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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
...And what happens when we no longer need cows? It's not going to be happy fun time for the species, because as soon as there's not a reason to breed them then we'll have a few cows kicking around in zoos and that's it.
Good for the environment, possibly, but bad for the species.
The cow is already extinct in the wild. It's not an animal that gets along well outside of human care. An argument could be made that the kindest thing to do is let the species, twisted and distorted by humanity into a ghoulish parody of a once-mighty beast, regain its dignity in extinction.
I have a feeling though that however easy faux-beef gets, there will always be people who won't eat it- just look at the "pink slime" controversy, or the anti-GMO movement.
We can worry about that when they figure out how to make milk in the lab.
Industrial meat production is a pretty brutal affair. It's not quite clear what it might mean for something to be good or bad for a species, but I'd think that having a large population suffering constantly under shockingly inhumane conditions would fall on the bad side.
I find it highly unlikely that vat meat would totally replace livestock. For starters, a large portion of the world doesn't have refrigeration or reliable transport infrastructure, let alone industrial labs. Even in developed areas, you have to take into account the large existing demand for pasture raised meat.
Vat meat simply has externalities associated with it – civil infrastructure, educational overhead, perception issues, etc – that make it so that it can't compete with traditional livestock models in many areas.
Realistically, vat meat competes with factory farming, and not a whole lot else. Which, don't get me wrong, is fantastic all on it's own.
There will always be a market for real meat and real leather. If/when the major sources of the two are "not-real" the producers of real meat and leather will be seen as a luxury, so the remaining cows bred to produce meat and leather will be cared for well to produce high quality outputs. So the population will drop but those that remain will be bred to produce luxury goods and so be kept in better conditions.
A lot of them are bread for milk too... (Whether they're having fun is another question, the ones that are allowed to graze outside probably are, the ones that never see the light of day probably aren't).
Why wouldn't they have fun? They get a comfortable life up until the horrible end. Most cattle is not kept inside huge industrial buildings like chickens or pigs.
Comfortable life: if it weren't made illegal, cows bred for meat would be locked in cages where they can barely move. After all, all energy spent on movement can't be spent on gaining weight.
Also, cows bred for their meet are slaughtered at 7-8 months of age. If cared for, a cow could live for 20 years, but economics prevail.
Cows held for their milk have it a bit better, as they get to live for 5-6 years. Also, things have improved. For example, the milking robot not only improved yield, but also allowed each cow to select the time it wanted to be milked, and does not require farmers to chase their cows towards their milking place two or three times a day.
Not kept in buildings: That depends on the level of industrialization of the farms and on the quality of your grassland. For example, in the Netherlands, mowing grass mechanically and feeding it to your cattle which is kept inside year round is the way to go, if you look at this purely economically (cows destroy too much grass by trampling it and by dropping cow peas on it)
Consequently, there is now talk of paying farmers to let their cows go out on the meadows.
That's a very existential question that doesn't have an easy answer. Is a somewhat brief existence worse than no existence at all? If we eradicate fruit flies (or the many species that live short, brutish existences), have we done them a favor?
I am a huge fan of the Omnivore's Dilemma and recommend it wholeheartedly because while Pollan faces these serious questions, he doesn't simply resort to the easy answer.
I've read that methane emissions from cattle contribute substantially to global warming and other pollution problems. According to the link above, this method could reduce methand emissions from cattle by 96%, and reduce the amount of land needed by 99%.
I haven't followed the link to the study at Oxford and Amsterdam University (always a good idea if you start to get excited about general science coverage). I plan to do this later.
The real cool thing is that they are making great advertising to stem cells, by doing something that has a very positive ethical connotation (which is the typical argument against using stem cell in medicine).
Could you elaborate? I don't understand what you mean by perceived need for more meat - to me this seems like a project geared at creating more ethical, future proof meat products.
Humanity has never -- with the exception of extreme cases, historical or modern -- eaten as much meat as the western man does now [1]. The only reason we eat as much meat as we do, I think, is out of marketing. The perceived need for more meat is therefor to saturate the marked.
The problem arising from growing meat consumption include, pollution, maldistribution of food, animal suffering, wasting of land and resources, wasting of water, etc.
[1] I suppose I need a reference for this claim, but think in terms of economy and you'll find that no other culture can afford this much land and resorces to go under meat-farming other than current western cultures
--edit--
I forgot about humans living in extreme environments that live (by necesity) almost exclusively on meat, like the inuits in Greenland, before major western influence. It doesn't change the fact that the majority of all culteres do, and have in the past, eaten but a porportion of the meat that the average westerners eat today.
> Humanity has never -- in no culture, historical or modern -- eaten as much meat as the western man does now
Absolutely incorrect. There are several well known groups of humans who survive off of a diet of principally animal products.
edit -- apologized for snark
I agree. In most places historically with good arable land, meat is not nearly as prevalent in a meal as today's Western diet. In many places, meat is pretty much just used as a flavoring in dishes like you might find in Chinese-American Szechuan String Beans (the little salted pork bits).
> I suppose I need a reference for this claim, but think in terms of economy and you'll find that no other culture can afford this much land and resorces to go under meat-farming other than current western cultures
Yeah, you do need a source here. An obvious counterexample is the Inuits, but there have been several other societies with high meat consumption. Also note the high meat consumption of the upper class in Europe during some centuries (the popularity of meat varied over time).
There have been observation that when tribes move from hunting to agriculture (usually of desperation) the average height collapses and the decay of teeth is brutal in just a few generations.
Blaming marketing for meat consumption is somewhat unfair - people love meat - in the past it was reserved for the rich and wealthy - gout was called "The illness of kings". A lot of people just love meat.
> The problem arising from growing meat consumption include, pollution, maldistribution of food, animal suffering, wasting of land and resources, wasting of water, etc.
That's the whole point of growing meat in a lab. It isn't economical to do it now, but it also wasn't economical to have a personal computer 30 years ago, or to get your DNA sequenced 10 years ago.
Actually, the land/people ratio now is vert low, there is research named "original affluent societies" that show that stone age people were rich and lived better, because low population means they almost did not had to work, with plenty of food, including hunted meat available.
> The problem arising from growing meat consumption include, pollution, maldistribution of food, animal suffering, wasting of land and resources, wasting of water, etc.
Most of these problems are addressed by artificial meat
A complete waste for $250,000. Lab meat? Why? Why would any one want to buy artificial, lab processed meat? Why do people insist on complicating food? Our supermarkets all already filled with things that can be barely classified as "food" and now we have this.
Well, it's a good indication you chose to make a throwaway account for that post, as it suggests that you yourself are aware to some extent how uninformed and ignorant the question is.
But, to answer: These animals are brought up in very inhumane conditions -- in crowded spaces, with no light, no freedom. The whole process is unsustainable, what happens when the world population reaches above 10 billion and demand for meat keeps getting higher? Do we have enough space to keep these animals, enough food to sustainably feed them without having bad environmental implications?
It turns out there are alternative methods, and they may prove to be well worth the cost of investigating them. So here we are, doing science, in the hopes of a brighter future. Experimenting with food, to make it taste better, healthier, cheaper, more environmentally-friendly.
I'm going to make political remark because the issue by its nature is very political.
We are wasting time and energy investigating solution to a real problem from the wrong end. Doing science is not enough to solve this problem, we need to do politics too (or social science for that matter). Infact doing science might ultimately lead us to enhance the problem.
Now we are looking for a way to make a very wastefull behavior more economy friendly. Meat consumption at the current mass scale is unpresidented and there is no reason to enforce it. Alternatives include alternative diet, less waste, better usage of the food we already grow. We have found brilliant ways to cultivate food at minimum cost, but it is not securing the majority of our species food intake. And the western meat marked might be the biggest factor for this injustice.
Now trying to solve it by further saturating the western marked with meat -- a product that is to blame for this mal-distribution of food -- is not going to solve any problem. It is going to shift the attention away from the real issue at hand and further stabilizing a marked that is currently really unfair and damaging.
Its not a throw away account. So a better future is lab produced meat? I'm not saying that the current demand for meat is not bad for the environment. All I'm saying is food is something that is best not experimented with. Nothing good has come up with food scientists tinkering with food. We live in an age where food is seen as a combination of nutrients. We keep track of calories, we read a new study everyday about the benefits for this food/that food, each study contradicting the one before it. Surely, the ultimate solution to making food "better, healthier, cheaper, more environmentally-friendly." is a pill, which will have everything that the body needs. right? Thats what all this experimenting will ultimately lead to. Maybe your scientific mind finds artificial meat appealing. Ask you grandmother how she feels about it.
That's missing the forest for the trees. There are probably lots of factories that treat animals more humanely than others but we still should be investigating alternative methods of creating meats. Ultimately you're going to have to meet problems of scalability down the road in some years, and/or other unforeseen problems with antibiotics and such. It's probably best to start heavy research/experimentation in preparation now than later.
