Hell yes I would. I rather like the branding of "slaughter free", too.
In 1931, Winston Churchill predicted that the human race would one day "escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium". Eighty-seven years later, that day has come as we discovered at Just, a food company in San Francisco where we tasted chicken nuggets grown from the cells of a chicken feather.
The chicken - which tasted like chicken - was still alive, reportedly roaming on a farm not far from the laboratory. This meat is not to be confused with the vegetarian plant-based burgers and other meat-substitute products which are gaining popularity in supermarkets. No, this is actual meat grown from animal cells and variously described as cultured, synthetic, in-vitro, lab-grown or even "clean" meat.
It takes about two days to produce a chicken nugget in a small bioreactor, using a protein to encourage the cells to multiply, some type of scaffold to give structure to the product and a culture, or growth, medium to feed the meat as it develops. The result is not yet commercially available anywhere on earth but Just's chief executive Josh Tetrick says it will be on the menu in a handful of restaurants by the end of this year.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45865403
I can see the workaround: “All our chickens are slaughter-free. Instead, they’re properly euthanized under sedation, while listening to Bach.”
ReplyDeleteJoking aside, while extremely promising, this needs a ton of scrutiny:
- what’s that scaffolding they’re talking about? A human-digestible simple sugar or some protein that has the potential to accumulate in our body?
- Does it remain in the meat, or is it “digested” by the growth process (if so, what are the byproducts)?
- Same again for the growth nutrients.
Then on to the industrial side of things:
- what purity level do we need for safe food?
- incineration of residues (instead of cycling it back into the nutrient feed). Mad Cow Disease was enough, we don’t need Mad Chicken Disease. (Kreutzfeld-Jacobson is bad, no matter where you get it from).
In the H. Beam Piper science fiction novels, spacecraft supplement their hydroponic food growing gear with "carniculture vats"
ReplyDeleteA. Bertram Chandler used that premise in his Rim stories as well.
ReplyDeleteWinchell Chung -- I kind of like the word 'carniculture' ... not that I find the word itself particularly pleasing, but it's a good word for what it refers to.
ReplyDeleteIt is something of a double-entendre as well. We live in a carniculture.
ReplyDeleteJose Pina Coelho
ReplyDeleteThe way it was explained to me, scaffolding is because of the problem of getting culture medium food to the growing cells.
With tissue cultures, it is very easy to grow a layer of chicken meat cells that is only one layer thick. The culture medium can easily reach the cells. Trouble is which you have multiple layers. The cells on the inner layers starve to death.
Researchers have tried growing lots of single cell layers, then laminating them together to make something like meat. But the results were disappointing.
Researchers have been trying to solve the "vascularization problem", i.e., how to make the tissue culture make its own system of blood vessels which can bring the food to every single cell. This turns out to be really hard.
I would guess that the scaffolding is sort of an edible framework that the chicken cells can cling to, keeping the cells separated so that the food can percolate into the innermost cells.
At last, Chicken Little from "The Space Merchants"! Anyone got a version earlier than 1952?
ReplyDeletetechnovelgy.com - Chicken Little by Frederik Pohl (w/CM Kornbluth) from The Space Merchants