In-Vitro Meat
November 14th, 2011Via: Reuters:
Scientists are cooking up new ways of satisfying the world’s ever-growing hunger for meat.
“Cultured meat” — burgers or sausages grown in laboratory Petri dishes rather than made from slaughtered livestock — could be the answer that feeds the world, saves the environment and spares the lives of millions of animals, they say.
Granted, it may take a while to catch on. And it won’t be cheap.
…
Using stem cells harvested from leftover animal material from slaughterhouses, Post nurtures them with a feed concocted of sugars, amino acids, lipids, minerals and all other nutrients they need to grow in the right way.
So far he has produced whitish pale muscle-like strips, each of them around 2.5 cm (1 inch) long, less than a centimeter wide and so thin as to be almost see-through.
Pack enough of these together — probably around 3,000 of them in layers — throw in a few strips of lab-grown fat, and you have the world’s first “cultured meat” burger, he says.
“This first one will be grown in an academic lab, by highly trained academic staff,” he said. “It’s hand-made and it’s time and labor-intensive, that’s why it’s so expensive to produce.”
Not to mention a little unappetizing. Since Post’s in-vitro meat contains no blood, it lacks color. At the moment, it looks a bit like the flesh of scallops, he says.
Like all muscle, these lab-grown strips also need to be exercised so they can grow and strengthen rather than waste away. To do this Post exploits the muscles’ natural tendency to contract and stretches them between Velcro tabs in the Petri dish to provide resistance and help them build up strength.
brings the term ‘mystery meat’ to a whole new level.
is this a case of “just because we can” or am i missing something?
1) no one wants to eat this
2) anyone who would want to eat this, due to ethical concerns over meat, would realize the amount of energy/resources/etc used to create a tiny slab of the stuff is obscenely unsustainable and thus would avoid it anyway.
i guess if production were large-scale enough it might be something to talk about in terms of solving world hunger problems, but really..? “they” can (and already do) produce enough [fill in the blank] to feed the world with a hell of a lot less cost. they just don’t want to.
There is no known method of producing meat this way without large scale antibiotic use for the culture, due to the fact that the isolated meat cells have no immune system of their own. It would be a disaster.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat
given the right flim flam artists, this will probably lead to research investments, or at least to some research grants from Uncle Sucker.