Coming soon: chicken meat without slaughter
israel21c.org
israel21c.org
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.
http://the3foragers.blogspot.com/2013/10/hen-of-woods-recipe...
Except for that I substitute the regular maple syrup for smoked maple syrup from here: http://www.sugarbobsfinestkind.com/
It's super easy, you just need a food dehydrator. For the chicken of the woods I usually just cook it with barbecue sauce and then throw it on pizza.
And with the giant puffballs I think the best way is to slice them half an inch think, first cook them down a little in a pan and then bread and fry them and treat them like chicken parm. There are some recipes here: http://www.mssf.org/cookbook/puffballs.html
For each mushroom the basic thing to know is whether it's a mushroom that takes dairy or oil. Most of them only taste good if cooked in either butter or olive oil, but not both. Also, using veggie salt instead of regular salt tends to be key for whatever reason.
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.
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.
E.g. chantarelle mushrooms are an example that is tricky [1] and where commercial cultivation is just in its very early infancy despite being an extremely attractive goal for people to cultivate because of its price.
I've not tried the ones mentioned, but I've picked maybe a couple dozen different types and their taste and texture varies so wildly that I'd not be surprised at all if some of them get close. I've tried smaller puffball varieties, and they're in any case nice.
They're also "easy" ones to learn as there's very few poisonous varieties and I believe only a few similar mushrooms you might mistake for puffballs (but if you want to pick them - or any type of mushrooms - check local advice on what to look for; a common problem with picking mushrooms given the sheer variety, is if you pick somewhere new and don't realise there are poisonous varieties you're unfamiliar with that look similar to the ones you're picking - always familiarise yourself not just with what the mushrooms you want to pick look like, but also specifically how they differ from similar poisonous ones in the area)
[1] http://www.gardenguides.com/127093-grow-chanterelle-mushroom...
Do people really need to eat that much? And they'd have to get their calories elsewhere anyway.
I suppose the nutritional value of mushrooms is quite diminished in comparison to meat though.
I gather mushrooms have a much harder time colonizing new areas than say, insects. Hopefully.
Hmm. Boletus mushrooms are much more meat-like. Also sometimes prepared as schnitzels. However, the rarity and popularity of mushroom picking makes it uncommon to have so many to eat them like that..
Calvatia Gigantea tasting like chicken?
I've eaten some we found in the wild. Not bad, but it's definitely not meat.
Most people* pick and eat mushrooms where I live, but I've yet to hear anyone say any mushroom tastes like meat.
*Except the doctors and nurses working metabolic intensive care.. :). Some people don't know how to recognize a Death-cap mushroom..
Even if you could culture a strictly seasonal product like Calvatia regularly all around the year, is not guaranteed that you could eat it every week without to slowly poisoning yourself with nickel, lead or arsenic. Chicken meat, even with its own problems, seems much safer at long term.
I.e. do they consider the animal itself dirty, or its inherent genetic structure?
That said, kosher/hallal beef "bacon" does a brisk business in NYC, so who knows.
That's not true. Meat certified by all reputable Kosher agencies in the US is slaughtered according to Jewish tradition. That's part of why it's so expensive.
I.e. isn't there a case to be made that these things should be treated more like mushrooms than chickens or pigs?
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.
While most observant Jews don't have issues with eating say Turkey Bacon or any other substitute some Jewish communities don't eat those either due to a different commandment (actually the one that today is interpreted as not mixing dairy and meat, but it has more to do with accepting customs of other cultures than that).
BTW there are probably more "Leviticans" in the US than Muslims, and for sure more than observant Jews so you don't even have to go that far to find new markets for cultured pork.
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.
Dirty? That's a really really really bad translation for not-kosher. It has nothing whatsoever to do with cleanliness.
Anyway for the purposes of this meat neither of those two options cover the topic.
The animal itself is what is kosher or not kosher. It has physical signs and those decide if it's kosher or not.
There is a second issue that something derived from something non-kosher is also not kosher.
So CO2 (for seltzer) from beer is not kosher for passover, but CO2 from combustion is, despite both being identical.
But, there is a concept of nullified, i.e. diluted. If someone non-kosher is unintentionally diluted in something kosher at a 1/60 level it becomes nullified and ignored. (So CO2 from the atmosphere is fine for passover even if it originally was from beer.)
Except, if that diluted item is considered "primary", i.e. it's something that even at a 1/60th level becomes important in the final product.
So here we have a single cell from an animal - it certainly is less than 1/60th of the final product, but since it is primary to that product, which could not exist without it, that single cell can not be diluted.
i.e. you have to start with a kosher cell.
A much more complicated question is if it's considered meat with regard to mixing meat and dairy. But the question is academic only since it would be rabbinically considered like meat because it looks like meat and you should not create a misleading situation.
And from the length of this reply you can start to understand why Judaism is such an academic and logically oriented religion with such an enormous quantity of scholarly books. You start with God-given unprovable axioms and generate everything else with logic, one item building upon the next, all ultimately sourced from the Torah (but you need some serious knowledge to be able to trace each law). It's also how Judaism has survived so long - using this method you can extend the law to cover novel situations.
o...k....
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.
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.
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.
And this is a point of view that other people do not share, or that is not a problem for most people, and that often lead to the search for twisted, ilogical and even surrealist shorcuts to circunvent the problem.
... soy and lattices are living beings also (as the hundred of thousands of species of plants, fungi and insects that lived in the meadows that are now sterile soy plant highways and that we poisoned in order to get a tofu sandwich).
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.
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)
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.
I'm not vegetarian but I don't eat 100% meat all the time. A former boss of mine ate only meat no vegetables at all, literally no vegetables no tomato on a burger not the little cup of coleslaw, nothing!
I find it strange how these days many people, not saying you are, eat mainly meat and very little vegetables. And then people who eat only vegetables and some )vegan) are even more extreme.
My mother in her 70s said when she was young her family ate vegetables all week and had a roast on Sunday which was common these days they'd be nearly vegetarians. Nearly every member of her family now has diabetes so I guess diet wasn't the cause.
It seems like society is evolving into two extremes which to me raises a lot of red flags. Meanwhile I eat a variety of vegetables and eat meat a few times per week mainly turkey or chicken very little red meat.
[1]: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
I can't remember exactly, but I think it was Chamath Palihapitiya that funded a startup that does lab-grown meat.
The fascinating thing is that they realized it is so hard to differentiate the lab-grown meat from actual slaughtered meat. I'll be right back and find that article.
Edit: I can't find the article and I don't know who owns that startup. Most of the sources I find are from link where I am not sure if they are reliable:
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/05/15/impossible-burger-our-test-tu... http://www.techinsider.io/impossible-foods-cheeseburger-back...
Technology marching on is dooming us to becoming obsolete. Already there are people who are effectively unemployable. Once this is extended to the majority.. it won't be pretty. Life of leisure has driven even high-status people bonkers. Once it is a mass phenomenon, it's not going to be pretty.
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.
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).
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.
Or maybe this is really actually a call for volunteers to work with them.
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.
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.
Fats, amino acids, natural flavors, curing — those are the next steps. This is a first step.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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.
While I understand your statement, I read it more as he was continuing to eat meat for the health benefits, not moral ones. Of course you could then say "If all your ancestors smoked cigarettes would you too..."
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.
As you may know, human population is growing exponentially and has been doing so for a century. To meet the demand for meat, we have grown the poultry and cattle's population accordingly, increasing the energy, water and food spendings uphill (after all, they too need to be nourished). Especially in the US, to maintain low prices, those who set the customer price (such as McDonalds) have been forced to rationalise the whole chain of production, putting a lot of stress and liability on farmers.
However, the human population is still accelerating tremendously, and meat is still among the most costly food per kilogram we eat, not in terms of money spent by the customer, but in terms of energy wasted along the whole chain.
Fishing has a similar crisis; regulation became necessary to maintain fish population to a sustainable level, and avoid having fish locations simply disappear.
At a fundamental level, the reason life can thrive on earth is energy from the sun and the Earth converted to plants which are consumed by animals and fungi. Every step of consumption between plants and humans is wasted energy, given that the planet's energy is not limitless, and that we humans must tap that supply carefully if we ever hope to colonize another planet.
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.
I am satisfied with the land I have. But let's not kid ourselves, the only reason wars of conquest are uncommon today is because the cost typically exceeds the potential reward.
> "ethical disaster that is eating meat?"
I cannot derive sympathy for food from my value system. Unless you are prepared to impose your value system on me by force (in your value system, is that so different from wars of conquest?), that isn't going to change.
> "If you want to keep eating meat because you just don't care, say so."
Didn't I just?
> "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."
Do you find that meat eaters usually back down when you compare them to racists and homophobes?
I don't. I've never seen somebody become a vegan in response to this line of rhetoric, which could just as well be applied to any tradition. I am sure you must have some traditions of your own; will you abandon them if I tell you that racism is also a tradition?
It's not effective persuasive rhetoric, so what is it? It's combative rhetoric which is meant to shame people into silence.
You made an appeal to tradition. I don't believe tradition is sufficient cause to not acknowledge something is damaging the environment on a massive scale. Fossil fuels are also a tradition (though a short lived one), but it doesn't make it "right".
> "I cannot drive sympathy for food from my value system."
Then how do you feel about climate change? Because that is part of this ethical equation, as well. Billions of people eating meat is comparable to billions of people driving cars and burning coal for electricity.
> "Do you find that meat eaters usually back down when you compare them to racists and homophobes?"
Actually, I usually find that I am shouted down or voted down whenever suggesting that eating meat is unethical. I don't expect meat eaters to back down, as they are in the huge majority and will never have trouble finding support among almost any group.
Worst case scenario is we enjoy it while we've got it, then miss it when we don't.
And precisely what is the sustainability of lab meat? What makes you think lab meat will be more efficient that raised meat?
Yuval Noah Harari, on the second video (ca. 0:40) states the reasons why he thinks cultured meat will have a smaller ecological footprint. He says: "When you don't have to raise an entire cow in order to get a steak, when you don't have to raise an entire chicken to get a schnitzel, you just need this particular piece of meat, these particular cells, it reduces considerably the amount of water, the amount of fuel, the amount of nutrients that you have to invest in it, and also the amount of pollution that you are creating."