Worlds Most Expensive Burger: 1/4 million euros
economist.com
economist.com
"Cultured"? Conjures up images of lab coats. "Man-made"? Not much better.
I'd say some better ideas:
- Humane meat
- Painless meat
- Slaughterless meat
- Guiltless meat
- Pure meat
To me, pure meat probably wins. It's meat, but without all the ugly impurities introduced by having an animal grow it in the wild. See how much of a difference successful framing can make to how you "feel" about a product?
Meat 2.0
I like knowing what I'm eating, not how you want me to feel about it. I am just fine eating artificial meat, cultured in a lab by people in white coats.
To be fair, a name is just a name. Marketing isn't meant to educate you about the product's details.
The problem with these names is that, subconsciously, they conjure up the very things you're trying to avoid. The term "slaughterless" calls to mind visions of slaughter. The word "painless," especially in an unfamiliar context -- like that of food -- gives a queezy feeling in the pit of the stomach. (One thinks: "Is this food going to hurt me?") And the word "humane" is close enough to "human" to cause discomfort, even in people who are well aware of the difference between those words.
Far better, IMO, to go with phrasing that draws no attention to negatives. "Sustainably raised," "sustainably grown," or even just "sustainable" would be interesting choices. (Though even the word "grown" might evoke the wrong idea for a lot of consumers). This phrasing says "green" without implying "Soylent Green." Alternatively, you borrow a page from the tuna industry, who wisely chose "dolphin-safe" over the more psychologically onerous "dolphin-free," and go with "animal-safe" or some variant thereof.
Of your suggestions, "guiltless" also seems pretty effective. I'm on the fence about "pure," inasmuch as it forces the mind to wander to the meat's origins. Furthermore, it could backfire in a big way -- especially with the Christian crowd, who would see cultured meat as "unnatural" in comparison to traditional meat.
If it's cheap and it tastes nice, most people wont care where it came from.
[1] Given the state of politics in the US, it would probably be incredibly difficult for such legislation to come into existence there. I suspect Europe would lead.
Just cycle through brands until once sticks. The meat products industry is already full of potentially disturbing stuff that people think is delicious (hotdogs and chicken nugget goo (really, mechanically separated chicken) come to mind).
And even in our world, just think: There are meats out there, waiting to be invented, that are a thousand times more delicious than bacon.
1 kg own cultured flesh
3 cups orange juice
lime, kiwifruit, or pineapple juice to taste
1 clove of garlic, mashed
pepper and salt to taste
So I guess my error was using an ambiguous unit, which is even worse than mixing units.
PS: Now the real question would you pass up the same option?
Vegetarian "bacon" salt is still delicious, but not fat (and has a rabid fan base.)
Fat is delicious, but bacon is not delicious because it has a high fat content.
This fat / salt / sugar combination is supposedly a great combination to make foods palatable. Here's a review of a book by a former FDA administrator:
(http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227091.500-review-it...)
A lot of numbers get thrown around, but the amount of grain and water you need for 1 pound of beef is enough to feed something like 25 people. Then there's the environmental impact (land, pollution, ....). The more I travel the world, the harder it is for me to eat beef.
And if you want to be completely honest with yourself, take a good look at industrial agriculture and tell me how self-righteous you feel.
Here's a couple of decent articles to start: http://www.alternet.org/story/13900/ http://www.organicconsumers.org/Organic/IndustrialAg502.cfm
Also, the documentary Food, Inc. is a well done introduction to the issue.
There's no doubt that it's healthier for us, and better for the cows, but there seems to be plenty of back and forth with respect to which of the two is more sustainable. And I don't see anyone arguing that grass-fed cows are more efficient (or even close to as-efficient) than chicken, pork or plants.
Thanks for the links on agriculture...going through them now!
Depends on what country you're in, I guess. Here in Ireland cattle are predominately grassfed (though usually are fed at least some grain in the winter too).
According to a quick googling, it seems that grass is more sustainable but lower output.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/207/4433/843.abstract
Free trade would mean less or no grain-fed livestock, hopefully (here in Uruguay we have almost 7 million cows, all of them grass-fed, neighbour Argentina has 40 million cows, also grass-fed, Australia and New Zealand also have similar numbers of grass-fed cows).
In any case, as you argue, cows are not the most efficient means of producing meat, that's why chicken is much cheaper for instance :) .
Grass-fed cows probably take more land, but I suspect they pollute a lot less (for example there's a lot of indirect pollution from the grain produced to feed the grain-fed cattle)
Edit: about free trade - both the U.S. and Europe have trade quotas and subsidies in place to maintain the local agriculture. I understand not wanting to destroy it entirely due to strategic concerns (and excessive dependency on a provider), but I believe it's gotten out of hand.
Edit2: the number of cows in Uruguay was inflated, changed for more reasonable source.
Although, I'll agree that looking more into it, grain-fed appears to be a largely North American thing.
I agree that it's a complicated issues involving subsidies, nutrition, shipping, processing. Maybe it was wrong to assign a specific #...maybe I just say "you can feed a lot people from the energy that goes into growing a steak" ?
Just curious.
So I'm guessing that many existing vegans and vegetarians wouldn't eat lab-grown meat. It might well cut down on the number of people who become vegetarian in the first place, though.
That was the tastiest thing I'd ever eaten!
At the same time, I don't know why I do eat meat now but I seem to crave/need it and just can't shift that. I don't usually actually like it either ironically (apart from that one quarter pounder above).
A friend of mine was vegetarian for many years and one day, about two years ago, she collapsed and the doctor told her she needed to eat meat again because her body had stopped processing protein properly and she wasn't getting enough from non-meat alternatives anymore (or something like that, don't remember the exact details now).
Veganism is a way of living which excludes all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, the animal kingdom, and includes a reverence for life. It applies to the practice of living on the products of the plant kingdom to the exclusion of flesh, fish, fowl, eggs, honey, animal milk and its derivatives, and encourages the use of alternatives for all commodities derived wholly or in part from animals
Note that they consider honey to be an exploitation of animals...so I assume extracting muscle tissues from a cow would also be considered exploitation of animals. Furthermore, it pretty explicitly states "living on the products of the plant kingdom".
Unless there are already existing products that have this property, in which case I guess we have our answer. Or if it's not so non-linear as it sounds, in which case there's no question.
I think environmental vegans are the most likely to buy into this..if it even becomes an efficient way to produce nutrition/calories. I could certainly see some more pragmatic organizations throwing their weight behind it.."if you must eat beef, at least eat this kind of beef (but consider X, Y and Z as even better alternatives)."
I still think ethical vegans would have a problem
with it, and I don't see this changing the opinion
of anyone doing it for health reasons.
Theere's already a split: vegetarianism vs (strict) veganism. In French we actually have two distinct words: "végétarisme" vs "végétalisme" (which are both cases of "véganisme").
The former is concerned with cruelty and eating living animals, and is assumed to have no problem consuming milk and eggs. The latter is assumed to reject all forms of animal proteins, living exclusively on vegetal products.
There is a wide range of people that call themselves vegan. Diets vary greatly, and the reasons for choosing those diets varies even more. Some eat honey. Some don't. Some eat tons of junk food and don't care about health. Some eat incredibly healthy and don't care about animals. Some are guided by beliefs about the economy or about sutstainability. Some eat animal products when they would otherwise be thrown away. Some eat meat or other animal products on very rare occasions. You may not want to call some of these people "vegan", or maybe they are the ones you aren't calling "strict vegan", but they probably get value out of calling themselves vegan because it's a convenient way to give someone an idea of what kinds of foods they wish to avoid.
There isn't a vegan authority, and people aren't reading some definition as a set of instructions, because being a vegan isn't the goal, at least for anyone I've met, it is a means to some goal. The goals vary, and the dedication to those goals vary, which is there is a wide variety of diets. If you limit who you want to call a "strict vegan" to people who read some definition and then follow it, where following the definition is the goal itself, then I think you're left with almost nobody.
I don't like to call myself "a vegan" largely because it facilitates the misconception I'm following rules rather than making choices. It's not a religion or a personal trait, it's a dietary choice (for me, a lifestyle choice for others, who may minimize animal product use outside of their diet.)
People ask me if I can eat this or that, rather than do I eat it, will I eat it, or do I want to eat it, and they really seem to mean "am I able to" as if I might not be capable of eating meat, or as if there is some authority with power over me that will not allow it. That's not the case. I can eat meat and drink milk, of course. I just don't want to.
There may be foods you don't want to eat as well. But I probably can't predict how you would react to changes to those foods. And you probably can't predict how I will react to lab-grown meat. For that matter, I probably can't predict how I will react, either.
My wife, on the other hand, is a lifelong vegetarian that can't stand the odors of cooked meat and anything resembling real meat.
So I think among vegetarians it will be a matter of preference and taste. Thankfully the ethics will be left out of it.
Creepy. Do they give these cells an electric jolt to make them exercise?
Besides that, few people eat beef for its nutrition (beyond the protein), and McDonald's meat is probably more tuned for 1) ease of production and 2) taste than nutritional value.