Posted on 02/01/2014 11:43:50 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
When, if ever, will we eat lab-grown meat? It's still early enough in 2014 for predictions of the year to come, and late 2013 saw the unveiling of the world's first hamburger made of laboratory-cultured animal protein, leading to a frenzy of journalistic coverage and even one short article that collected past predictions for when "cultured meat" might reach supermarket shelves. ("Cultured meat" is the term of preference among the substance's promoters, over "schmeat," "lab meat," and of course "frankenmeat.")
Those skeptical about the viability of meat grown in laboratories can look back with satisfaction at a long history of "foods of the future" that never came to pass: the nineteenth century boasted fantasies of meals-in-a-pill, fantasies that persisted into the Jetsons visions of mid-twentieth-century America, and cultured meat was itself dreamed about many decades ago.
The mandatory citation is to Winston Churchill, who in his "Fifty Years Hence" of 1932 imagined a 1982 of artificial chicken that would be more efficient because one would no longer have to grow an entire bird, but just the breast. Indeed, the thought of avoiding the inefficiency and waste - not to mention the impressive environmental damage - of animal agriculture, is one of the driving ideas of cultured meat research.
The 1980s did give us cyberpunk fiction and its dismal predictions about the future of food - William Gibson is one of the many science fiction writers to mention artificial meat in a less optimistic register, and Margaret Atwood may be the contemporary author best known for it - but Churchill's predictions, like those of so many others, came to naught. And there are commentators who think that cultured meat will never really happen, either because of insuperable technical challenges or the impossibility of producing the substance cheaply enough.
Literally predicting the future of cultured meat is of course impossible, but since August 2013's hamburger demonstration in London, where the work of Professor Mark Post's laboratory was unveiled, speculations have abounded. There are conferences and symposia on cultured meat, and the Dutch arts collective Next Nature is producing a Cultured Meat Cookbook - actually a project meant to grow the conversation, rather than provide cooking instructions for an as-yet-unavailable ingredient.
The organization New Harvest acts as a hub connecting researchers and other interested parties, and encouraging discussions of cultured meat. We're in what Disney would call the "Imagineering" stage, in other words, and some of Silicon Valley's biggest investors are starting to contribute to the cause. If true prediction is beyond our powers, a few things do seem certain, and we can clear up a few misconceptions about cultured meat now:
•Cultured meat is not going to appear on your supermarket shelves in 2014. Or in 2015. While no prediction is reliable, the most wildly optimistic promoters of the technology don't think it will reach markets for another ten years. Twenty seems more likely.
•Cultured meat is animal flesh based on real animal cells, not fully synthetic or based on vegetable protein (but vegetable meat substitutes are also reaching new and impressive levels of development) The process by which cultured meat is made, is somewhat complex (you can watch a cartoon, produced for Mark Post's group, here).
•While no animals need to be killed to harvest the cells used for cultured meat, current techniques also employ serum taken from fetal animals - truly kill-free meat would be possible if scientists devised a substitute, and some think that this is possible.
If cultured meat is very much an "emerging" technology, the creation of which demands that scientists overcome serious technical challenges and that marketers convince a skeptical public to overcome their inevitable "yuck factor," there are reasons why scientists, entrepreneurs and pundits keep pushing.
For some, cultured meat promises a world in which animals need not die in the vast numbers they now do, for our nutrition and pleasure. In 2008 PETA announced a $1 Million prize that would go to the first group that brought a convincing chicken nugget substitute to market - with a close date of 2012 (now extended to March 4, 2014) for the contest.
Others are motivated by the high environmental cost of animal agriculture, which produces a staggering amount of pollution and uses land inefficiently. Experts expect meat consumption to increase with global population growth, creating more demand for meat and entailing greater and greater environmental costs. By growing meat in laboratories rather than on the hoof, much of that could be avoided.
Thus if the real future of cultured meat is inscrutable, it is easy to see why we might reach for dreams of safe, kill-free beef, chicken, pork or fish. Many of us eat well in Los Angeles - so well, in fact, that it can be hard to remember that our food infrastructure is strained to the breaking point, and the future needs all the help it can get.
ze goyische.
I prefer a vegetarian diet, and being lactose intolerant, I wind up being mostly vegan.
You’d think I’d applaud this research, but I don’t. I do not find any of this cultured meat attractive - I don’t want to eat it, I don’t want to look at it. I’d rather eat natural beans and rice and veg. I’d rather eat a real chicken than this fake stuff.
When are we going to learn to think about what we put into our bodies and start avoiding all this processed food?
soylent green
POOP BURGER: Japanese Researchers Create Artificial Meat From Human Feces
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2735291/posts
Poop Burger....(Evironmentalists Ultimate recycling process to save Mother Earth?)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2736094/posts
“A Future of Lab-Produced Meat?”
What’s the big deal. They already do this in many Asian countries.
“Others are motivated by the high environmental cost of animal agriculture, which produces a staggering amount of pollution and uses land inefficiently.”
The concept of efficiency is an economic one but here it is spoken of in other terms, primarily ideological. This is the same ideology that does not complain when millions of acres are put under the plow to grow corn to burn in motor vehicles.
If we want to talk about inefficient land use, let us talk about the consequences of borrowing money from China so we can pay ethanol distillers a subsidy that allows them to bid up the the price of corn by 50% and in turn allows corn farmers to bid up the price of land by 50%. That has vast economic consequences for the price of other grains and meat as well.
POOP BURGER: Japanese Researchers Create Artificial Meat From Human Feces
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2735291/posts
Poop Burger....(Evironmentalists Ultimate recycling process to save Mother Earth?)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2736094/posts
There’s one problem. They taste like $hitt.. : )
My concern is that the producers of this product will not be able to resist genetic tuning to improve attributes they consider important. In doing so they will introduce genes from dissimilar species that may have later implications for those who consume these products over time. These products must not become an experiment with the public as the test subjects and in the process we contaminate and irreversibly alter our internal biospheres.
I used to think that, other than radioactive or persistant poisons or heavy metals, if you composted something and then ate the meat from animals that ate the plants grown there you would separate yourself from bad stuff.
Alaskan brown bears have been tested positive for seaborne nutrients from eating grass that was fertilized by dead salmon.
You are what you eat, I guess.
Define Lab Meat!
What makes you think she's not Jewish ? Too skinny ?
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