Would it be legal to produce a product called 'Soylent Green' ?
Soylent Green is people. Seriously though, an idea of a fake meat modified to taste like human meat is both troubling and intriguing.
It's been done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu
Lab-grown meat might be only 6 months away
21–30 of 104 posts
Re: Lab-grown meat might be only 6 months away
#22This is awesome. Presumably, at some point we'll have the process optimised to the point that it could be done in your own home, or at a local (supermarket?) level. Imagine having a kitchen appliance that produces meat from liquid feedstock. Even more speculatively, I wonder if the nutrient medium could be produced from other kitchen scraps? That's basically what animals were kept for in the past. Aside, it sounds li…
Not only do markets appreciate beef, but they will pay top dollar for fancy high-quality beef. Once someone gets growing beef down, it probably won't be much of a stretch to develop top-quality sirloin, and more repeatably. Additionally, beef is a good target ecologically speaking. Fish and birds are much more efficient at energy conversion, so there's a much larger margin of energy and material savings to be had wit…
> Not only do markets appreciate beef, but they will pay top dollar for fancy high-quality beef.
Maybe. It depends on the extent to which high-end beef consumers are paying for the direct experience (taste, texture, mouth feel, etc) versus other things.
For example, consider the scam that is high-end speaker cable. People pay a lot of extra money not for real quality, but for imagined quality, exclusivity, and brand association. The same thing definitely goes on with wine and cheese, and I'd suspect some beef purchase will be like that, too.
Re: Lab-grown meat might be only 6 months away
#23It's likely that the lab grown "meat" won't be a proper substitute for the meat that we evolved to eat. Food is more complicated than it outwardly appears (i.e. a collection of muscle cells != meat) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....
We didn't evolve to eat happy meals, pizza, and onion rings, either. We evolved to exploit of a broad spectrum of foods, and this new food will probably fall within that spectrum.
Re: Lab-grown meat might be only 6 months away
#24[deleted]
Re: Lab-grown meat might be only 6 months away
#25This is gross!
Can they guarantee that the synthetic meat is healthy? Like, will it contain CLA, B-12, Omega-3s (found in grass-fed cows, and well-raised pigs), B-12, and so on? We get a lot of important nutrients from animal meat and fat that are harder to process from plant or synthetic sources.
Re: Lab-grown meat might be only 6 months away
#26This is awesome. Presumably, at some point we'll have the process optimised to the point that it could be done in your own home, or at a local (supermarket?) level. Imagine having a kitchen appliance that produces meat from liquid feedstock. Even more speculatively, I wonder if the nutrient medium could be produced from other kitchen scraps? That's basically what animals were kept for in the past. Aside, it sounds li…
Duplicating the taste of fish would be more important, especially if it could get to sushi-grade. Fishing many larger fish is becoming unsustainable.
It's also more difficult because not only does texture matter, but the meat filters through sea water to get its taste.
Re: Lab-grown meat might be only 6 months away
#27This is gross! Can they guarantee that the synthetic meat is healthy? Like, will it contain CLA, B-12, Omega-3s (found in grass-fed cows, and well-raised pigs), B-12, and so on? We get a lot of important nutrients from animal meat and fat that are harder to process from plant or synthetic sources.
Grosser than eating something that was once a living, breathing, feeling animal? Probably not.
(I'm a meat eater but still acknowledge how horrible it is.)
Re: Lab-grown meat might be only 6 months away
#28Apparently nobody was paying attention when Meat Tube won Best New GMO in 08.
Re: Lab-grown meat might be only 6 months away
#29This is awesome. Presumably, at some point we'll have the process optimised to the point that it could be done in your own home, or at a local (supermarket?) level. Imagine having a kitchen appliance that produces meat from liquid feedstock. Even more speculatively, I wonder if the nutrient medium could be produced from other kitchen scraps? That's basically what animals were kept for in the past. Aside, it sounds li…
Duplicating the taste of fish would be more important, especially if it could get to sushi-grade. Fishing many larger fish is becoming unsustainable. It's also more difficult because not only does texture matter, but the meat filters through sea water to get its taste.
I think premium-quality foods are probably a bit further off, but something of similar quality to frozen supermarket tilapia is probably not too much to ask. Some countries already consume a lot of products made of processed, retextured fish protein. I love those artificial crab-sticks.
Re: Lab-grown meat might be only 6 months away
#30There's not much of a wait left until the day a man will be able to come home from work, eat a lab-grown Bratwurst, have sex with his sex robot, and then relax with an electric cigarette.