily for all of us, the biochemists solved the problem; as you may know, the answer was one of the countless byproducts of space research. All food-Animal or vegetable-is built up from a very few common elements. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, traces of sulphur and phosphorus-the half-dozen elements, and a few others, combine in an almost infinite variety of ways to make up every food that man has ever eaten or will ever eat. Faced with the problem of colonizing the moon and planets, the biochemists of the twenty-first century discovered how to synthesize and desired food from the basic raw materials of water, air and rock. It was the greatest, and perhaps the most important, achievement in the history of science. But we should not feel too proud of it. The vegetable kingdom had beaten us by a billion years.
The chemists could now synthesize and conceivable food, whether it had counterparts in nature or not. Needles to say, there were mistakes-even disasters. Industrial empires rose and crashed; the switch from agriculture and animal husbandry to the giant automatic processing plants and omniverters of today was often a painful one. The danger of starvation has been banished forever, and we have a richness and var
Just gross.
This will allow people objecting to slaughter of actual animals to eat the necessary protein, which is good.
However, there is no mention of the "carbon footprint" of this method — how much electricity, labor, and materials is it going to take per pound? The (real) meat is wasteful, we are told. Will this be better?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That lied on the label, and was accused of buying up their own product off store shelves to boost their standing?
No, we're not perfectly good food. We're disease vectors. All critters that practice cannibalism show a high incidence of diseases that pass through that, with the exception of some interesting spiders.
How can you claim to extend that respect to "the life and potential and feelings" of predators when you deny their existence. Give you a hint. feel those eye teeth. We're omnivorous predators, and have been for a long, long time.
There is good reason we call the most murderous Humans "butchers"- history has taught us that once you can look a cow in the eye, then split its skull with a hammer, you are pretty much ready to do the same thing to people. Torturers are usually people with a background in killing animals. Serial killers almost always begin their career killing animals.
Yet in this thread a disgusting number of people dismiss the advantage of synthetic meat eliminating the need to kill anaimals. I think this speaks volume of the current neo-liberal warmongering targte audience Slashdot seeks. Evil on the rise, especially in the USA, as America prepares its population for war with Iran. So the neo-liberal idiots that voted for Clinton, yet cheer Trump's wars, are going to be proud to express their lack of interest in animal suffering. Those Japanese doctors who called their Human victims 'logs' during WW2 clearly share a near identical pschological make-up to far too many of Slashdot's remaining visitors.
But then Clinton loving neo-liberals don't lose a moment's sleep over America's destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria. Some animals are more equal than others- eh guys.
If it ain't Dukes, it pukes.
That KFC was accused of doing some years back (and was BS). Funny someone managed to pull it off. If this turns out to be the exact same thing as regular meat. minus the killing of an animal with no weird side effects (in the RL one does NOT get superpowers from eating toxic stuff sadly), then it's a viable option. Puts the farms out of business tho so there will be a disruptive economic impact as well.
Muslim companies start creating "artificial depictions of Mohammed" which combine light in such a way that there's never actually a full image of Mohammed in one place, but when you look at it you see what looks like an image of Mohammed anyway.
We can follow up with special Amish computers built out of wires instead of transistors because computers built that way can do exactly the same thing as normal computers while being less objectionable to Amish principles.
Maybe instead of creating artificial meat, they should figure out that their aversion to real meat has gone just a little bit too far? If you're making fake meat out of soy, that's a little weird, but people grow soy all the time. If you're developing a complicated and obviously inefficient laboratory growing process just so you can indulge in eating meat that doesn't violate your taboo against meat, things have gotten out of hand and you probably should take a second look at your taboos.
If it becomes cheaper to artificially manufacture meat, what are we going to do with all those obsolete cows? The species will go extinct in a generation if it's not economical to keep them.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
a lot quicker and cheaper than shipping it all the way from Vega (26 light years)
if god had meant for us to be vegans, we'd have dead brown eyes and go moo. we are at the apex of the food chain for a reason. embrace it.
This is not veganism the way veganism was meant to be. The point of veganism is to defend animals from human abusers by refusing to partake in their slaughter for human consumption.
Eating pretend meat is still eating meat, at least symbolically. You can sit in a restaurant and eat a black bean burger, but you're sending the message that it's okay to eat burgers. Nobody sitting 10 feet away can tell that you're not eating meat. They think you are.
For people to think THIS is a good idea and GMOs are an evil scourge on the face of the planet just proves that they are nuts. Organic, free-range, fair-trade, locally-sourced, non-GMO nuts.
This is an interesting article as it comes to me just after reading about the tic that can make you allergic to red meat. There's a particular sugar in the tic's saliva and once your body reacts to that you become allergic to meat containing the same sugar, primarily the red meats. This lab grown meat could be produced with the genes for producing that sugar disabled so that it would become hypo-allergenic for people who have been affected by the tic bite.
I hope someone mentions this to them.
Vegan's rail against GMOs but expect us to eat this sh*t.
The Vegan 'philosophy' (if you can call it that) states that Vegans may not eat, own, or use anything with an even remotely animal origin. Therefore this vat-grown 'meat' cannot be Vegan: they had to get the DNA from an animal.
In the US, to be called mayonnaise, the food must contain eggs. If it's vegan, then it's not mayonnaise.
So vegans want to promote centralized big corporate industrial production at the expense of local sustainable economies. Not a wise choice.
I can produce tons of meat on pasture locally without the need for industrial or petroleum inputs.
Stick with the real meat.
Which came first? Does veganism cause insanity, or vice versa?
Except industrial chemicals are notorious for causing Cancer and all sorts of other fun stuff.
You think your ranch grown ones fed on hormones, antibiotics and feed-that-isn't-the-natural-diet is free of carcinogens or other harmful substances? You think that nice sizzle on your steak isn't carcinogenic? Enjoy your illusions.
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On the other hand, we have people who are currently subjecting themselves to be lab rats, testing whether we can survive without meat.
You might want to check out the millions (now hundreds of millions) in India who have done fine without meat from before Christ was born. 30-40% of India is vegetarian and has been for much longer than most long-term tests if you open your eyes.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-hampton-creek-just-mayo/
Hampton Creek never publicly admitted its numbers were wrong. It scrubbed its site of sustainability claims, and the Cookie Calculator vanished. Such quiet backpedaling might be forgivable at many young companies—overeager math isn’t unheard of in Silicon Valley. But at Hampton Creek, it fits a pattern of mistaken or exaggerated claims that may prove to be deliberately deceptive.
In August the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department launched probes of Hampton Creek for possible securities violations and criminal fraud. The investigation follows an Aug. 4 Bloomberg article that revealed the company deployed a national network of contractors to secretly buy back Just Mayo from grocery store shelves. Hampton Creek denies any wrongdoing. When news of the SEC inquiry became public, the company’s founder and chief executive officer, Josh Tetrick, wrote in an e-mail, “We’re aware of the informal inquiry and we’ll be sharing the facts, as opposed to the inaccuracies reported by Bloomberg.” The company declined to comment on the DOJ investigation.
This is true - but we didn't know that until very recently. And it's not why we don't eat each other; resistance to doing that has been in place for longer than anyone remembers, free of knowledge or common experience with consequences to health. Free enough, in fact, that cannibalism keeps showing up in various forms, just as do other unhealthy but socially disfavored practices such as bloodline incest. There's been no inherent knowledge of the unhealthy nature of the act until someone actually engages in it, which, being very rare, hadn't been in the general knowledge base of the people until very recently.
Avoidance of cannibalism has been about empathy, primarily. For the victim, for the victim's relations. Knowledge about prions is, relatively speaking, a brand new factor. In one sense, it's good we know; in another, we don't have to, as cannibalism represents an obvious failure of empathy, a critical factor in healthy socialization, and the vast majority of people integrate the idea without needing a medical justification.
Also, just as an aside, there are plenty of red health flags WRT eating meat of other species. That should be sufficient to start up several relevant chains of thought that support what I've described here.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's a very recent bit of knowledge, and one that was not available for most of history - yet we still didn't eat each other. Even the most ignorant and isolated peasants didn't do it. Try again. This time, think about empathy.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'll be first in line to buy a slab of delicious Maybe Meat!
Oh no, wait, no I won't.