Engineering the $325,000 Burger
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If this winds up being cheap, great. Regardless, I still prefer an interesting spicy black bean burger to anything made with ground beef.
But yes, a nice spicy black bean burger sounds interesting!
I think for some people meat, and pretty much of all food, is fairly uninteresting it is pretty much just a way to fuel their body. They take fairly little joy in their meals - which seems a bit incomprehensible - but it seems to be the way it is.
For instance, I've found vegetarian Indian restaurants vastly more interesting than Indian restaurants that rely on meat. It's not that I hate meat (I don't, and I'm not a a vegetarian), but the former sort simply seem to offer more interesting food, with a much wider range of flavors.
Note the stereotypical Airplane-meal question (where the actual dishes are quite different): "Chicken or beef?" I know they're just trying to be efficient, but this question seems to capture society's attitude: that once you know the type of meat involved, eh, the rest is just pointless detail.
So while meat can be a wonderful and interesting part of a meal, I think it would be better if it lost some of its overwhelming dominance, and became just another ingredient.
I wonder how meat came to be so dominant though. Funnily enough, when the Old World found the New World they found a land so plentiful in meat, instead of jumping up in joy certain parts of society actually started to find meat disgusting. So maybe it's not really just a Western thing, but meat's dominance is mostly a New World thing: According to http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/06/27/155527365/visual..., USA, Canada, Australia and NZ are far ahead of everyone else in per-capita meat consumption. And it doesn't seem to be correlated with per-capita GDP either. This might also means that meat's dominance is also very recent, and not universal even in modern Western culture. Maybe it's simply a matter of who has an older history of eating traditions, traditions that are responsible for toning down the meat-mania?
Free range chickens still die, which is often the ethical reason for vegetarians/vegans.
Agree.
> Free range chickens still die, which is often the ethical reason for vegetarians/vegans.
Disagree. For me at least the death itself is comparatively insignificant. What's far more significant is horrible conditions in which many mass produced meat animals spend their lives, i.e. Factory farming.
Often the only difference is that a free range barn will have a small outside area, which the chickens may not access because all the food is inside [1].
I think most vegetarians/vegans would agree that Halal meat is ethically worse than the 'bolt to the brain' alternative. Of course this is a sweeping generalisation.
[1] http://kb.rspca.org.au/What-is-the-difference-between-free-r...
First this stuff will be an inferior meat substitute.
Then it'll be an equivalent meat substitute.
Then it'll improve upon nature itself, and we'll be eating things that taste ten times better than bacon, and fifty times better than steak, and it will all be without a twinge of guilt.
A quick search did not bring up any evidence that sugar substitute have known negative longterm effects.
The fallacy has everything to do with your insistence that this is anything but fantasy. Artificial sweeteners are not worse off for you than sucrose/fructose.
I suppose meh-tasting-guilt-free bacon is something, but, well... meh. TT
Aspartame is a more complex molecule synthesized to mimic certain properties of monosaccharides. Many would say it is inferior in taste to what it purports to replace.
Cultured beef, however, should be more or less the same cocktail of organic compounds that make up a dead cow. How these compounds are mixed, the proportions to which they appear, and what shapes they take are the interesting variables here, and could, with enough control, make something "better than real."
I'd draw instead the comparison to synthetic diamonds. Same stuff, potentially unnaturally flawless results.
So, for example, the move from grass-fed to corn-fed beef allowed for vastly greater production in a much more efficient fashion, and even (for most people's palates) resulted in a better tasting meat. 20+ years later, we're finding out that the environmental cost of factory farm meat is much higher than we thought, and the corn-fed beef is much worse for you than grass-fed beef.
20 years from the meat cubes hitting the shelves, are we going to find out that cells grown on a straight glucose+vitamin mix are missing some micronutrient that helps our brain function correctly, or protects the gut against cancer?
Our bodies have had a very long time to adapt to certain models of nutrition, and when we tamper with them, we often find unintended consequences.
I feel like the lesson of Tesla is that the way to sell new technology is to make it better than the status quo in some way. "It's reasonably good" will sell to a few environmentally-conscious people, but it's better if something is genuinely appealing in some way other than ethics.
It's easier to sell the carrot than the stick.
In this case I guess you skin the cat by growing cat-meat in a dish, so you don't skin any cats.
If you take away the fundamental question of eating meat, it's the way cattle are raised today that's the problem.
If you give it a bit of thought, it might be more ethical raising brainless and senseless organisms for human consumption. It also solves many sanitary problems in farms (antibiotics, crowded living conditions) and it allows us to give pasture lands back to nature.
Assuming that such meat was demonstrably safer for humans to consume, why would we choose to keep eating "nature's animals"? It's taboo what keeps us from doing this.
You may find my lack of faith disturbing.
Edited for Vader.
I agree with you to a minor extent, in that there'll be extremely high quality meat available and cheap gro-meat available for the backyard burgers and fast food. I do not see this as an issue. Production will be cheaper, use up less resources, and destroy the shitty mediocre meat, leaving the higher-quality just as cheap as it always was.
"You may find my lack of faith disturbing."
I find it unsurprising, but I really don't see things as being that bad. This would be entirely preferable (in the pocketbook) for low-to-middle-classed meat eaters.
[1] http://www.justmeans.com/editorials?action=readeditorial&...
I, for one, wouldn't mind trying it out, but I have serious doubts it would approach the quality of real meat grilled burger anytime soon. And I understand that there are places where people are starving and such technologies can save lives, but realistically being the part of the lucky billion that is not under the threat of starvation I would always prefer the real thing if it's available.
There's not a vast difference between what's sold as ground beef and what Taco Bell serves.
1) No species on earth "wants" to die. Every living organism has defence systems that it will try to prevent/repair any damage made to it.
Even more, (some) plants communicate and use signaling system to warn their neighbours about threats. Clearly, any species try to avoid death
How do you define "does not want to die"? 2) What about carnivorus species? Do they "allowed" to eat meat? If they are allowed, why humans can't? And more specifically, why you can't?
2) Eating meat is immoral, animals can't reason about morality, therefore they do whatever they do. Morality is the domain of beings intelligent enough to think about it. I consider killing animals immoral. That said, I do eat meat, because it's so tasty, in full conscience that I am immoral.
As a worse example of the same path, castration of bulls has always been seen as "OK" for convenience in raising beef, none the less I'm thinking a somewhat higher "brain-ectomy" of livestock isn't going to fix everything up for vegetarians.
Well of course not. You're still ending a sentient life. You're just separate out the sentience ending from the life ending.
Obviously, being such a common practice.
But then again, there's really no shame in advocating the preservation of human links in our already heavily mechanised food chains, is there? I mean, what type of world do we want to live in?
Somewhere on this planet exists the tastiest cow. It has just the right combination of genes and environment to make it more mouth-watering to us than any other cow. Unfortunately, we won't know it's the tastiest cow until we kill it and eat it. Then only a few people will be able to enjoy it. Offspring with the same diet would likely taste great, but breeding and changing diet will always be an imprecise way to get tasty cows.
When fully-developed, in-vitro meat technology will give us better control over every aspect of the meat's taste. Nutrients can be delivered in just the right proportions at just the right times. Exercise (or lack of) can be simulated as much as we want. Even the genes in the tissue can be altered to improve the taste and texture. Once the technology gets to that point, there will be no good reason to raise and eat animals.
We can all eat /better/, live /better/ and be /better/ without all the trade-offs if we'll put a little more thought into our lives and a have a little more moderation of consumption. Oh, and waste less.
This is a nice sentiment, but I don't think any civilization has voluntarily reduced its resource usage or consumption. The people working on in-vitro meat want to solve the same problem as you, but they're being pragmatic about it.
Ultimately comes down to the individual's motive for being a vegetarian, which varies.
I wouldn't have a problem eating manufactured meat if it looked the same and tasted the same, if not better (which what seems to be promised). I already eat Spam and salami, what's one more processed product in my food arsenal?
Maybe this technology has too much potential to dangerously destabilize the world food situation for it to be fundable by a government.
In the US? The beef industry has a strong enough lobby.
Except if Monsanto took it over. Then we'd be paying license fees to go to McDonalds.
It has the potential to be economically much more efficient than growing livestock and massively increase the production of meat. The article doesn't talk much about the potential economic impact, focusing instead on environmental and ethical concerns, but considering the amount of land that is currently devoted to livestock grazing that would be able to be put to other uses when it becomes obsolete...it really is a game-changer that will make the human race much better off.
The people who make it work will deserve the billions they'll earn.