
Engineering the $325,000 Burger - swampthing
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/science/engineering-the-325000-in-vitro-burger.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all
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sethbannon
As someone who doesn't eat meat for ethical reasons, I couldn't be more
excited by the potential of this.

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raldi
As someone who eats meat all the time, I also couldn't be more excited.

First this stuff will be an inferior meat substitute.

Then it'll be an equivalent meat substitute.

Then it'll improve upon nature itself, and we'll be eating things that taste
ten times better than bacon, and fifty times better than steak, and it will
all be without a twinge of guilt.

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cheapsteak
Eagerly anticipating the Aspartame of meat. 2 pounds of bacon, 0 calories.

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mortenjorck
Not really an analogous comparison.

Aspartame is a more complex molecule synthesized to mimic certain properties
of monosaccharides. Many would say it is inferior in taste to what it purports
to replace.

Cultured beef, however, should be more or less the same cocktail of organic
compounds that make up a dead cow. How these compounds are mixed, the
proportions to which they appear, and what shapes they take are the
interesting variables here, and could, with enough control, make something
"better than real."

I'd draw instead the comparison to synthetic diamonds. Same stuff, potentially
unnaturally flawless results.

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mattzito
My concern with this is the health or nutritional profile of the engineered
meat. Technology is great, but we've also found out years later that an
"innovation" is really a step backwards health-wise.

So, for example, the move from grass-fed to corn-fed beef allowed for vastly
greater production in a much more efficient fashion, and even (for most
people's palates) resulted in a better tasting meat. 20+ years later, we're
finding out that the environmental cost of factory farm meat is much higher
than we thought, and the corn-fed beef is much worse for you than grass-fed
beef.

20 years from the meat cubes hitting the shelves, are we going to find out
that cells grown on a straight glucose+vitamin mix are missing some
micronutrient that helps our brain function correctly, or protects the gut
against cancer?

Our bodies have had a very long time to adapt to certain models of nutrition,
and when we tamper with them, we often find unintended consequences.

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haberman
> Dr. Post, who has conducted some informal taste tests, said that even
> without any fat, the tissue “tastes reasonably good.”

I feel like the lesson of Tesla is that the way to sell new technology is to
make it _better_ than the status quo in some way. "It's reasonably good" will
sell to a few environmentally-conscious people, but it's better if something
is genuinely appealing in some way other than ethics.

It's easier to sell the carrot than the stick.

~~~
damoncali
Read _The Innovators Solution_ (or Dilemma). There is more than one way to
skin a cat.

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kbenson
Interesting choice of words given the subject.

In this case I guess you skin the cat by growing cat-meat in a dish, so you
_don't_ skin any cats.

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mjs
Glad this is getting closer! Aside from the moral issues, running sunlight,
water and feed through a cow is such an inefficient and inelegant way of
producing meat...

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mattzito
Running grass through a cow is a remarkably efficient way of converting
sunlight-capturing grass into calories we can actually digest. At least in the
US, much of the scrubland can't support crops without intensive irrigation and
fertilizer, but they can support cattle.

If you take away the fundamental question of eating meat, it's the _way_
cattle are raised today that's the problem.

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ams6110
Additionally, the meat of grass-fed beef is much better for you than corn-fed
(actually I believe the real difference is in the fat).

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duopixel
I know this sounds repulsive, but I think a good shortcut to lab grown meat
would be similar to KFC's urban myth of "headless organisms fed by tubes" [1].

If you give it a bit of thought, it might be more ethical raising brainless
and senseless organisms for human consumption. It also solves many sanitary
problems in farms (antibiotics, crowded living conditions) and it allows us to
give pasture lands back to nature.

Assuming that such meat was demonstrably safer for humans to consume, why
would we choose to keep eating "nature's animals"? It's taboo what keeps us
from doing this.

<http://www.snopes.com/food/tainted/kfc.asp>

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phil_s_stein
I suspect this idea has occurred to the people working on this and it is not
as easy as you assume - that there are problems in execution (so to speak) of
this shortcut. Once the lab-in-a-test-tube thing is solved, it is a much
cleaner and more elegant solution.

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lifeformed
So who gets to eat it at the event?

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jmilkbal
I have a lot of mixed feelings about developments like this. On one hand, I'll
tell people that food for me is about quality and flavor. I'm not opposed to
pink slime for what it is, but because it just makes for a poor result. I'm in
favor of this on a sustainability level, but very opposed on a quality
level—not consistency and reliable textures and taste, but that sort of
unquantifiable property that things exude when they just feel right. That's
quality and it's just not going to come from a lab, in my opinion. Meat isn't
just about texture and a taste, it's about /terroir/. Meat can be raised
sustainably and humanely, it just isn't as appealing to your local food
conglomerate looking to work on economies of scale. We can all eat /better/,
live /better/ and be /better/ without all the trade-offs if we'll put a little
more thought into our lives and a have a little more moderation of
consumption. Oh, and waste less.

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StavrosK
Eh, I can give up a bit of "unquantifiable property" if it means that living
things don't have to die for it.

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smsm42
You mean "living things that look cute on pictures"? Cell cultures are alive
too, and have to die for you to consume them.

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fchollet
Are you seriously trying to compare individual cells and fully grown mammals?
Or are you just trying to be contrarian.

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smsm42
It said "living things". If it said "sentient things", that'd be different.

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ekurutepe
Can a vegetarian eat meat if it's grown in lab a dish?

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cwzwarich
Depends on the reason you're vegetarian. If it's for ethical reasons, then
they probably would. If it's for health reasons, then probably not. If it's
for environmental reasons, then it would depend on the environmental impact of
in vitro meat.

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pdog
Don't forget taste -- some vegetarians simply don't like the taste of meat.

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staunch
And some find it gross to eat animal flesh.

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warfangle
Those poor nuts and fruit, with all their flesh being eaten :( eat a cow today
to save them!

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DigitalSea
This is actually an exciting and much needed development for the meat industry
to be honest. Everyone is quite content eating highly processed to the point
they're questionably even meat products like salami already and the effects of
farming cattle for meat like horrible conditions for the animals, high costs
of feeding the cattle, transportation and the environmentally damaging effects
of said practices.

I wouldn't have a problem eating manufactured meat if it looked the same and
tasted the same, if not better (which what seems to be promised). I already
eat Spam and salami, what's one more processed product in my food arsenal?

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return0
I wonder why he had to be funded privately. This seems to me as high priority
research.

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smsm42
If he'd being funded - which seems to be the case - what't the problem with it
being private? I can understand calls for public funding where the need is
there but the private funds to serve it for one reason or another are not -
but here the funds are supplied already, I see no problem.

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mjs
I'm guessing the OP means: given the high stakes (environmental, financial,
moral, and so on), why aren't governments more involved in this research?
(They're already regulating and subsidising farming in pretty much every
country of the world.)

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illuminate
"given the high stakes (environmental, financial, moral, and so on), why
aren't governments more involved in this research"

In the US? The beef industry has a strong enough lobby.

~~~
return0
Yes that's my guess too. Note that the lab is in Netherlands.

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gfodor
I'm bullish.

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nano111
I currently eat meat but I would rather not eat this... they already inject
all kinds of stuff in "real" meat... I can't imagine what they would do to a
completely engineered meat..

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jtchang
Please let there be some ahi tuna in the product development pipeline after
that. They wouldn't be going extinct if they weren't so damn tasty.

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chrisvineup
The amount of vivisection that will take place to bring this genetically
modified monstrosity to market makes it too unethical to bear for me.

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ScotterC
I can't believe in the entire article they didn't mention who would be eating
the 5 ounce burger. Who gets to try it!?

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nevinera
I thought that sounded familiar..

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1402241/>

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bickfordb
Would this reduce cancers with correlated animal protein consumption?

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dmourati
pass

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mnml_
I wouldn't beta test it

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zzzeek
I'd be super happy about this.

Except if Monsanto took it over. Then we'd be paying license fees to go to
McDonalds.

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csense
The company or companies that make this work commercially will probably have
patents out the wazoo. And manufacturers that use their technology will have
to pay them license fees, which would probably be included in the price of the
product.

It has the potential to be economically much more efficient than growing
livestock and massively increase the production of meat. The article doesn't
talk much about the potential economic impact, focusing instead on
environmental and ethical concerns, but considering the amount of land that is
currently devoted to livestock grazing that would be able to be put to other
uses when it becomes obsolete...it really is a game-changer that will make the
human race much better off.

The people who make it work will deserve the billions they'll earn.

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zzzeek
Did you take my comment to mean that I'm opposed to this technology or that I
would actually expect consumers to pay for patents directly? It was merely a
very poorly received joke, downmod away as humor is really not appreciated on
hacker news, but at least know that it was sarcasm.

