Google's Sergey Brin explains why he paid $330,000 for lab burger
nbcnews.com
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No intermediate step which takes 10 times the space of a traditional meat-farm, no anti-biotics, fat-free and no need for any living, breathing animal slughtering.
Honestly I cant find a single logical reason why this artificial-meat buisness is a good idea except for "just because we can"
You can't find a single reason why people would rather eat a replacement that eventually looks and tastes like a burger, rather than cow-food mixed with saffron and beet juice?
If that sounds good to you, more power to you, but to think that people would pay for the mush the same way people currently pay for burgers is ridiculous.
Just because people will pay money for it, doesn't make it a good idea.
It's not logical to pretend that they don't matter.
I guess, what I'm saying is simply that the time and effort going into artificial meat, and the promise it is going to generate will probably end up in continued overcomsuption. Totally overshadowing the social consernes.
I only wish an investigation into how to behaviorally modify our species from doing wastefull and damaging stuff on mass scale, would get as much funding and attention.
If your only other problem with this is that they're working on changing the product rather than the behavior of an entire population, without actually giving a hint on how you would go about changing that behavior, you're just complaining for the sake of complaining.
I personally find this valuable for the same reason the space program is valuable, a lot will be learned, and technology will advance. As far as being a practical solution, seems unlikely. On the 'low end' the actual hungry people of the world for the most part arent particularly meat driven to the same degree that Americans are. On the 'high end', there is literally no way to reproduce the marbleing, vascular structure, bones etc, required to make a top quality steak without reproducing the whole cow, at which point the excersize is moot. I mean on the high end folks claim they can taste the difference in the type of grain the animal was fed, so that market is not going to go in for lab grown meat no matter what. So really at best, this technology will one day be able to replace ground beef, which isnt an ignoble goal.
I have always been very very carnivorous animal. Not because of marketing and my family was always almost vegetarian. But occasions where I eat more than 3-4 pounds of tenderloin in one sitting have been observed.
But if you want from me to eat a dish - it better have big chunks of skeletal muscles of for legged animal that spent the majority of its life on the surface.
There are a lot of people for which meat is plain old delicious. This does not mean that we support the current cruel farming methods and we cannot make the fact that the pig is very bad grain to meat converter (bovines are even worse).
So a meat that is meat - if it can be produced at a fraction of a environmental cost could have a lot of usages - sausages, burgers, almost everything that uses minced meat.
While chances are it won't end on the plate as a steak soon due to aesthetic reasons it could help in feeding the world.
The idea of vat meat is a great one if it turns out it can scale. It will give vegetarians (like me) an additional range of protein sources—not that I'm dissatisfied with what's out there, but I do miss real burgers from time to time. It will also give meat eaters an option that's actually meat, but without the externalities that are endemic in the meat industry (factory farms, poor conditions for animals, methane emissions, low efficiency).
It's unreasonable to expect the world to become vegetarian because of those externalities. And the grass-fed/free-range/cruelty-free kind of thing, while a good step, only addresses some of the externalities, while being intrinsically more expensive. Why not investigate vat meat to see if it's a feasible alternative? Maybe it isn't, and we'll have wasted a bunch of time and money (though I suspect there are implications to this exploration beyond simply food). But maybe it is, and we could fix or ameliorate a bunch of problems without demanding the world switch to soy, seitan, and lentils for their protein (which is not going to happen to the extent it would need to).
"Better livestock conditions
Cultured Beef can be produced without the slaughter
of cattle, and far fewer cows are needed, so they
can be reared without the need for intensive
farming."
"Cultured Beef is created by painlessly harvesting
muscle cells from a living cow. Scientists then
feed and nurture the cells so they multiply to
create muscle tissue, which is the main component
of the meat we eat. It is biologically exactly
the same as the meat tissue that comes from a cow."Good for the environment, possibly, but bad for the species.
I've read that methane emissions from cattle contribute substantially to global warming and other pollution problems. According to the link above, this method could reduce methand emissions from cattle by 96%, and reduce the amount of land needed by 99%.
I haven't followed the link to the study at Oxford and Amsterdam University (always a good idea if you start to get excited about general science coverage). I plan to do this later.
That's a very existential question that doesn't have an easy answer. Is a somewhat brief existence worse than no existence at all? If we eradicate fruit flies (or the many species that live short, brutish existences), have we done them a favor?
I am a huge fan of the Omnivore's Dilemma and recommend it wholeheartedly because while Pollan faces these serious questions, he doesn't simply resort to the easy answer.
This would apply to local farms perhaps, but from what I read industrial livestock production is causing suffering to many animals to lower the costs.
Disclaimer: I am not a vegan.
Also, cows bred for their meet are slaughtered at 7-8 months of age. If cared for, a cow could live for 20 years, but economics prevail.
Cows held for their milk have it a bit better, as they get to live for 5-6 years. Also, things have improved. For example, the milking robot not only improved yield, but also allowed each cow to select the time it wanted to be milked, and does not require farmers to chase their cows towards their milking place two or three times a day.
Not kept in buildings: That depends on the level of industrialization of the farms and on the quality of your grassland. For example, in the Netherlands, mowing grass mechanically and feeding it to your cattle which is kept inside year round is the way to go, if you look at this purely economically (cows destroy too much grass by trampling it and by dropping cow peas on it)
Consequently, there is now talk of paying farmers to let their cows go out on the meadows.
Not in huge buildings? Go to https://www.google.nl/search?q=cow+stable+design and click on 'Images'. Fewer cows per stable than we do with pigs or chicken, but not small stables, either.
Vat meat simply has externalities associated with it – civil infrastructure, educational overhead, perception issues, etc – that make it so that it can't compete with traditional livestock models in many areas.
Realistically, vat meat competes with factory farming, and not a whole lot else. Which, don't get me wrong, is fantastic all on it's own.
I have a feeling though that however easy faux-beef gets, there will always be people who won't eat it- just look at the "pink slime" controversy, or the anti-GMO movement.
There will always be a market for real meat and real leather. If/when the major sources of the two are "not-real" the producers of real meat and leather will be seen as a luxury, so the remaining cows bred to produce meat and leather will be cared for well to produce high quality outputs. So the population will drop but those that remain will be bred to produce luxury goods and so be kept in better conditions.
If it's stem cells from the human species it's controversial even if the purpose is to save lives.
Unless both are controversial?
Jeff Bezos buys a newspaper for $250,000.
Sergey Brin buys a burger for €250,000.
Each smart in its own way.
Thanks for not downvoting this as mercilessly as it deserved.
/me slinks off
The problem arising from growing meat consumption include, pollution, maldistribution of food, animal suffering, wasting of land and resources, wasting of water, etc.
[1] I suppose I need a reference for this claim, but think in terms of economy and you'll find that no other culture can afford this much land and resorces to go under meat-farming other than current western cultures
--edit--
I forgot about humans living in extreme environments that live (by necesity) almost exclusively on meat, like the inuits in Greenland, before major western influence. It doesn't change the fact that the majority of all culteres do, and have in the past, eaten but a porportion of the meat that the average westerners eat today.
sexist
> The problem arising from growing meat consumption include, pollution, maldistribution of food, animal suffering, wasting of land and resources, wasting of water, etc.
Most of these problems are addressed by artificial meat
That's the whole point of growing meat in a lab. It isn't economical to do it now, but it also wasn't economical to have a personal computer 30 years ago, or to get your DNA sequenced 10 years ago.
Yeah, you do need a source here. An obvious counterexample is the Inuits, but there have been several other societies with high meat consumption. Also note the high meat consumption of the upper class in Europe during some centuries (the popularity of meat varied over time).
Absolutely incorrect. There are several well known groups of humans who survive off of a diet of principally animal products.
edit -- apologized for snark
I agree. In most places historically with good arable land, meat is not nearly as prevalent in a meal as today's Western diet. In many places, meat is pretty much just used as a flavoring in dishes like you might find in Chinese-American Szechuan String Beans (the little salted pork bits).
Blaming marketing for meat consumption is somewhat unfair - people love meat - in the past it was reserved for the rich and wealthy - gout was called "The illness of kings". A lot of people just love meat.
Don't be confused, it still is. The sepparation now just spans continents instead of classes.
But, to answer: These animals are brought up in very inhumane conditions -- in crowded spaces, with no light, no freedom. The whole process is unsustainable, what happens when the world population reaches above 10 billion and demand for meat keeps getting higher? Do we have enough space to keep these animals, enough food to sustainably feed them without having bad environmental implications?
It turns out there are alternative methods, and they may prove to be well worth the cost of investigating them. So here we are, doing science, in the hopes of a brighter future. Experimenting with food, to make it taste better, healthier, cheaper, more environmentally-friendly.
It isn't accurate to paint an entire, very diverse industry with the paints of the worst offenders (e.g. Texas factory fattening houses).
We are wasting time and energy investigating solution to a real problem from the wrong end. Doing science is not enough to solve this problem, we need to do politics too (or social science for that matter). Infact doing science might ultimately lead us to enhance the problem.
Now we are looking for a way to make a very wastefull behavior more economy friendly. Meat consumption at the current mass scale is unpresidented and there is no reason to enforce it. Alternatives include alternative diet, less waste, better usage of the food we already grow. We have found brilliant ways to cultivate food at minimum cost, but it is not securing the majority of our species food intake. And the western meat marked might be the biggest factor for this injustice.
Now trying to solve it by further saturating the western marked with meat -- a product that is to blame for this mal-distribution of food -- is not going to solve any problem. It is going to shift the attention away from the real issue at hand and further stabilizing a marked that is currently really unfair and damaging.