

In-vitro hamburger? "We have the technology." - pg
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/invitro_meat

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danteembermage
I think an interesting market for this product would be religiously observant
vegetarians. If killing an animal is morally repugnant to you, perhaps eating
the protein byproduct of a bacterial culture wouldn't rub you the wrong way?

As prices come down to near hamburger level, I would be willing to change to
vat grown to spare cows the feedlot unpleasantness they are exposed to now. Of
course this would reduce the worldwide population of cattle, so its a moral
judgment whether a smaller number leading better lives is preferable--is
welfare measured by the sum or average--I'd lean towards the smaller and
better camp to the tune of about 15 cents a pound.

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icky
I think we're going to see more and more advances like this where the chief
obstacle to adoption is social, not technical. (This came up a couple weeks
ago during a discussion of self-driving motor vehicles).

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chaostheory
reminds me of a scene in Neuromancer:

"Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily at his steak,
reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around in the
rich sauce, finally abandoning the whole thing.

'Jesus,' Molly said, her own plate empty, 'gimme that. You know what this
costs?' She took his plate. 'They gotta raise a whole animal for years and
then they kill it. This isn't vat stuff.' She forked a mouthful up and
chewed."

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carterschonwald
What I think will be very interesting is when the technology get sophisticated
enough that its cost effective to grow the in-vitro meat in various shapes and
distributions of mak I mean, cubes are all well and good for storage,
transport and generic consumption, but if you had the ability to specify the
proportions and distribution of various tissue types and whether you want say
steak shape versus paper thin (for that crazy pastry with meat layered in
you've been hankering for), THAT will be awesome.

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RK
Now we can finally live ethically sound cannibalistic lifestyles, not having
to subsist on that horrible Hufu!

Maybe my new company can sell "Man in a Can".

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tocomment
I think the most important benefit is the removing animal cruelty from the
equation.

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keating
The trick is what to grow it on. Previous lab meat experiments used fetal calf
serum.

Engineering meat directly on a large scale is probably going to happen before
a significant percentage of people ethically convert to animal-free
lifestyles. It would make a huge difference in human-perpetrated cruelty, as
the U.S. currently slaughters 10 billion land animals and around 15 billion
aquatic animals (not counting by-catch) every year.

However, general consensus among farm animal rescues/sanctuaries is that egg
and milk operations are the cruellest, moreso than beef. Thus, contrary to
popular belief, eating steak while avoiding milk and eggs puts more of a dent
into animal cruelty than becoming an ovo-lacto vegetarian.

Another common misconception is that fish is healthy; due to environmental
pollution, however, fish now frequently contains unsafe levels of mercury and
other heavy metals; plus DDT, dioxin, PCBs, etc. This is due to concentration
as you go up the food chain, where the fish that humans eat have several
orders of magnitude more contaminants than the water they swim in.

DHA and EPA, the Omega-3 fatty acids that are present in certain types of fish
oil, are also now available in oil from marine algae. E.g.
<http://www.water4.net/> (this brand has no discernible taste, unlike some
others). Brain food is probably a good idea for hackers.

