Posted on 05/01/2014 12:05:27 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
In a nondescript hotel ballroom last month at the South by Southwest Interactive festival, Andras Forgacs offered a rare glimpse at the sci-fi future of food.
Before an audience of tech-industry types, Forgacs produced a plate of small pink wafers -- "steak chips," he called them -- and invited people up for a taste. But these were no ordinary snacks: Instead of being harvested from a steer, they had been grown in a laboratory from tiny samples of animal tissue.
One taster's verdict on this Frankenmeat? Not bad, actually.
"It was delicious. It tasted like a thin piece of beef jerky," said Michael Wang, a program manager in Washington. "I would have never thought it wasn't real meat."
Forgacs is co-founder and CEO of Modern Meadow, a young company that is developing lab-engineered meat and leather products, also known as "cultured," "in vitro" or "test-tube" meat. He is among a new breed of youthful entrepreneurs who are applying tech-startup principles -- innovation, efficiency, data-driven processes -- to address the growing challenges of global food production.
"Once you start to see food as technology, as a form of hardware, you start to ask, why can't food get better?" asked Rob Rhinehart, CEO of Rosa Labs, a nutritional-science startup based in Los Angeles. "But there's a lot of disagreement about what our products are. Is it fake? Is it real?"(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at edition.cnn.com ...
I guess the senior citizens may have a chance of dodging the soylet green vats now...
Test tube steak washed down by a nice Guatamalan Bergundy.
Yum.
Does life get any better than this?
I wonder what this is supposed to prove, other than that they can grow bovine muscle cells in a lab.
Cells grown in the lab are fed with medium containing 10% fetal bovine serum (FBS). FBS is collected from the fetuses from slaughtered cows. Within the scientific community, there is some discussion of the ethics of collecting this material. I believe that it is justified on the basis that after the mother is slaughtered, the fetus becomes unconscious and presumably does not feel the collection process. (I won’t go into details of how it is done.)
In any case, to grow up cells in the quantities necessary to commercialize vat-grown meat, it would take vast quantities of FBS. Being a limited commodity, FBS is rather expensive. Furthermore, I don’t see its availability increasing much. Any lab-grown meat would be quite expensive. Might as well save the time, effort, and money and just eat the cows.
Not saying the collection process is right.
I just want to point out that the people mostly likely finding this offensive - cruelty in how the unborn calf is treated and the possible pain it might endure - are very likely the same people that have no problem with human abortions.
To be fair, I have met plenty of scientists who are perfectly aware of the facts of fetal development and yet have no trouble with abortion. OTOH, the ones who do have trouble with abortion are the ones most likely to be concerned over humane treatment for animal fetuses. There are actually specific protocols for euthanizing animal fetuses, designed to cause as little pain and distress to the animal as possible. If abortionists were required to use those same techniques when killing human fetuses, they'd probably complain more loudly than they complain about having to comply with the same health and safety standards that regulate medical clinics.
I dunno. Growing tissue in test-tubes seems awfully slow and expensive compared to the Soylent Corporation's process.
It sure makes a good cover story, though.
If we start by ignoring the population control crowd, we’d find the “science” is already in place to feed the world.
If not for political oppression of people and technology, we have the means to feed them all.
Please tell me you are joking? Test tube meat is the new world order not scientific advancement.
Knowing the FDA, it will become against the law to properly label this crap.
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