Lab-grown meat might be only 6 months away
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Even more speculatively, I wonder if the nutrient medium could be produced from other kitchen scraps? That's basically what animals were kept for in the past.
Aside, it sounds like efforts are focused on replicating pork/beef. It seems like some kind of fish might be easier, since texture is less of an issue, but I guess that's not what the US palate demands.
Additionally, beef is a good target ecologically speaking. Fish and birds are much more efficient at energy conversion, so there's a much larger margin of energy and material savings to be had with beef. As yet even another bonus, I suspect the ratio of edible meat to body mass in beef is much lower than in fish.
Maybe. It depends on the extent to which high-end beef consumers are paying for the direct experience (taste, texture, mouth feel, etc) versus other things.
For example, consider the scam that is high-end speaker cable. People pay a lot of extra money not for real quality, but for imagined quality, exclusivity, and brand association. The same thing definitely goes on with wine and cheese, and I'd suspect some beef purchase will be like that, too.
People take this and make burgers out of it, not because it makes a good burger (it doesn't), but because it is expensive. (See Vegas)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobe_beef http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagy%C5%AB
You can think of it as the Scotch or Champagne of the beef world, a geographic locality owning a market in the high end, and the external imitators.
Of course, there'll always be Wagyu and Kobe, but that's a much smaller market than just the high end of normal meat.
It's also more difficult because not only does texture matter, but the meat filters through sea water to get its taste.
IT IS unsustainable. Many fisheries have already collapsed with many more collapses looming on the horizon.
Catch too many fish, and you get a suboptimal population growth - the babies that do get born do well (due to a lack of competition), but there's so few born that this doesn't really matter.
It's more true for slow growing fish, like salmon, and tuna.
Fun fact, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) was not formed to stop whaling, but because it was obvious that whale stocks had collapsed, and international co-ordination was needed to allow them to grow back to an economic level. The whaling industry collapsed slowly, got a second wind as steam ships made fast-moving blue whales a feasible target, then collapsed again as the blue whales ran out. The IWC was formed in 1946, and it wasn't until the 70s that the anti-whaling movement gained any steam.
* The anti-vaccine movement, also known as anti-vax, is filled with vocal, litigious, people who do not care for the science or the facts. They would have the human race become extinct because it would be 'better for the planet.' (note this is hyperbole but not far off from some of the more extreme elements of that movement.)
I think people who write about the ethical or taste issues are missing the boat. Peoples tastes and ethics will change as the technology does and the meat improves.
The most interesting perspective, in my opinion, are the entrepreneurial opportunities. Lab grown meat is the starting point. Lab grown fur, animal fats, leather, etc and so on are only a matter of time. The potential markets are colossal and can revolutionize many industries.
Here's a post on a vegetarian entrepreneur's (me) take on lab grown meat -- http://joshuaspodek.com/vegetarian-entrepreneurs-test -- from after the recent New Yorker article.
And not just nanotech, we have already copied/borrowed a lot from nature.
An improvement on the 8mm x 2mm meat reported on just a few months ago:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...
But still, where is "6 months" coming from? A vague "year" figure is given by Mark Post (with the caveat that funding is needed), but that doesn't even bring into consideration the process of getting the meat out of the lab and into the grocery store.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128283.500-meat-with...
That article isn't much more informative though. That New Yorker article was much higher quality, as expected.
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/30/139786731/tube-burgers-the-wor...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....
More significant: will it be a diet improvement to replace fatty hamburger with this 'meat'? Perhaps - since Americans eat pounds of meat per day, a whole week's worth of protein in a Wendy's Double with Cheese.
I imagine there are far more useful things to worry about in the American diet, than subtle differences between a single strain of pork muscle vs which strain of angus they're eating. Like how much they're eating; how much fat, salt, empty carbohydrates.
If you are worried for yourself, fine, FUD away and eat vegan. But as a social phenomenon, I can't see how lab-meat can be very harmful, and it is a certain good.
Human contact is nice too.
Said the man with the sexbot.
Would it be more energy efficient to grow meat in a factory than in the fields? What are the energy requirements for a pound of lab meat vs a pound of pig meat?
More importantly, what would happen if it turned out cheaper and tasted the same? How many industries depend on eating meat? What would happen to all the pigs if nobody wanted to eat them?
As for all the animals, their populations would obviously get scaled back. The transition would not happen overnight, there would be plenty of time. Though you may have a point- domestic pigs would likely become pets and little else. However, chickens still lay eggs, cows still make milk, and sheep and goats still produce milk and wool.
I don't want anyone to think I'm spreading FUD, I'm genuinely interested and concerned. Who knows what the nutritional consequences would be? We've only just started to realize that there might be some detrimental effects due to consuming the products of a corn-soy (duo-)monoculture farms, all in the name of efficiency, what of lab-meat? Plus, I'm just creeped out by it.
I do think it's valuable work, and largely inevitable, and wouldn't suggest for a moment that we (humans) not fund this kind of research.
Additionally, the yearlong production of milk in animals requires contant pregnancies, so will still cause many animals to killed. For instance, goat milk products kill far more male goats than any demands for the meat.
There are multiple types of vegetarians. Ones who dislike the moral part of meat will not have an issue with the new meat. There are energy consumption vegetarians. If this new meat is considerably close to the energy requirements for a vegetarian diet, they may go for it. The health vegetarians who are afraid of adulterated food may go for this meat now, but the ones who are afraid of the general higher cancer risk from red- meat based diets, etc, will likely not be persuaded to change.
In a similar vein, would someone who identifies as Jewish or a Muslim eat test tube bacon? Well, some already eat real pork and don't get worked up about it. It just depends on how you interpret and practice your beliefs. And we've all got different beliefs that make us do different things.
Linked from the New Scientist article.
* I believe it is 6 months away from the start of testing legal approval * it will not taste the exact same due to the different ways its grown, at least at first. It will be more easily customized to fit peoples requirements, however. * the meat industry will not collapse in a day. Animal requirements won't change overnight. The industry will adjust slowly unless they get lobbyists to ban this technology (which they will attempt to do, of course) * due to the innefficient way animals grow, lab-grown meat has the potential to be more efficient, but won't be at first
Initially, it probably will be quite expensive, but it is most certainly _potentially_ cheaper than real meat due to tech advances and economies of scale.
As for farm animals, they will be just bred less. Nobody will mass slaughter them just because there is a cheaper source of meat.
I don't think this will ever be a complete replacement for real meat. There are such subtleties to how an animal lives and what it eats that affect its taste. Wild hogs and domestic pigs are the same animal but taste entirely different (I prefer the wild variety).
Still, I'd prefer higher quality lab-grown meat created under safe and open conditions with some free range/hunted organic on the side to the factory farmed meat we're stuck with today. I drive 35 miles out of my way for groceries every week to avoid that stuff.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/international/japanese-scientis...
Somehow this feels like a Vonnegut plotline: population boom equals food shortage. Solution? Synthesize food from human waste matter. Absurd yes, but Japanese scientists have actually discovered a way to create edible steaks from human feces.
That's even more twisty. Interesting, though.
Seriously though, an idea of a fake meat modified to taste like human meat is both troubling and intriguing.
It wasn't terrible, but it didn't make me want the real thing.
Can they guarantee that the synthetic meat is healthy? Like, will it contain CLA, B-12, Omega-3s (found in grass-fed cows, and well-raised pigs), B-12, and so on? We get a lot of important nutrients from animal meat and fat that are harder to process from plant or synthetic sources.
(I'm a meat eater but still acknowledge how horrible it is.)
I source all my meat possible from local farms that raise the animals in free-range methods, and slaughter them in ethical ways (IE, no shocking or killing them when they're in a panic, like a CAFO would). And that's as ethical and as kind as a meat eater can get, with no exceptions.
But the nutritional point I raise isn't a light issue. These are animal cells coaxed into growing in foreign conditions. Just like hydroponic tomatoes have no taste, and possibly poor nutrition too, the "flesh vats" of the future will have nutritional problems too.
Then why did you start off by saying it was gross?
>But the nutritional point I raise isn't a light issue. These are animal cells coaxed into growing in foreign conditions. Just like hydroponic tomatoes have no taste, and possibly poor nutrition too, the "flesh vats" of the future will have nutritional problems too.
This will obviously be studied and tweaked at length. Input --> output.