As someone who eats meat all the time, I also couldn't be more excited.
First this stuff will be an inferior meat substitute.
Then it'll be an equivalent meat substitute.
Then it'll improve upon nature itself, and we'll be eating things that taste ten times better than bacon, and fifty times better than steak, and it will all be without a twinge of guilt.
Hydroponic gardens produce some of the most amazing-tasting vegetables. I can't imagine how good a chemically-perfect chuck roast would taste. Edit: and getting veal, good goose liver, etc without any animal cruelty is good too :)
Aspartame is a more complex molecule synthesized to mimic certain properties of monosaccharides. Many would say it is inferior in taste to what it purports to replace.
Cultured beef, however, should be more or less the same cocktail of organic compounds that make up a dead cow. How these compounds are mixed, the proportions to which they appear, and what shapes they take are the interesting variables here, and could, with enough control, make something "better than real."
I'd draw instead the comparison to synthetic diamonds. Same stuff, potentially unnaturally flawless results.
Bacon is so chock full of good-for-you things I'll take it exactly as it is. But I'm definitely OK if Wilbur doesn't have to have an early demise after an inhumane existence to produce it.
That sounds like the path of artificial sweeteners. If history is any guide, there will also be a backlash where its artificial nature will be equated with poison for your body.
I think the best is a combination of acesulfame potassium (Ace-K) and sucralose (Splenda). It doesn't taste like sugar, but it's nice and sweet and they cover each others' aftertaste pretty well. Jone's Soda uses it for their diet drinks.
Not sure what naturalistic fallacies have to do with artificial sweeteners generally being pretty bad for your long-term health (not that sucrose/fructose is that much better in sufficient quantities).
"artificial sweeteners generally being pretty bad for your long-term health"
The fallacy has everything to do with your insistence that this is anything but fantasy. Artificial sweeteners are not worse off for you than sucrose/fructose.
I've gone back and forth a couple times between omnivore and strict vegetarian, and personally I've concluded that meat isn't particularly exciting. It's just convenient and fairly cheap.
If this winds up being cheap, great. Regardless, I still prefer an interesting spicy black bean burger to anything made with ground beef.
Do you mind explaining why you don't find meat particularly exciting? I personally have nothing much against vegetarians -- in all honesty my current diet (cheaper) is probably closer to that of a vegetarian's -- but whenever they dismiss meat as "uninteresting" they all seem to actually be quite ignorant of meat, and that they all seem to have ever bought theirs out of a styrofoam, shrinkwrapped package from a supermarket rather than a good butcher.
But yes, a nice spicy black bean burger sounds interesting!
Certainly meat can be exciting, but in many cases, and especially in modern western culture, it seems to be used as a crutch, in a sort of "just throw in some meat and you're done" way.
For instance, I've found vegetarian Indian restaurants vastly more interesting than Indian restaurants that rely on meat. It's not that I hate meat (I don't, and I'm not a a vegetarian), but the former sort simply seem to offer more interesting food, with a much wider range of flavors.
Note the stereotypical Airplane-meal question (where the actual dishes are quite different): "Chicken or beef?" I know they're just trying to be efficient, but this question seems to capture society's attitude: that once you know the type of meat involved, eh, the rest is just pointless detail.
So while meat can be a wonderful and interesting part of a meal, I think it would be better if it lost some of its overwhelming dominance, and became just another ingredient.
Nice note about the meat-orientated culture. To add to that, though, historically (and I find this, as you pointed out, a mostly Western thing, since coming from a southern Chinese culture I know that meats aren't elevated above other foods, ever) I'm pretty sure the role of meat in the dish's name is simply because every time anyone around the Renaissance era--foundation of Western cooking--would have made a huge deal about slaughtering a cow, and such names of dishes simply stuck with us since then.
I wonder how meat came to be so dominant though. Funnily enough, when the Old World found the New World they found a land so plentiful in meat, instead of jumping up in joy certain parts of society actually started to find meat disgusting. So maybe it's not really just a Western thing, but meat's dominance is mostly a New World thing: According to http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/06/27/155527365/visual..., USA, Canada, Australia and NZ are far ahead of everyone else in per-capita meat consumption. And it doesn't seem to be correlated with per-capita GDP either. This might also means that meat's dominance is also very recent, and not universal even in modern Western culture. Maybe it's simply a matter of who has an older history of eating traditions, traditions that are responsible for toning down the meat-mania?
Having known some vegetarians who claim meat is uninteresting and have had a good farm raised and wild caught meat in their pre-vegetarian days, I don't think this is a case.
I think for some people meat, and pretty much of all food, is fairly uninteresting it is pretty much just a way to fuel their body. They take fairly little joy in their meals - which seems a bit incomprehensible - but it seems to be the way it is.
I had good meat before I became a vegetarian but it's just not a food I really enjoy. I enjoyed high-quality meat but it just wasn't a taste I was ever especially attached to.
> I'd rather a bolt to the brain than having my throat sliced open and being left to bleed out.
Agree.
> Free range chickens still die, which is often the ethical reason for vegetarians/vegans.
Disagree. For me at least the death itself is comparatively insignificant. What's far more significant is horrible conditions in which many mass produced meat animals spend their lives, i.e. Factory farming.
I'm sorry, free range depends on the country in question and I should have been more specific. I was talking about UK regulations, but I can understand your point regarding US regulations, if that was indeed your point.
The problem with free range (at least in Australia) is that it doesn't really mean what customers expect it to.
Often the only difference is that a free range barn will have a small outside area, which the chickens may not access because all the food is inside [1].
I think most vegetarians/vegans would agree that Halal meat is ethically worse than the 'bolt to the brain' alternative. Of course this is a sweeping generalisation.
Well, I'm extremely excited about the impact this might have on the rest of the population. And I'd be ecstatic to have a more ethical alternative for my pets. Personally, I have no plans of going back to meat - even lab-grown.
My concern with this is the health or nutritional profile of the engineered meat. Technology is great, but we've also found out years later that an "innovation" is really a step backwards health-wise.
So, for example, the move from grass-fed to corn-fed beef allowed for vastly greater production in a much more efficient fashion, and even (for most people's palates) resulted in a better tasting meat. 20+ years later, we're finding out that the environmental cost of factory farm meat is much higher than we thought, and the corn-fed beef is much worse for you than grass-fed beef.
20 years from the meat cubes hitting the shelves, are we going to find out that cells grown on a straight glucose+vitamin mix are missing some micronutrient that helps our brain function correctly, or protects the gut against cancer?
Our bodies have had a very long time to adapt to certain models of nutrition, and when we tamper with them, we often find unintended consequences.
> Dr. Post, who has conducted some informal taste tests, said that even without any fat, the tissue “tastes reasonably good.”
I feel like the lesson of Tesla is that the way to sell new technology is to make it better than the status quo in some way. "It's reasonably good" will sell to a few environmentally-conscious people, but it's better if something is genuinely appealing in some way other than ethics.
Yeah, but Tesla didn't invent the first electric vehicle. As he said, it's a proof of concept. Besides, the taste is probably less of a concern than the price tag at this point.
It's not going to taste all that great until there's fat embedded in the meat. In the long term, presumably you can embed seasoning right in the middle, which could be really amazing.
Glad this is getting closer! Aside from the moral issues, running sunlight, water and feed through a cow is such an inefficient and inelegant way of producing meat...
Running grass through a cow is a remarkably efficient way of converting sunlight-capturing grass into calories we can actually digest. At least in the US, much of the scrubland can't support crops without intensive irrigation and fertilizer, but they can support cattle.
If you take away the fundamental question of eating meat, it's the way cattle are raised today that's the problem.
I know this sounds repulsive, but I think a good shortcut to lab grown meat would be similar to KFC's urban myth of "headless organisms fed by tubes" [1].
If you give it a bit of thought, it might be more ethical raising brainless and senseless organisms for human consumption. It also solves many sanitary problems in farms (antibiotics, crowded living conditions) and it allows us to give pasture lands back to nature.
Assuming that such meat was demonstrably safer for humans to consume, why would we choose to keep eating "nature's animals"? It's taboo what keeps us from doing this.
I suspect this idea has occurred to the people working on this and it is not as easy as you assume - that there are problems in execution (so to speak) of this shortcut. Once the lab-in-a-test-tube thing is solved, it is a much cleaner and more elegant solution.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about developments like this. On one hand, I'll tell people that food for me is about quality and flavor. I'm not opposed to pink slime for what it is, but because it just makes for a poor result. I'm in favor of this on a sustainability level, but very opposed on a quality level—not consistency and reliable textures and taste, but that sort of unquantifiable property that things exude when they just feel right. That's quality and it's just not going to come from a lab, in my opinion. Meat isn't just about texture and a taste, it's about /terroir/. Meat can be raised sustainably and humanely, it just isn't as appealing to your local food conglomerate looking to work on economies of scale. We can all eat /better/, live /better/ and be /better/ without all the trade-offs if we'll put a little more thought into our lives and a have a little more moderation of consumption. Oh, and waste less.
It seems awfully close-minded to be dismissing the whole idea of eating lab-grown meat due to some ineffable "quality" before you've actually even tried it.
I don't have much faith in the patent or global food system to create something with "ineffable 'quality'". Once the local food conglomerates are able to produce this, it's all about a price point and most frequently that price point is so low that anything you'd describe as high quality is not available. Think Salisbury steak. What will end up happening is a stratification of meat. Those with higher disposable incomes will eat dead things and the impoverished will get the poor economies of scale.
"Once the local food conglomerates are able to produce this, it's all about a price point and most frequently that price point is so low that anything you'd describe as high quality is not available. Think Salisbury steak. What will end up happening is a stratification of meat. Those with higher disposable incomes will eat dead things and the impoverished will get the poor economies of scale."
I agree with you to a minor extent, in that there'll be extremely high quality meat available and cheap gro-meat available for the backyard burgers and fast food. I do not see this as an issue. Production will be cheaper, use up less resources, and destroy the shitty mediocre meat, leaving the higher-quality just as cheap as it always was.
"You may find my lack of faith disturbing."
I find it unsurprising, but I really don't see things as being that bad. This would be entirely preferable (in the pocketbook) for low-to-middle-classed meat eaters.
Do you put forward the same argument for diamonds? What about ice made by refrigeration instead of ice cut from a frozen lake? Early man-made versions of these products were inferior, but nowadays we prefer them. Likewise, in-vitro meat is still in its early stages, but it has the potential to taste even better than the most pampered animals today.
Somewhere on this planet exists the tastiest cow. It has just the right combination of genes and environment to make it more mouth-watering to us than any other cow. Unfortunately, we won't know it's the tastiest cow until we kill it and eat it. Then only a few people will be able to enjoy it. Offspring with the same diet would likely taste great, but breeding and changing diet will always be an imprecise way to get tasty cows.
When fully-developed, in-vitro meat technology will give us better control over every aspect of the meat's taste. Nutrients can be delivered in just the right proportions at just the right times. Exercise (or lack of) can be simulated as much as we want. Even the genes in the tissue can be altered to improve the taste and texture. Once the technology gets to that point, there will be no good reason to raise and eat animals.
We can all eat /better/, live /better/ and be /better/ without all the trade-offs if we'll put a little more thought into our lives and a have a little more moderation of consumption. Oh, and waste less.
This is a nice sentiment, but I don't think any civilization has voluntarily reduced its resource usage or consumption. The people working on in-vitro meat want to solve the same problem as you, but they're being pragmatic about it.
I think sentient is probably closer to his definition. Yes, vegetables are 'alive', but (as current knowledge) they do not feel. Which reduces the apprehension of eating it.
This line of thinking drifts into uncomfortable territory relating to cannibalism of euthanized elders, after all if they're not sentient around the time of death and those at the bedside vigil are hungry ... Just saying that as a moral/ethical argument its a minefield, not simple.
As a worse example of the same path, castration of bulls has always been seen as "OK" for convenience in raising beef, none the less I'm thinking a somewhat higher "brain-ectomy" of livestock isn't going to fix everything up for vegetarians.
>As a worse example of the same path, castration of bulls has always been seen as "OK" for convenience in raising beef, none the less I'm thinking a somewhat higher "brain-ectomy" of livestock isn't going to fix everything up for vegetarians.
Well of course not. You're still ending a sentient life. You're just separate out the sentience ending from the life ending.
So? Cannibalism of euthanized elders doesn't seem immoral. It is not an accepted practice in most human cultures, because of emotional ties. Cannibalism itself was a prevalent phenomenon throughout human history. Although, my view of ethics mostly aligns with Peter Singer.
Pain is not a necessary component of the animal being eaten (unless it's being hunted down in the wild, of course, but most animals that are consumed by humans aren't), so if that is the problem it can be (and, as far as I know, is being) dealt with without reinventing the whole lifecycle in the lab.
1) No species on earth "wants" to die. Every living organism has defence systems that it will try to prevent/repair any damage made to it.
Even more, (some) plants communicate and use signaling system to warn their neighbours about threats. Clearly, any species try to avoid death
How do you define "does not want to die"?
2) What about carnivorus species? Do they "allowed" to eat meat? If they are allowed, why humans can't? And more specifically, why you can't?
1) I'd say "being sentient" is a good definition for that. What exactly is sentient is left open to interpretation a bit, but I know big animals are, and I know plants aren't.
2) Eating meat is immoral, animals can't reason about morality, therefore they do whatever they do. Morality is the domain of beings intelligent enough to think about it. I consider killing animals immoral. That said, I do eat meat, because it's so tasty, in full conscience that I am immoral.
If you are so inclined, you could try being a weekday vegetarian - http://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian.html. For me, the two hardest things, when finally quitting eating meat a year ago, were convincing everybody around me that was serious about it, and finding alternative foods. I still occasionally eat fish. I try to justify it to myself as fish being of lesser intelligence and sentience.
As someone who grew up in a rural place eating organically, humanely and affectionately grown (in the local terroir) animals, i am thrilled that the possibilities for in vitro meat are opening up. It's amazing that we have the technology to replicate the properties of real food sources in a way that will (ultimately) be cheap and eco-friendly. Raising animals organically is messy and impossible to do on a large scale. Replacing that with a machine is a much better solution than growing animals in factory farms stuffed on antibiotics.
Pound for Pound, I could still see an engineered meat cube having better texture than tofu. Even if this was just used for ground beef substitute, it would probably be fine.
I, for one, wouldn't mind trying it out, but I have serious doubts it would approach the quality of real meat grilled burger anytime soon. And I understand that there are places where people are starving and such technologies can save lives, but realistically being the part of the lucky billion that is not under the threat of starvation I would always prefer the real thing if it's available.
Maybe you could open your mind a little? Sausage comes to mind as does all the Asian fish balls eaten by billions of people. If it's indistinguishable from ground beef that's great but if not I'm perfectly happy to eat it as something else if it tastes good.
I'm also all for quality and flavour as well. It's like saying that a nespresso machine can't ever beat a professional barista, let alone best barista in the world. But whenever the coffee connoisseurs make their judgement, machines come out as well as, if not ahead of, their human counterparts. And there's no shame in choosing the machine over the human -- a coffee is a coffee is a coffee, no?
But then again, there's really no shame in advocating the preservation of human links in our already heavily mechanised food chains, is there? I mean, what type of world do we want to live in?
Depends on the reason you're vegetarian. If it's for ethical reasons, then they probably would. If it's for health reasons, then probably not. If it's for environmental reasons, then it would depend on the environmental impact of in vitro meat.
It depends on their reason for being vegetarian. Some think meat is unethical, those probably could. Others think it's healthier not to eat meat, those would probably pass. A friend of mine is allergic to most animal proteins - she probably won't want to eat that stuff either.
I've had this discussion with a few vego's. My wife doesn't eat meat because she doesn't like animal suffering or confinement, so she would happily eat lab-grown meat. Yet her sister is disgusted by the texture/taste of meat on top of the suffering/confinement aspect, so the lab-grown meat only removes half of her aversion.
Ultimately comes down to the individual's motive for being a vegetarian, which varies.
I believe that under a strict definition of vegetarianism - a person who abstains from eating meat - the answer would be no. If they did they would not be vegetarian. Maybe another classification would need to be created for those who will only eat cultured meat.
This is actually an exciting and much needed development for the meat industry to be honest. Everyone is quite content eating highly processed to the point they're questionably even meat products like salami already and the effects of farming cattle for meat like horrible conditions for the animals, high costs of feeding the cattle, transportation and the environmentally damaging effects of said practices.
I wouldn't have a problem eating manufactured meat if it looked the same and tasted the same, if not better (which what seems to be promised). I already eat Spam and salami, what's one more processed product in my food arsenal?
If he'd being funded - which seems to be the case - what't the problem with it being private? I can understand calls for public funding where the need is there but the private funds to serve it for one reason or another are not - but here the funds are supplied already, I see no problem.
I'm guessing the OP means: given the high stakes (environmental, financial, moral, and so on), why aren't governments more involved in this research? (They're already regulating and subsidising farming in pretty much every country of the world.)
I had an economics professor who noted that one of the main reasons rich countries don't suffer from famines is because they have a lot of livestock. When there's a food shortage, livestock can be slaughtered early to provide extra meat and free up food crops for human consumption that would normally be used to feed the livestock.
Maybe this technology has too much potential to dangerously destabilize the world food situation for it to be fundable by a government.
Probably because making a full burger at this stage isn't really about research, but about getting publicity and support. Although who knows, maybe some good scaling techniques will come out of it.
Some would say that the entrenched agricultural lobby would not be happy to see funding go to this work, since it ultimately eliminates farming livestock and farming for livestock feed (which is a huge fraction of all farming).
I currently eat meat but I would rather not eat this... they already inject all kinds of stuff in "real" meat... I can't imagine what they would do to a completely engineered meat..
The company or companies that make this work commercially will probably have patents out the wazoo. And manufacturers that use their technology will have to pay them license fees, which would probably be included in the price of the product.
It has the potential to be economically much more efficient than growing livestock and massively increase the production of meat. The article doesn't talk much about the potential economic impact, focusing instead on environmental and ethical concerns, but considering the amount of land that is currently devoted to livestock grazing that would be able to be put to other uses when it becomes obsolete...it really is a game-changer that will make the human race much better off.
The people who make it work will deserve the billions they'll earn.
Did you take my comment to mean that I'm opposed to this technology or that I would actually expect consumers to pay for patents directly? It was merely a very poorly received joke, downmod away as humor is really not appreciated on hacker news, but at least know that it was sarcasm.
