More on artificial meat

[mr friendly guy]

http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-t ... 6251161486

Meat grown in a lab is 'not Frankenstein stuff'

Jan 23

LATER this year a small group of people will meet in Washington. They will be expecting to eat fried chicken for lunch.
But while it may look like chicken, smell like chicken and hopefully even taste like chicken, it will have never walked like one or have even taken a breath.
Five years ago scientists were offered a $1 million reward by animal welfare group PETA to prove they could make meat in a laboratory. To win the prize, the lab-grown chicken must be indistinguishable from "real" chicken flesh and it must be able to be grown in quantity.

The deadline for their creations is June 30 this year. And PETA believes there is a very real chance someone will claim the reward.
“We really do not know who will apply," said Ingrid Newkirk, president and founder of PETA, told The Guardian. "Five years ago I thought no one would.
“But I cannot tell any more. There is a real chance someone will claim the reward.
“A lot of researchers are keeping very quiet and have their cards close to their chest. Progress is being made. They are overcoming obstacles. We are very optimistic."

By 2050 the world population is expected to increase by 2.5 billion – an extra China or India. The United Nations says the world will need to nearly double food production to sustain this increase. But dwindling farm land, growing water shortages, and climate change are expected to make growing crops much more difficult.
Artificial meat is suddenly becoming a viable option. For vegetarians and animal rights groups, that means less animal suffering.
"More than 40 billion chickens, fish, pigs and cows are killed every year for food in the US alone, in horrific ways," Ms Newkirk said.
“In vitro meat would spare animals from this suffering.”
Progress is being made – but don’t expect lab-grown meat to be on your dinner plate in 2013.

US scientist Vladimir Mironov has successfully grown muscle tissue from turkey cells – but only in small quantities. While Mark Post, head of the department of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands claims he will produce a synthetic beefburger this year.
The problem is that burger may be colourless, tasteless and lacking texture.
Meat needs blood and fat to give it colour and taste. While stem cells for blood and fat have been identified it is slow, complex and expensive work.

Until research into blood and fat cells improves, scientists may have to add fat and even lab-grown blood and colour to artificial meat.
Professor Julie Gold, a biological physicist at Chalmers technical university in Gothenburg, Sweden, told The Guardian it could be years before artificial-meat lands in our fridges.

"There is very little funding,” Ms Gold said. “What it needs is a crazy rich person."
Or maybe a million dollar incentive.

[Singular Intellect]

Good to know progress is being made, although as always funding seems to be the key element holding back even faster progress.

[Broomstick]

I presume that such lab-grown meat needs some sort of container, power, chemicals... This is only useful if the carbon/resource footprint is smaller than natural sources of meat.

For an analogy, hydroponics is a pretty well-developed technology, but it is almost always more expensive per unit of food produced than conventional dirt-farming. It makes a lot of sense at an antarctic base, in space, or to provide locally produced fresh foods during winter in some regions, but for a supply of the bulk of human food it is arguably more harmful than conventional farming.

There may be a role for vat-grown meat, but I doubt very much it will replace animal husbandry any time soon.

[eion]

There's certainly a market for such "designer" food. Just look at the popularity of organic and "natural" food. One could easily imagine products labeled as "Cruelty-Free Chicken" with a PETA seal and everything that are made from manufactured meat. One does wonder if PETA would also endorse products made using "brainless" animals cloned without any higher brain function beyond resperation.

[PeZook]

There may be a role for vat-grown meat, but I doubt very much it will replace animal husbandry any time soon.

We might no thave a choice, though. The problem with animal husbandry is that it takes up so much space, and consumes so much grain and other products that could otherwise be used to feed people, that we'll be running into hard population limits soon.

Saving on carbon emissions isn't really the rationale behind using vat-grown meat ; In an ideal world, we'd slowly decrease world population to 3.5 billion or so and thus both massively reduce carbon emissions and not have to worry about farmland at all. But that's not going to happen...

[darthdavid]

Saving on carbon emissions isn't really the rationale behind using vat-grown meat ; In an ideal world, we'd slowly decrease world population to 3.5 billion or so and thus both massively reduce carbon emissions and not have to worry about farmland at all. But that's not going to happen...

I'm not sure I'd necessarily call that 'ideal'. If we had cheap enough space lift and/or good enough automation everything we'd need to feed many times the current population is already floating around in asteroids and comets up there and it's not like you lack for sunlight in space (which could also be used to reduce our carbon footprint to basically zero with Beamed Orbital Solar).

On topic, well this has the potential to be quite good. Meat is quite tasty after all and if it can be obtained without animal suffering so much the better.

[PeZook]

I'm not sure I'd necessarily call that 'ideal'. If we had cheap enough space lift and/or good enough automation everything we'd need to feed many times the current population is already floating around in asteroids and comets up there and it's not like you lack for sunlight in space (which could also be used to reduce our carbon footprint to basically zero with Beamed Orbital Solar).

On topic, well this has the potential to be quite good. Meat is quite tasty after all and if it can be obtained without animal suffering so much the better.

That would require massive investment in all sorts of (currently mostly pie-in-the-sky) technology and space infrastructure. If the world's population was 3.5 billion, we could comofortably feed everybody with what we have right now.

[dragon]

then what the hell do we do with all the chickens

US Egg Production Up One Per Cent: Egg production during the year ending November 30, 2010 totaled 91.4 billion eggs, up one per cent from 2009. Table egg production, at 78.5 billion eggs, was up one per cent from the previous year. Hatching egg production, at 12.9 billion eggs, was up one per cent from 2009.

US 1 December Inventory Numbers: The total number of chickens on hand on 1 December 2010 (excluding commercial broilers) was 455 million birds, up one per cent from last year

link

[Thanas]

Prices for chicken wings plummet? Or you let nature take care of them.

[Junghalli]

One thing I'm unclear on: this artificial meat is presumably going to require some source of nutrients and energy, what exactly are they planning to feed it with?

Presumably the vat meat isn't going to have a digestive system, so they can't just feed it grass. Is the plan to replace the cow's digestive system with some artificial equivalent, or to switch to forms of feed that can be directly assimilated by the vat meat (like I guess maybe sugar cane or corn syrup or something)?

[Guardsman Bass]

They'd probably just kill off all the chickens for eggs and meat, so that they don't have another generation of chickens when the farm closes.

[DudeGuyMan]

I'm skeptical of this turning out to be any less expensive resource-intensive than regular meat. Would be nice if it were, but you know, it's probably easier to just invent better ways of making soy meat taste real. At least as far as I'm concerned. If my burger tastes good I don't give a shit what it was made from or how.

[KhorneFlakes]

What if it gives you cancer or bowel troubles? Remember Beastman and Skeletor, man.

Remember them.

[DudeGuyMan]

As long as the guy at Little Caesar making pizza with syntho-meat pepperoni remembers to wash his hands after wiping his ass I should be cool.

[PeZook]

I'm skeptical of this turning out to be any less expensive resource-intensive than regular meat. Would be nice if it were, but you know, it's probably easier to just invent better ways of making soy meat taste real. At least as far as I'm concerned. If my burger tastes good I don't give a shit what it was made from or how.

I think the point is to use other resources than what farming traditionally uses, rather than to necessarily use less, so that you can increase overall food production.

After all, traditionally most problems of civilization were solved with application of more energy and resources

[JPaganel]

it's probably easier to just invent better ways of making soy meat taste real. At least as far as I'm concerned. If my burger tastes good I don't give a shit what it was made from or how.

There is a fair number of people in the world who can't eat soy, no matter what it tastes like.

[DudeGuyMan]

Then they can invent something to make burgers made out of pencil shavings taste better, whatever. The specific substitute isn't the point. The point is that growing meat in cloning vats or whatever seems like a rather extreme way of accomodating people who hate the conventional meat industry but just can't bear eating substitute meat.

I mean how small a market niche is that, anyway?

[madd0ct0r]

There is a fair number of people in the world who can't eat soy, no matter what it tastes like.

Why? allergies?

[loomer]

Allergies, yeah, and soy is a bitch of a one to have. It is in fucking everything. Take a look at your groceries. Is it anything that is not a fresh fruit, vegetable, or steak? Chances are, it's got soy.

[JPaganel]

Why? allergies?

There are allergies proper, plus soy intolerance, plus sensitivity to phytoestrogens.

All good things not to have.