I'm a big fan of these developments. Meat is tasty, but I don't like where it comes from for all sorts of reasons. The sooner is can be replaced with artificial products, the better. What I cannot for the life of me understand is why there is an "ick factor" around cultured meat. Icky as opposed to what, slaughtering animals ? How is growing something in a clean laboratory more icky than an abattoir ?
An Israeli start-up launched earlier this year says they've identified a new way to grow chicken meat that could be commercially viable within just five years, with a chicken burger costing just two dollars.
Unlike Brin's burger, the technology does not use animal serum but instead uses cells. It's based on a revolutionary technology developed by Yaakov Nahmias, a professor at Hebrew University, in 2006. It's actually based on a 3D printing technique Nahmias used to map human liver cells.
However there is still a lot of skepticism over whether cultured meat could get to a commercial scale any time soon. Sergey Brin may be an adventurous investor, but there are few like him. Venture capital funding to companies like SuperMeat has been hard to come by, because investors are skeptical about whether people will really eat meat grown in a lab.
http://www.dw.com/en/is-it-a-bird-no-its-supermeat/a-19442271
Oh, I can hear the bitching and moaning, and outright lies already. Just like over GMOs.
ReplyDelete"Eating printmeat will mutate your genes!"
I hope they can also grow the fat and the skin so that it works well on the grill. Barbecued chicken is good stuff.
ReplyDeleteI'm torn. The scientists in me says 'great progress'. Being the son of a butcher I don't see this being able to compete.
ReplyDeleteUnless they can replicate the different types of meat, muscle groups, fat, skin, what it was fed on it won't get anywhere near meat. Maybe for burger use only.
It would be great for space colonization, not having to raise and feed the animals.
ReplyDeleteDepends on what the process needs otherwise, Robbie Yarber.
ReplyDeleteSimon Barton This is my biggest worry with this. It is easy to tell "Look at those environmentally unfriendly livestock farms!" and want them to go away. But there is no guarantee that this industry will be better.
ReplyDeleteThis may be another case of the German "Let's get rid of nuclear power plants that are killing Nature!" and replace them with coal power plants.
Or it may be a genuinely good move, but there isn't enough detail here to judge that.
And for the ecological justifications they could have chosen against industrial livestock farming - mistreatment of animals, pollution of soil and water, destruction of the environment and local ecosystem, even poor-quality meat with possible health consequences down the road for consumers, they chose the weakest one. Go figure...
I suspect the 'yuck' problem with vatmeat is an instinctive wariness of purely artificial food. What do we associate artificial food with? Glucose and refined sugar (prime cause of obesity), artificial flavouring and preservative (most of which haven't been tested for long-term health consequences), probably even agricultural products...
Even if the principle here is different, it won't escape associations, conscious or not.
In addition to that, the principle of precaution would ask us to wait and see if the subtle (or not, I don't know) differences between vatmeat and zoomeat(?) won't cause all sorts of wacky long-term effects on consumers as well.
For what we know, the substrate used causes a dangerous increase of red cell count, or one type of fat is too low and compensating for it strains the liver [purely fictional examples, feel free to use in a SF novel]. I have no idea how probable those kinds of unforeseen consequences are, but I suspect many will instinctively assume they may be important.
And cancer. You know it will be blamed for cancer.
Long-term, though, this is definitely a big part of the food industry, especially if we start living in less biologically friendly places (like, say, space).