How In-Vitro Meat will Change Our Lives

http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/bio/eight-ways-vitro-meat-will-change-our-lives

by MikeCapone • 17 years ago

33 43 17 years ago

hplusmagazine.com

dan_the_welder2• 17 years ago

I encourage you to read "The Merchants War" by Fredrick Pohl

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

Which is a sequel to 'the space merchants'.

And I really wonder why that got you modded down, it's perfectly on-topic.

StrawberryFrog2• 17 years ago

It was modded down, probably because if you haven't read this book (which I haven't), the suggestion is unsupported and means little - why should I read it?

zitterbewegung• 17 years ago

I think this article doesn't actually address the obvious question of the stigma of actually eating in-vitro meat.

wisty2• 17 years ago

It does. It suggests that Europe will take it up before USA, for cultural reasons. It might also be popular in the developing world.

Our food is already processed within an inch of it's life (then a good three yards past it). Tour Spam will be grown in a vat, rather than fed hormones and ground in a factory. Big deal.

You think PETA is unethical? Just wait for the smear campaigns that will crop up when MegaCorp can actually make some money off scaring people out of living meat.

patio11• 17 years ago

It suggests that Europe will take it up before USA, for cultural reasons.

This mystifies me. All you have to say is "genetically modified" and Europe flips its proverbial wig. Aren't savvy English cattle farmers going to say "Oh-my-Gaia this is Frankenfood! It is unnatural! It is cloned! It probably has DNA in it! Phone your representative, this should be banned!"

(The reference to savvy farmers is an oblique reference to the fact that the difference between GMO soybeans/corn/etc and non-GMO soybeans/corn/etc is that a preference or requirement for non-GMO product shuts American-grown stuff out of the market. What a handy coincidence.)

Gmo• 17 years ago

It suggests that Europe will take it up before USA, for cultural reasons.

I'm european, and I seriously doubt that. I'd say that the US would pick it up before Europe. In Europe, we are much more wary about "unnatural" way of growing things, you just have to see with GMO ...

JCThoughtscream• 17 years ago

What stigma? When it's been gussied up with sauce and a fancy abstract plate, the average diner won't even taste the difference - or notice the fine text on the bottom of the menu, next to the Ethical Meats stamp.

bwhite• 17 years ago

Postulate two sets of people. Set A consists of those who regularly eat meat, deeply care about the origin of that meat, but care very little about the environmental impact of raising meat and are dismissive of any cruelty or health concerns. Set B consists of folks who are vegetarian or who avoid red meat because of health, environmental, and/or cruelty considerations.

I suspect almost all of set B would eat vat meat and that set B is larger than set A.

StrawberryFrog2• 17 years ago

I'm in Set B, and would hesitate before eating Vat-meat. I didn't become a vegetarian in order to pretend to eat meat. And if it's on your fork, how do you tell if it's vat meat or not?

cmars232• 17 years ago

Especially the in-vitro human meat. It'll probably cause mad-human disease or zombies.

wvenable2• 17 years ago

Do you know what's in the average hot dog? Hamburger? Package of frozen chicken strips? The fact is that while people do eat a lot of steak, chicken wings, and bacon a lot of meat is merely an ingredient.

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

I hope that food labeling will take care of that, and that any synthetics will be required to carry clear labeling.

s3graham• 17 years ago

Assuming I believe in this taking over the world, can anyone point to some startups or larger public companies I should be following?

nikils• 17 years ago

This means now vegans can eat meat ?

jamesbritt2• 17 years ago

That would depend on why one was a vegan. Some do it for health, some for various philosophical reasons.

For myself (vegetarian for philosophical reasons), if no plausibly sentient being was harmed to create this stuff, I'd likely have no ethical reasons against eating it.

dejb• 17 years ago

> Some do it for health, some for various philosophical reasons.

I'd also add 'Yuck Factor' to that list. I'm not sure how IVM would effect this.

berntb• 17 years ago

Vegans could even eat long pig... Norwegians and Japanese could eat whale. :-)

Anyone else thinking of "Transmetropolitan"?

colonelxc• 17 years ago

Apparently it's all rainbows and sunshine from here on out. I really don't see the meat industry dying out for a long time, and I have some doubts about how easy it will be to be able to ship "in vitro kits" to food deprived nations. Maybe someday, but not for decades is my guess. I'm curious as to how much the materials that the cells grow in will cost, and how hard that will be to make.

One of the commenters put it well:

"In Vitro meat will do to pasture grown meat what margarine did to butter. Despite nearly 50 years of food science, still the most economical way of getting the wonderfully rich flavor of butter is to milk it out of cows.

In vitro meat will be fine for industralized meat products that just want the approximate taste & texture of meat but anybody wanting a fine steak is still going to get it from good old fashioned cows."

wvenable2• 17 years ago

I think that commenter has it right: that "traditionally grown" meat will always have a place in society. However, right now, a significant amount of meat is ground up into hamburgers and sold in McDonalds; that seems like a waste to me. Maybe taking that mass market out we can get back to sustainable farming.

Dove3• 17 years ago

Cutting out ground beef consumption entirely wouldn't reduce the number of cows produced. A given cow produces so many T-bone steaks, so many barbecue ribs, and some quantity of ground and stew meat from tougher cuts. The demand is driven by the good, expensive meat; ground beef is cheap because it's the byproduct. If it wasn't cheap, we wouldn't want as much as was produced.

theblackbox• 17 years ago

It's the "In-vitro kits" that really get me thinking. I wonder if they will be as magnanimous as the author suspects or if they will simply be another tool of third world oppression. Like with how GMO crops sometimes have a built in dependency on a nutrition product sold by the same company, or how they can be made infirtile so the farmer cannot reseed the same crop. It all seems like another rift in the Socio-technological Divide, to me!

On a side note, what would in-vitro mean for Halal/Kosher meat? Anyone care to speculate?

rms• 17 years ago

Some guy on Yahoo Answers gave an answer for Kosher: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090519173621AA...

In short, no, it wouldn't be kosher, but meat grown from modified genes could be kosher.

anamax2• 17 years ago

> another tool of third world oppression. Like with how GMO crops sometimes have a built in dependency on a nutrition product sold by the same company, or how they can be made infirtile so the farmer cannot reseed the same crop.

That's not oppression.

Those folks are perfectly free to continue to do as they've done for centuries or to buy something else if they feel that the benefits are not worth the costs.

There's nothing wrong with charging more. Customers are always free to buy something else.

moonpolysoft• 17 years ago

This article reads like it was written by someone with an axe to grind against traditional meat.

nvasilak• 17 years ago

This scares me to death.

There is no way that humanity has figured out all the complexity that billions of years of evolution has created when it comes to animals eating each other.

Corporations are now coming up with new types of 'food' that they can sell for much more profit than the things our species have been surviving on for thousands of years. Take margarine for example - no cows to raise and milk, therefore a much bigger profit margin than butter. They also tell us it's much healthier too. But then studies like this come along http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/05/us/study-links-heart-disea... , and the whole french paradox, which indicate the opposite may be true.

"When In-Vitro Meat (IVM) is cheaper than meat-on-the-hoof-or-claw, no one will buy the undercut opponent." I seriously doubt it. Even though a grass fed, dry aged steak is quite expensive, many people splurge because they are delicious. Has the author heard of the organic movement growing 20% a year over the past decade? People buying more expensive food because it's healthier and tastes better, that defies logic.

The article claims that this IVM is also healthier for the planet, but it neglects to mention where all the raw ingredients for the IVM will come from. Mother nature already created the perfect way to stay healthy - plants get energy from the sun to grow, animals eat plants, and excrete fertilizer to grow new plants. This happened for millions of years before humans came along. Unfortunately, our farms are no longer run using this perfect natural solution (another issue entirely), but I don't see how IVM would solve this.

My favorite quote from the article: "We won't even choke to death because IVM contains no malicious bones or gristle." It's amazing our species has survived so long with so many malicious bones and evil gristle after us. Malicious bones - I cant stop picturing zombies, haha.

riffic• 17 years ago

real grass fed cows will still be raised and sold, but expect it to get a lot more expensive in the future.

wisty2• 17 years ago

It might get less expensive, as there will be more room for pasture and a low cost competitor.

Dove3• 17 years ago

Meh. Human beings haven't been eating domesticated cattle for all that long, either. I mean, geologically speaking. If you're going to put some faith in evolution, put it in our ability to adapt to available food sources. If we were as brittle as needing to consciously micromanage nutrient input, I doubt we'd have made it nearly this far.

Anyway, I don't see any particular reason to expect 'natural' food to be more healthy. Most of nature, given its druthers, would like to kill you.

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

That's actually a really good point, our bodies have some fairly advanced defenses, but still I'd play it safe and avoid this stuff like the plague until a solid amount of time has gone by.

In the old court days they used to have a person that would taste the food (I don't know the English word for such a person, sorry) and if that person wouldn't keel over within half an hour of tasting the food the food would be considered safe.

I fully intend to use that part of humanity that doesn't care about issues like this for exactly that purpose, but I'll set the time quite a bit longer than half an hour.

(silly old timers, never heard of slow acting or cumulative poisons...)

rsheridan6• 17 years ago

>If you're going to put some faith in evolution, put it in our ability to adapt to available food sources. If we were as brittle as needing to consciously micromanage nutrient input, I doubt we'd have made it nearly this far.

It depends on your definition of "need." You can obviously live to be old enough to reproduce on extra value meals from McDonald's - people do - but that doesn't mean its good for you.

>Anyway, I don't see any particular reason to expect 'natural' food to be more healthy. Most of nature, given its druthers, would like to kill you.

Because we're adapted to it and we're messing with systems that are not well understood. Some of this is obvious and well-known - for example, the link between sugar consumption and diabetes.

kingkongreveng_• 17 years ago

The meat we have now is rather unhealthy and unnatural. Cows are built to eat grass and chickens are built to eat mostly bugs. Instead we stuff them all with corn and soy. This makes the omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratios very wrong. This imbalance is strongly implicated in many human diseases, heart disease in particular. The only truly healthy meat is grass fed.

I'm very skeptical, but it seems at least possible to me that test tube meat could be formulated to better approximate "natural" grass fed meat than the mass produced feedlot stuff we have now. They could fix the fatty acid ratios by "feeding" the meat with algae secretions. The only way to find out will be with experimentation.

Of course this brings us back to the question of what our food market would look like if all grain subsidies were removed. It's quite likely the vast corn fields would be converted to pasture and healthy meat would get cheap. And it's quite likely that proper pastured meat production is more efficient than all the test tube processes.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 17 years ago

chickens are built to eat mostly bugs

Not to be too nitpicky, but chickens are omnivores. They will happily eat worms, leaves, bugs, grass, flowers, seeds, flies, small frogs, other chickens, and I've seen them try to attack small snakes.

And trust me when I say they don't have to be forced to eat corn. Next to worms, it's probably their favorite food.

SwellJoe• 17 years ago

This sounds like one of those "In The Year 2000" articles from Popular Science in the '50s. It is hyperbolic beyond credulity, probably missing some extremely important aspects of the central tenet of the story, and too light on cited facts to take seriously.

I do think there will be major changes in the way meat for the majority of meat eaters is produced in the future, but it won't be in three years, or even ten. The changes have to happen because meat production is simply too resource intensive for an ever-growing population to keep on eating more and more of the stuff without ever increasing environmental impact. But, they will come extremely slowly, because peoples habits change extremely slowly. People will choose "real" meat for a long time after cheaper in-vitro meats are available.

If I ate meat, I would be somewhat suspicious of the new stuff, just as I'm suspicious of most modern, and not so modern, lab-created food additives. As with most artificial sweeteners, HFCS, hydrogenated fats, etc., I'm suspicious of them as beacons for general poor quality when I see them on a label. I know if the manufacturer chose the cheapest options for the sweeteners and fats, they probably chose the cheapest garbage for the rest of the ingredients, too. Much like soy in burgers indicated to people in the '70s and '80s that it was a poor quality, cheap, food, in-vitro meats will probably go through a phase of being thought second rate. And, of course, a few years on, we now know that soy in some forms actually can be detrimental to health, particularly in men.

It will take a pretty brilliant marketing coup to overcome that kind of resistance. Splenda and Nutri-Sweet both had very effective marketing that seems to have countered any feelings of badness about them. Though what Nutri-Sweet replaced (Saccharine) had such a bad reputation at the time that anything probably would have been a shoe-in. It's not coincidence that Splenda began to hit big just as questions about the safety of Nutri-Sweet/Aspartame started to get mainstream attention. I'm not sure people will be convinced about the unhealthiness of meat, since artificial meats aren't exactly mainstream today, despite many of them being quite tasty (certainly tastier than diet sodas) and reasonably healthful. This makes me think the desire for healthier substitutes for meat isn't very high, and the awareness of most folks of the environmental impact is even lower.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 17 years ago

No one will buy ranch raised meat when In-Vitro meat is so cheap? This guy has no business sense.

I raise chickens as a hobby. I don't even try to market or sell my product, yet I have people asking me if they can buy eggs (no, I just give them away if they ask) because they're willing to pay more for fresh eggs from chickens living in natural surroundings than the "battery farmed" ones in supermarkets.

Premium products will always command premium prices.

How In-Vitro Meat will Change Our Lives

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