Meat Grown in a Lab, Would you Eat it??
 

July 13, 2005 -- Number 27, Volume 5

"1. Tissue Engineering Study Says Animal Flesh Can be Grown in Labs

An article in the latest edition Tissue Engineering discusses the feasibility of producing "cultured meat" in laboratories as an alternative to raising and slaughtering farmed animals. (The full text is available online, see link below). Authored by a team of international researchers, the article describes two possible methods of generating edible animal flesh based on tissue engineering. The first method is described as a "scaffold-based" technique that involves layering sheets of engineered tissue to replicate various types of processed meat products. The second, more complex method involves culturing progenitor (parent) cells on small beads in a nutrient-rich medium. Cultured meat has been produced on a small scale by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to maintain food supplies during longer space flights. Three research teams have examined the subject closely in the past.

The current article's authors cite several potential benefits to finding an affordable way to produce in vitro meat: "With cultured meat, the ratio of saturated to polyunsaturated fatty acids could be better controlled; the incidence of foodborne disease could be significantly reduced; and resources could be used more efficiently, as biological structures required for locomotion and reproduction would not have to be grown or supported." According to one physicist quoted separately, 21% of the carbon dioxide produced by humans is attributable to our consumption of animals. The article also notes that cultured meat may help reduce human dependency on farmed animals, providing a more humane alternative to breeding, raising, and slaughtering billions of animals for food. The authors' "back-of-the-envelope calculations" suggest that the world's demand for animal flesh could be generated from a single cell. However, the technology faces several potential hurdles, including affordability of the process and acceptability among meat consumers. "



1. "In-Vitro Cultured Meat Production," Tissue Engineering, May 2005
Full article (PDF file, 54k): http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdf...en.2005.11.659
2. http://www.farmedanimal.net/


Would YOU eat meat grown in a lab?

How do you personally feel about it?

If this were to be economically feasible and comsumers enjoyed this product, i could see how it could become an important product in our society, having a positive effect on the enviroment, the fat intake of individuals and discontinue the suffering that occurs at many ill managed farms.



Sweetpea

While its current incarnation sounds pretty vile from a taste standpoint, if it were perfected I'd have no problem with it. I think their main problem will be economic. While all it takes to raise a cow is a field with grass and animal husbandry has been perfected over 1000's of years of agriculture, this would require a specialized facility and most likely be more expensive unless a true mass production could take place.

Another issue would be emotional. If genetically modified corn makes some people start civil disobedience, what would meat grown in a lab? My gut tells me they would be for it from the animal emotional stand point, but there is always a chance they are being intellectually honest and would oppose this as this is about as Frankenstein as a food product could get.

In an ideal world this would be cheap to produce and indistinguishable from an animal product and if it was I'd be all for it.

I would, assuming it was perfected.

I think they could make it with low fat, and the best taste.

When I was in high school I wrote a short story about the future; in it meat was grown in tanks, and people protested(during protesting hours).

Anyhow, taste and health are what is important.

I think if we can grow a new york strip steak, it could be a good step forward.

I wonder what PETA thinks of this? I would think they would like it... but I gotta bet they will find something wrong with it.

I would trust it a heck of a lot more than the unidentified meat product in cans of stew, soup, chili, - and what ever it is in hot dogs before they paint them :eek: A thick slice of vat-grown steak medium well with a baked potato would suit me just fine.

If it looks like a T-bone and tastes like a T-bone, I'd eat it.

If it looks and tastes like a tofu-burger, I'll pass.

You know, it's interesting, many of the individual's who protest GMO's don't know much about the true History of all our vegatables and fruits, when i took my college botany class, we studied evidence of how early humans would "engineer" their food, let's take corn as a simple example, by crossing the best tasting of corn with the longest season havesting corn, early humans "engineered" virtually all the food we enjoy in these modern times. For many of the GMO foods today, we are merely following this same pattern.

"Fedoroff studies plants, lately using the techniques of genetic engineering. She’s never crossed a fish with a strawberry, and she agrees that many of the first products of biotechnology, like the "ice-minus" bacteria (engineered with a fish gene to protect strawberries from frost) or the "Flavr-Savr Tomato" (which ripens more slowly and so can sweeten on the vine) have been public relations disasters and commercial flops. She did not mention the fact that genetically modified food is already a mainstay of the American diet: According to the New York Times, 70 percent of all processed foods and soft drinks on our supermarket shelves contain ingredients from genetically modified crops...."

http://www.rps.psu.edu/0109/miracle.html

Now, i'm not talking about the kind of GMO foods that large corporations make that are resistent to 'Round Up' and require farmers to buy hundrends of gallons of herbicides and get rich from it . . . i don't believe that kind of GMO food is beneficial to anyone or the envrioment.

" A grobacterium acts by inserting a plasmid — a small ring of DNA — into the plant cell. To engineer a plant, scientists modify this plasmid. First they take out the genes that produce growth hormones and create food for the bacterium. Then they insert the genes they want the plant to express. Genes, for example, to make corn resistant to the herbicide Round-Up or to produce Bt, a popular insecticide."
http://www.rps.psu.edu/0109/miracle.html

In general, i think GMO's have great promise in helping with the world's nutrition as noted:

"Using this or similar techniques, scientists are working on breeding rice rich in vitamin A, bananas that deliver the hepatitus B vaccine, poplar trees that can clean up mercury pollution, sunflowers that make an oil to replace petroleum. As Gregg Easterbrook wrote in a New York Times editorial, The transgenic crops in the news today are just the first manifestations of a fundamental new idea. Much better versions are coming. "

if we use rational thought instead of the emotional response that 'GMO foods are always bad.' We can chage the way we eat to have a more positive impact not only on the enviroment, but our own health!


agreed!


Sweetpea

i see this becoming the SPAM of the future...


if its good i'll eat it...

that is an interesting question.

my perspective is as a vegetarian for several years ... but I've added fish to that a few years ago ... and i eat and enjoy 'fake' meat products.

yet ... one of the reasons I don't eat (most) animal flesh is that, somewhere along the line, the idea of chewing on muscle tissue became unpalatable (sorry if that imagery offends any meat eaters, I usually keep my ideas to myself ..).

So, I dunno.

maybe if it were chicken?

anyways, I do think it's a nice idea and I certainly think it's something that will happen in the future.

Get the grill heated up!

How much worse can it be from the meat we are eating today?

Nope, no offense. But along those lines, this muscle tissue won't be getting any exercise, unless they are electrostimulating the muscles or something. Might this be similar to veal in texture, then? Might they even reach Kobe beef?

No doubt.

I mean, they can't possibly be doing anything to it any worse than what we do to 'consumer' meat today anyway. Maybe if I grew a third arm, but even then...I think I'd be okay with it. It'd have to be tasty though; but I don't think that'll be a problem...I actually kind of like spam... /shrugs


mmmmmm.....'spam of the future'.... agghhh... /Homer

Considering the way the general population got their panties in a bunch over the idea of Genetically Modifed food, I have serious doubts about this sort of "vat-grown" meat ever being approved for mass consumption.

we've learned that processed foods aren't as healthy for you as organic, free range ones.

I can't imagine it being better for you.

It's already bad enough that poor people get the lowest quality of meat out there, I just another way to keeping healthy more and more expensive instead of driving the costs down, they've gone up.

[QUOTE]True. The studies are still out on this though.
I will point out that "Processed" foods are different than genetically grown foods though.

Cyn,
You make a good point, but this study is not about raising or lower costs.

As it states, it has nothing to do with ecnomics, rather it's merely an alternative to farming animals "Tissue Engineering discusses the feasibility of producing "cultured meat" in laboratories as an alternative to raising and slaughtering farmed animals."

The issues you are addressing in relation to nutrition and poverty are social and political issues..... which hopefully will be addressed.

although, as the lab noted in the report, many pounds of meat can be grown from only ONE cell . . . we could end hunger potentially?


thanks,

Sweetpea

Any recipes yet?

yes, if it's tasty and healthy for you.

I'd be curious how the vegan mainstream would view this. Didn't come from an animal so it would be ok?

My sentiment exactly. However, I would be skeptical and quite hesitant to take the first bite.

um, no. i have a hard enough time eating regular, old-fashioned, nature-made meat. only eat it because the supplements, meat-replacements, etc. were making me sicker. but what they do to mother nature's meat is bad enough.

i got this from my SO who enjoys torturing me, but i'll give y'all the warning he didn't give me. not for the weak of stomach even the plain pamela anderson clips. heh heh.

**MOD NOTE: Yeah, this is not the place to push PETA propaganda. Link removed. - analog.**

nope. i want the meat of something that once lived and breathed. anything else would be "fake", and i'm not comfortable with eating engineered food.

note: our ancestors mixing tasty and long-weathering corn in a field was using nature's own way... this is manufactured at the cellular level.

MY REAL QUESTION IS... if they can do this for animal meat, why can't this be done more effectively for human tissues? There are a MILLION more uses- and more important uses- for manufactured human tissue than fake strip steaks. THAT is what bothers me the most.

i'm sorry, i so do NOT support that company's propaganda, i wasn't thinking about it being specific to a program. i'd never seen that stuff before. i do profoundly apologise.

they are apparently working on engineering human tissue to help with burn victims and people who've got injuries/disease beyond the grafting. there's been a lot of ethical issues raised again.

and i'm off topic so i'll hush. but i'd eat a smart-dog over a lab-simulated-dog any day.

If it tasted good, cost less and I didn't think it came from a Soylent Green factory I'd eat it every meal.

I bet the growth of flavours and textures and such will be amazing when this gets going. What do you bet the Japanese will lead the way in the new approach market? The stuff they do with ice cream shows that they are extremely creative and not bound by traditional approaches to some things.

I bet there will be foods never heard of that will be staples of our future generations coming from this. Sounds rather exciting to me. It doesn't stop at pure meat either I bet.

If perfected, this will provide the perfect solution to my concern about the testicle and brain content of processed meat. Speaking of brain, this is a good thing for people who are paranoid about mad cow disease.

I'd eat it, but only if it came in colorful packaging with a cartoon character waving a magical baton, and the word "Smeat" in big gold letters.

mmmm....Smeat.

Lol, couldn't put it better :D

Hmmmmmm...
Why not just stick to cultivating plants? This meat thing is a little crazy if you ask me. I'd eat it, sure... but sounds like it would take a long time for it to become economically realistic.

I like that. Smeat.

I'd probably eat it, mostly because I love meat. Mm, meat. Besides, as Don DeLillo points out in his book White Noise, the packaging everything is placed into--the clean, white cellophane-wrapped trays the meat comes in--really divides us from the concept that yes, at one time this was an animal.

damn now I want there to be a little smeat jingle..

Smeat, Smeat, it's good to eat!

I did for get to answer the OP.

No I would not eat it. I'd try it, but I don't think I'd eat it on a regular basis.

Seeing as Quorn is vat grown meat substitute, I really don't see the difference.

Yes - I'd eat it.

The interesting question is "would it be vegetarian"?

To grow an endless supply of food from one cell is the equivalent of inventing the perpetual motion machine. It simply isn't possible to create something from nothing.

What is the engineered tissue they are using?

What is this nutrient rich medium?

The answer appears to be collagen.

As collagen only occurs in animals and there is no synthetic alternative, mass consumption of lab-meat would require a large number of collagen rich cows to satisfy demand.

We could always use the fat from from the people that had lipsuction done and then smeat will be made of people.

*screams as they drag him off* IT IS MADE OF PEOPLE! THE FAT ASSES OF PEOPLE.

jwoody, you ask some good questions,

I do not have the scientific education to explain any better than the article can. I have a social work degree, not a science degree . . . ;)

But i think the idea is to create a way of copying the cell and it would regenerate over and over, so i also assume that would mean it would have less variety in the meat itself.

And even if they do use initial cells from real animals, that would greatly decrease the needed number of cows by hundreds of thousands if not a million.


Sweetpea

True, but with an exploding human population and the need to feed everyone in the future (and try to feed the hungry now) this is being designed in part as looking at the whole picture. To fix a problem, it takes time, science usually looks ahead and designs new innovations for future issues.


Sweetpea

Fuck yes I would. I've been hoping something like this would come along.

analog: what's more important than the environment? With manufactured meat, the need to destroy natural habitats to allow cattle to graze would be gone. Granted, there would still be space used, but a factory takes less space than a ranch. Not to mention they could probably eliminate BSE among other things.

Ok, time to throw the heartless position in...

There are already too many people on this planet. Some resources are already stretched pretty thin. (Seeker was saying the other evening in chat, that the resevoirs in her area were at 40 percent of capacity) That'd scare the bejeesus outta me...

Now we're feeding everyone onthe planet... andmaking them healthy and they aren't dying.. there goes the rest of the resources that are needed.

Making fake meat I don't see as a help to anyone... Figure out how to do something with the water in the ocean so that it's cost effective and actually usable. Water is a bigger concern than who's eating what...

To answer the question - would I eat fake meat? Not a chance... I'm too fussy...

That's an awful lot of woulds, coulds and ifs we're talking here. In my view, affordability is a much bigger issue than acceptance, and I wonder what's more important to the people who have weighed in on this thread topic: the part about it potentially keeping us from killing too many cows and ruining too many habitats, or the part about it supposedly being accessible to the world's hungry one day.

To directly answer the question, if it tasted good and seemed safe enough, I would probably be willing to pay more than I now pay for natural meat to eat it. I would also sleep easy knowing that by moving my capital into a different market, I would be reducing the demand and thus the price of real meat so that less fortunate people could afford to eat it where they previously couldn't. But don't get me wrong - the moment I had even half a reason to believe that the syntho meat would negatively affect my health, I'd go back to real meat in a heartbeat, as I'm sure most people who are able would have enough sense to do.

For the current farmer's sake... No. Those guys have it hard enough. Beside that I think it would make me a little squemish at first. I've accepted eating meat all my life, but imitation meat?

I'd eat it, see no reason why not. (Unless as someone said you would grow and extra arm or two)

lol, yea, i mean, if im living after i eat mcdonalds, i think i could eat anything non-toxic/mcdonalds