
Coming soon: chicken meat without slaughter - kevindeasis
http://www.israel21c.org/coming-soon-chicken-meat-without-slaughter/
======
Alex3917
There are plenty of mushrooms that can substitute for meat, it's just that
none of them are being commercially produced.

If you had Calvatia Gigantea grown in the right soil and properly prepared I
doubt many people would be able to tell the difference between that and
chicken. Same with Laetiporus sulphureus, but grown on logs.

Similarly I doubt many people would be able to tell the difference between
beef jerky and jerky made from Grifola frondosa, even in a side-by-side
comparison.

~~~
SwellJoe
I suspect this stuff cannot be commercially viable, otherwise someone would
have done it by now. Though, I'm a vegetarian of 22 years and have never heard
of either of these things. It sounds cool, and I'll probably seek some out
now, but it's certainly not well-known. I've used portobello mushrooms, and
several kinds of Asian mushrooms, for substitution in various dishes, but
never considered them indistinguishable (or even all that similar) to meat.

But, given the incredible and fascinating (and delicious) variety of mushrooms
and fungi, I am more than willing to believe there are lots of food options
that haven't been explored.

~~~
Alex3917
> I'll probably seek some out now

Join your local mycology group in spring. Every city has one, and you can
either Google for yours or look them up on the NAMA website. A lot of their
websites look like the group may be defunct, but they are mostly still active
-- it's just that the average age in these groups is going to be like 60, so
the sites just don't get updated often. (Though most of the younger folks in
these groups tend to be software developers, go figure.)

Anyway they'll have at least one walk every weekend, and if you go on half of
them then you'll know how to safely identify and cook with most of the basic
edibles by fall. You'll probably learn a bunch of edible plants as well,
especially during the slow season between when the morels finish and when the
summer mushrooms start coming up.

There definitely are a lot of things that aren't commercially viable. But
probably even more that just haven't been commercialized. E.g. there are tons
of foods that are eaten in Asia, Africa, and South America that aren't
commonly consumed in the U.S., and sometimes that has to be with growing
conditions, but more often than not it's just a marketing thing.

Regardless, what I'd say is that you're not a real foodie unless you own a
couple dozen field guides, because at least for the foreseeable future that's
the only way you're ever going to get to try a lot of the best foods available
in your area.

------
avar
Related question since this is an Israeli foundation. What do jews and muslims
think about the kosher / halal-ness of eating cultured pork if there was such
a thing?

I.e. do they consider the animal itself dirty, or its inherent genetic
structure?

~~~
Eric_WVGG
I’m sure there’s no consensus at all. Rabbis have spent millennia debating and
reinterpreting their scripture.

I once heard that it’s possible to make kosher pork — the literal proscription
against pork is that Jews are not to eat from animals who have a cloven hoof.
But if you take a baby pig, suspend it from a harness, feed it to maturation
but never let it walk on the ground, its hooves will remain uncloven and thus
it’s fair game.

You will find many, many (probably most) rabbis who disagree with this
particular conclusion, but the point is that the whole culture has a
fascinating legacy of picking apart the rules that would make any lawyer
proud.

~~~
ars
> But if you take a baby pig, suspend it from a harness, feed it to maturation
> but never let it walk on the ground, its hooves will remain uncloven and
> thus it’s fair game.

What???????

You got it backwards! Pig is not kosher because it doesn't chew it's cud.

To be kosher you NEED split hooves.

> but the point is that the whole culture has a fascinating legacy of picking
> apart the rules that would make any lawyer proud.

That part's quite true. The more intense and involved the study the better, so
do not think of this as "loopholes" but rather as study to the smallest
detail.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
huh! well yeah it was a pretty daffy story, thank you for correcting me.

------
pcmaffey
Slaughter has never been the negative side of raising animals. It is in fact,
the slaughtering of an animal that teaches us to respect it, to honor its life
given, and ensure that we provide as humane a life and death as possible.

Distancing ourselves from the hard work of growing, raising, and killing our
own food creates an enormous gap in cultural awareness about where our life
energy comes from. This is clearly seen with the impact of industrial farming.

Widening the gap IMO is the wrong direction to go. Of course, we will go there
because we are human and we can. But I fear for the consequences as we
distance ourselves further and further from the natural world.

Garbage in, garbage out.

~~~
sebular
I'm pretty sure most people would disagree with you. People who choose
vegetarianism for conscientious reasons don't do it because we've distanced
ourselves from our sources of meat, they do it because we slaughter and
torture an unthinkably large number of living beings in order to get a chicken
bacon sandwich.

Some people lament what you're talking about, and they do it equally for
raising livestock as well as growing and harvesting our own fruits and
vegetables. That growing distance between us and our food production is
certainly an issue, but it's the infinitely lesser one compared to the
violence of meat consumption.

Given that humans crave the types of food they crave, I don't see lab-grown
meat as anything but a pure win for science, humanity, and all living beings.
In my mind, it's an achievement on par with fire, the wheel, electricity,
antibiotics/sterilization, and the internet.

~~~
pcmaffey
I certainly understand this POV, as I once held it, until living and working
on an off-grid farm.

My point is that the abhorrence towards animal slaughter has more to do with
the industrialized process, and the poor treatment of animals because of mass
market demands, then the fact that animals are killed. Animals can be raised
and killed in a humane way, and doing so teaches us about the natural cycle of
life, a reminder of our mortality.

We can certainly choose to abstain from that cycle. But as you say, humans
crave the foods they crave. I will venture a guess and say that lab-grown meat
will not satisfy that craving. Like GMO tomatoes, it may appear all the same,
but beneath the shiny appearance of a solution will be a vacuous gap in
substance. We can erode our "food pyramid" with cheap, artificial solutions,
or we can do the real work of (1) creating sustainable, humane food systems,
and (2) educating people about healthy diets and thus curbing the global
craving for flesh.

Lastly, what will happen to all the chickens, pigs, cows, etc of the world?
Like horses, they will become domestic novelties. People like me will raise
them and give them a good life, while their world population shrinks to
negligence, until eventually, they are forgotten to extinction, but for the
symbolic names of their imitation meat. "Chicken" will be a brand, an
algorithm that only slightly differs from the "Steak" algorithm.

------
XorNot
As someone who feels he should be vegetarian but is ultimately not into
vegetables enough to actually do it, I'm all for this. Put it supermarkets and
it'll be the only meat I'll buy.

~~~
necessity
Eat at a good vegetarian restaurant, you'd be surprised with the amount of
tasty non-salad dishes that can be made without meat. Where I used to eat
there were fantastic lasagnas, various kinds of pasta with various sauces, and
some classical "meat-centered" dishes with seasoned "soy beef" to emulate meat
-- which of course comes nowhere near real beef, but isn't all that bad. Lots
of salad too, of course. If you're lactose intolerant then you'd probably have
to cook your own dishes using lactose-free dairy products. If you're vegan
than I wouldn’t know what to recommend.

~~~
SwellJoe
Most reasonably large cities have at least a couple of really good vegetarian
restaurants, and some have a couple of really good vegan restaurants. Asian
restaurants are historically the strongest on this front, but, I've seen an
upsurge in the past decade in much broader options (I've been vegetarian,
occasional vegan, for 22 years).

But, almost any Asian restaurant has tofu options on the menu that are
probably vegan and are probably delicious. I'm back to traveling full-time (I
did it for four years in a motorhome, and have hit the road again in a travel
trailer), in very remote locations, and small towns almost _never_ have vegan
or vegetarian restaurants. So, I go for Chinese, when I want to go out.
There's nearly always at least a couple of delicious options on the menu.
Honestly, I would choose tofu over meat in almost any Asian dish. It's just a
nicer texture when prepared well and picks up the flavor of the dish.

~~~
vidarh
The "almost any Asian restaurant" _really_ depends on where you are.
Especially Chinese, because of the massive regional adaptations of Chinese
food (e.g. the same "Chinese" dishes in California, London, Oslo or Beijing
can look and taste like entirely different dishes - I still find the constant
presence of oranges in a lot of "California Chinese" food hilarious, for
example).

I live London, and while I have no interest in vegetarian food, the few times
I've been out with vegetarians to Chinese restaurants in London for example,
it's been an exercise in frustration to the point that I won't do it again,
because many places you'll ask if disk x is vegetarian, get told it is, order
it and find out that it's full of shrimp or covered in fish powder, or cooked
in animal fats, and when you bring it up with them they're confused and appear
to not understand that this means the dish isn't vegetarian... I've been to
Chinese restaurants where finding _any_ vegetarian dishes other than plain
boiled rice has been almost impossible.

(as for tofu.... I'd rather starve; I can stomach it in small quantities in
addition to something else, but I can't handle it as a meat replacement)

~~~
SwellJoe
Yes, I've heard this is true in some non-US locations. In the US, you
generally only need to worry about eggs and fish sauce, or beef/chicken broth
in soups, and I've rarely (maybe never) had trouble getting a vegetarian or
vegan meal in a Chinese restaurant anywhere in the US, Canada, or Mexico. I do
often ask for clarification about whether a dish has fish sauce or eggs, and
if I can get it prepared without, but I've never had a dish appear with shrimp
that didn't advertise it had shrimp; given the price of seafood in the US,
restaurants like to brag when a dish has seafood in it. I also never order
soups at unfamiliar restaurants unless they are explicitly labeled as
vegetarian or vegan.

Thai and Vietnamese restaurants are more likely to have fish sauce in almost
everything, though they're usually happy to make a vegetarian version. Korean
restaurants seem tricky, as there's almost never anything vegan on the menu,
but bibimbop can be ordered without meat or egg, even if they don't offer a
tofu version. But, none are as consistently easy to order from as Chinese.

I've been told that when traveling abroad, in some regions in Asia (including
some parts of India), saying, "I'm Buddhist" will help the wait staff and chef
understand what you mean when you say "vegetarian". I don't know exactly where
or whether this is entirely accurate, since millions of Chinese are Buddhist
and not vegetarian. I've never used this one weird trick for getting an actual
vegetarian meal, but I've heard it from a few older vegetarians who have
traveled a lot.

------
jacquesm
Chicken Little comes home to roost.

[http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002)

------
yeukhon
I am not a cook / chef, so I don't know exactly how to translate my
understanding to proper words here. A lot of people prefer fresh meat over
frozen meat for the true flavor of the meat. The meat produced from a lamb
running around all day vs from a lamb confined in a tiny space are very
different. If you just want meat like cheap McDonald hamburgers, cultured meat
is probably okay (assuming the scientists are able to add taste to cultured
meat, last I read a few years back they said the meat taste like plastic
[1]...). Also looking at the meat produced in the lab, the meat look gross...

[1]:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/08/lab_grown_meat_will_never_taste_right_it_s_a_waste_of_time.html)

~~~
rch
Some of the most desirable traits of beef could actually be easier to
reproduce in a controlled environment. I could imagine that once perfected,
steaks produced in this way might be exceptionally tender.

~~~
yeukhon
Ah tender is the word. I am not sure, we have to see. My gut says there will
still be some difference in tenderness and in the flavor of the meat.

------
NH_2
I get that lab meat is largely considered a transcendent technological
solution to the ethical dilemma of slaughtering livestock, but at the same
time I can't help but think that this dooms chickens and cows to obsoletion
and eventual extinction.

~~~
sfilipov
I think the demand for real chicken/beef will go down but there always will be
people who buy "organic", "real", etc.

~~~
Falling3
I'd love to see existing meat subsidies moved to either vegetables or lab-
grown meat. That would certainly help to further shrink the market of people
who need the "real" stuff.

------
Paul-ish
Will the lab grown meats have the same nutritional value as meat from animals?

~~~
onion2k
Lab grown meat _is_ meat. It's chemically identical to what you get from an
animal, but it's grown in a Petri dish instead of a cow. The nutritional value
is _exactly_ the same.

~~~
dangrossman
The "meat" you buy at the store is a hunk of muscle, fat, blood vessels,
blood, nerves and connective tissue, and it's saturated in the myriad of
vitamins, nutrients and other substances consumed or created by a living
being.

The "meat" created by this reactor is just a pile of muscle fiber. They
extract a single kind of stem cell from an animal, coax it into becoming a
muscle fiber, and grow lots of those fibers. Just muscle, fed by only what's
in the gel it's grown on, no fat, no vasculature, no connective tissue, and
without any of the substances an animal produces in other types of cells.

It's not just missing a lot, either. It also has at least one thing added that
"meat" doesn't necessarily: antibiotics. There's no immune system in a hunk of
replicated muscle fiber, nor is this lab currently growing the tissue in a
sterile environment, so it _has_ to be treated with antibiotics.

If you were to print a nutrition label for a pound of meat from the grocery
store, and a pound of what this lab grows, not much on those labels would
match up. Even the protein content: muscle fiber forms protein through
exercise, but this slab of cells in a dish has never walked to a trough. How
are they working around that? Watch for their patent filings.

~~~
vidarh
> Even the protein content: muscle fiber forms protein through exercise, but
> this slab of cells in a dish has never walked to a trough.

Protein, _in the form of muscle fibre_ is formed following exercise as a
result of signalling triggered by the breakdown of muscle fibre. Exercise is
only responsible as the trigger. There's no conceptual reason why we can't
emulate that part of the process too.

The question is if we need it - our body needs to amino acids, and they at
least have been shown to be present in similar quantities in in vitro grown
muscle cells. So if this "meat" can be made to taste and feel sufficiently
like "natural" meat, then there may be no point to simulating the growth of
"real" meat (which would also e.g. require a simulated circulatory system).

------
richsherwood
This is great. Currently I cook a lot with seitan which is great for a meat
substitute but boy do I miss juicy beef burgers sometimes.

------
erikpukinskis
In the long run, I think fake meat (both the in vitro stuff and the industrial
stuff) has serious disadvantages over foods properly prepared from whole
ingredients whose ultimate form happens to be vegan.

If that's true, I figure why not go straight for the endgame and help people
get their hands on that stuff. Lots of space for innovation there.

~~~
Falling3
I'm interested in this from the animal rights perspective. I don't doubt that
a breakthrough in this area would help us bring about a drastic decrease in
animals slaughtered for consumption so I welcome it.

------
ilaksh
They don't mention how they get the fetal bovine serum used to grow the meat.

------
ars
This announcement is a little early. They should wait till they actually start
working on it.

Or maybe this is really actually a call for volunteers to work with them.

------
FrankenPC
There's so much to good meat: fats, amino acids, natural flavors, curing, etc.
I suppose to the McNugget crowd, this will be awesome.

~~~
SwellJoe
Antibiotics (and the antibiotic resistant bacteria we now enjoy because of the
ocean of antibiotics used in meat farming), hormones, environmental
destruction on a scale only matched by the fossil fuels industry, and
increased risk of a number of cancers and other age-related diseases.

The vast majority of meat consumed is not "good meat", by your definition, and
never will be. Consumption of good meat by all the meat eaters of the world is
not ecologically or economically feasible. It is irresponsible to pretend that
it is.

It's worth discussing what makes "good meat" good, but it's not useful to
imagine a world where several billion people can eat organic grass-fed beef
every day, because that way lies destruction for all of us.

~~~
FrankenPC
I didn't say any of that. You and another commentator are stuffing words into
my mout...er comment.

A more relevant point would be along the lines: Why bother? I'm 99% vegan
myself. Not because I care about animal suffering (which I do) or because I
care about the impact on the planet and global warming (which I also care
about), but because I LOVE non-meat foods. They are cheap, easy to acquire,
and delicious.

This obsession with making fake meat seems like a terrible idea to begin with.
It's like saying we all really want meat. We all don't because it's a terrible
addiction and obsession.

------
allencoin
I'm looking forward to trying the real-life implementation of "ChickieNobs"
from Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

------
dennisgorelik
If artificial chicken meat is successful - it would dramatically reduce
chickens population.

------
webkike
But what about the actual shape of the cut of meat? I doubt if I buy a
cultured thigh of chicken I'd get it with the skin and bones, for some reason,
although my biotechnical knowledge is lacking. These things are essential for
cooking so a future where all out meat is literally just large slabs of flesh
would be unenjoyable.

~~~
gohrt
That's a narrow view of cooking and ejoyable.

~~~
webkike
I disagree. It's certainly not the only thing I cook, but I do cook it a lot,
and the skin and bone are necessary in many of my recipes to make the dish as
flavorful as possible.

------
Crito
I am the descendant of a countlessly long line of meat eaters. I'll stick with
the slaughter version, it has worked well thus far.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

~~~
SwellJoe
You're also the descendant of a long line of either oppressors or oppressed
(white in America=long line of oppressors). You aren't using that to excuse
stealing land from your Mexican neighbor, today, I would hope. So, why use
that as a reason to continue the environmental and ethical disaster that is
eating meat?

If you want to keep eating meat because you just don't care, say so. Don't
excuse it with "the way my great granddaddy did it", because there are plenty
of things about the way great granddaddy did it that are morally repugnant to
us today. Unless you are also supporting slavery/segregation, returning to no
legal interracial or LGBTQ marriage, a world without child labor laws, a world
with no vote for women, etc. you really shouldn't use that excuse.

~~~
necessity
>the environmental and ethical disaster that is eating meat?

I'd say there is arguably no environmental _disaster_ in meat production, and
even if there is, the mere act of eating meat does not imply in it, it would
depend on the amount of meat eaten per person and the production scale
required to supply that. The ethics of it depends on who you're talking with.
Your position is not "the righteous one", it might be "the right thing to do
according to X school of thought", but never an absolute ethical truth.

~~~
Falling3
If we have a healthy, satisfying alternative - the ethical question of "Is it
acceptable to kill or harm individuals unnecessarily?" has a very clear answer
no matter who you're talking with.

~~~
necessity
"unnecessarily" -> it is already unnecessary to eat meat, thus unnecessary to
kill animals. Anyone can live a perfectly healthy life being a vegetarian,
it's even cheaper depending where you live. Thus, by your logic the question
"is eating meat nowadays ethically wrong?" should have "a very clear answer no
matter who you're talking with". Which obviously is not true.

You mention "healthy, _satisfying_ alternative". You accept people eating meat
nowadays because according to you it is more satisfying than eating the
current alternatives (even though it's not necessary!), so you should always
accept the eating of meat (or hunting of animals) as long as people _want_ it
over whatever alternative exists.

Furthermore, people will always think differently. What is ethically wrong to
you is not to me and vice-versa.

~~~
Falling3
Show me a person who genuinely believes killing others unnecessarily is
acceptable and we've got much bigger problems than the ethics of meat. The
problem isn't getting people to agree with moral axioms. It's getting people
to be consistent with their application of them.

