What are the cells for the burger fed on? In tissue culture it's normal to feed cells Foetal Bovine Serum. Is this the case with these cells? If so we haven't fully removed the need for living, breathing animals from the equation.
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The goal is not to completely get rid of the use of cows. Scroll down on http://culturedbeef.net/home/, and you will read
"Better livestock conditions
Cultured Beef can be produced without the slaughter
of cattle, and far fewer cows are needed, so they
can be reared without the need for intensive
farming."
"Cultured Beef is created by painlessly harvesting
muscle cells from a living cow. Scientists then
feed and nurture the cells so they multiply to
create muscle tissue, which is the main component
of the meat we eat. It is biologically exactly
the same as the meat tissue that comes from a cow."maybe this is not the objective, rather having a more efficient way to produce meat, you're taking out of the equation the farm, meaning less space used, maybe healthier meat (without all the antibiotics and less fat)
from one cow you can produce 10 tons of meat without all the space needed not only to raise the cows, but to grow their food, the lab can also be closer to consumers having obvious implications on that.
fat is good for you. more fat please
Well, if efficiency is the endgoal here, than bean cultivation seems way more logical answere to beef alternatives than fake meat. You basically take the the food you would otherwice feed your cows, stew it together with some saffran and beet juice (the same colorants as for the fake meat) and you have your economy-burger.
No intermediate step which takes 10 times the space of a traditional meat-farm, no anti-biotics, fat-free and no need for any living, breathing animal slughtering.
Honestly I cant find a single logical reason why this artificial-meat buisness is a good idea except for "just because we can"
> Honestly I cant find a single logical reason why this artificial-meat buisness is a good idea
You can't find a single reason why people would rather eat a replacement that eventually looks and tastes like a burger, rather than cow-food mixed with saffron and beet juice?
If that sounds good to you, more power to you, but to think that people would pay for the mush the same way people currently pay for burgers is ridiculous.
Ehhh, I mean I dont think this psuedo meat will ever taste EXACTLY like a burger either. Frankly, if one were to spend this kind of time, money and effort to produce a 'tasty' no meat burger probably you could get something of similar taste value.
I personally find this valuable for the same reason the space program is valuable, a lot will be learned, and technology will advance. As far as being a practical solution, seems unlikely. On the 'low end' the actual hungry people of the world for the most part arent particularly meat driven to the same degree that Americans are. On the 'high end', there is literally no way to reproduce the marbleing, vascular structure, bones etc, required to make a top quality steak without reproducing the whole cow, at which point the excersize is moot. I mean on the high end folks claim they can taste the difference in the type of grain the animal was fed, so that market is not going to go in for lab grown meat no matter what. So really at best, this technology will one day be able to replace ground beef, which isnt an ignoble goal.
No, I can't find a single logical reason. Saturating peoples appetite for overmarkeded type of food doesn't seem logical to me.
Just because people will pay money for it, doesn't make it a good idea.
Why do people always confuse logic to mean we ignore all sociological concerns? Just because they are harder to reason about doesn't mean they don't matter.
It's not logical to pretend that they don't matter.
Im sorry for the misuse of the word 'logic'. By 'logic' I ment 'makes human sence'. But I was wrong there too. For investigating in means to satisfy our tastebuts, more economly, sound really human to me.
I guess, what I'm saying is simply that the time and effort going into artificial meat, and the promise it is going to generate will probably end up in continued overcomsuption. Totally overshadowing the social consernes.
I only wish an investigation into how to behaviorally modify our species from doing wastefull and damaging stuff on mass scale, would get as much funding and attention.
How does this research _not_ have the goal of keeping humans from doing "wasteful and damaging stuff"? The long term point is to have only a few cows that can create tons of beef without being slaughtered. Sounds much less wasteful, more efficient, and less damaging to me.
If your only other problem with this is that they're working on changing the product rather than the behavior of an entire population, without actually giving a hint on how you would go about changing that behavior, you're just complaining for the sake of complaining.
What's the logical reason for flavoring the beans?
There's plenty of meat analogues in the market, from highly processed (think Boca and Morningstar Farms) to relatively minimally processed (homemade bean burgers and the like). They sell reasonably well, but nowhere near as well as actual meat. Why? Well, although they're kinda like meat, they're not quite the real thing.
The idea of vat meat is a great one if it turns out it can scale. It will give vegetarians (like me) an additional range of protein sources—not that I'm dissatisfied with what's out there, but I do miss real burgers from time to time. It will also give meat eaters an option that's actually meat, but without the externalities that are endemic in the meat industry (factory farms, poor conditions for animals, methane emissions, low efficiency).
It's unreasonable to expect the world to become vegetarian because of those externalities. And the grass-fed/free-range/cruelty-free kind of thing, while a good step, only addresses some of the externalities, while being intrinsically more expensive. Why not investigate vat meat to see if it's a feasible alternative? Maybe it isn't, and we'll have wasted a bunch of time and money (though I suspect there are implications to this exploration beyond simply food). But maybe it is, and we could fix or ameliorate a bunch of problems without demanding the world switch to soy, seitan, and lentils for their protein (which is not going to happen to the extent it would need to).
Because that economy-burger you talk about will not taste like meat. Artificial-meat will, sooner or later.
Okay ... because the burger is not meat. It will taste like crap.
I have always been very very carnivorous animal. Not because of marketing and my family was always almost vegetarian. But occasions where I eat more than 3-4 pounds of tenderloin in one sitting have been observed.
But if you want from me to eat a dish - it better have big chunks of skeletal muscles of for legged animal that spent the majority of its life on the surface.
There are a lot of people for which meat is plain old delicious. This does not mean that we support the current cruel farming methods and we cannot make the fact that the pig is very bad grain to meat converter (bovines are even worse).
So a meat that is meat - if it can be produced at a fraction of a environmental cost could have a lot of usages - sausages, burgers, almost everything that uses minced meat.
While chances are it won't end on the plate as a steak soon due to aesthetic reasons it could help in feeding the world.
During the Q&A session of the press event, I think he did mention that they used Fetal bovine serum, and that it worked better than the alternatives.