Ok, after lurking here for many years, I finally decided to sign up to reply to some of the questions posted in reply to this topic.
How does taste/tasting something work? Food/beverages have some active ingredients in them (like coffee has caffeine), which are recognized by specialized proteins present on surface of taste cells. These receptors are called “taste receptors”. Once a receptor is stimulated by a certain active ingredient, it activates downstream signaling pathways that eventually tells the brain to accept (you like it) or reject (dislike) the taste. Not all taste cells have all taste receptors. If you do a google search for image of taste cells on tongue, it will show you what the locations are.
What this company is trying to find out is what ingredient to use to produce the flavor, so that they get the reaction they want from the taste buds, i.e., you like it. What they are possibly trying to optimize is how much of it to use in a certain volume of beverage, how much after-taste it leaves, etc.
Now coming to the part of HEK cells; indeed these cells are from an embryonic kidney. But, there is no need to keep killing babies for it. I don’t know if you are aware, but ordinarily cells do not survive long after they have taken out of their source (body). TO make them able to undergo proliferation indefinitely, certain changes are made to them. Once done, these cells can now be maintained in the laboratory for ever. So, it can well be the case that this embryo did not come to term for natural reasons, or aborted spontaneously, miscarried, etc, and once the cells were taken from the kidney of that fetus, they were transformed to make them able to proliferate for ever under laboratory conditions. This could well have happened prior to Roe. v. Wade.
Now to answer the Q: is there dead baby parts in my Pepsi? NO. Absolutely not. What this company is doing is taking the HEK-293 cell LINE (after transforming the cells to make them able to divide in the lab perpetually, they are called “cell lines”), culturing them in petri dish, making them produce the taste receptors,and adding the flavor ingredient to them to see how much they are stimulated . Once they have an idea what stimulant to use and how much, those amount of stimulant goes in the Pepsi. So, the cells are used for testing only. It is like, mice are used to test dose/efficacy of drug, then they determine the amount of drug, and prescribe it for humans, does that mean there are dead mice parts in the drug? No. Similar is the case here.
Just an aside, once the HEK-293 cell line is made (i dont know when it was made, probably 20 yrs ago), there is no need to make it again. These cells grow very fast in culture and you just freeze them in small vials and take them out as you need.
There is enough reason to hate Pepsi on moral issues, but this should not be one.
It’s still hideous. The concept alone, as applied to the FOOD & BEVERAGE industry, is hideous... and that there’s no requirement of full disclosure about the testing process makes it even more hideous.