How In-Vitro Meat will Change Our Lives
hplusmagazine.com
hplusmagazine.com
One of the commenters put it well:
"In Vitro meat will do to pasture grown meat what margarine did to butter. Despite nearly 50 years of food science, still the most economical way of getting the wonderfully rich flavor of butter is to milk it out of cows.
In vitro meat will be fine for industralized meat products that just want the approximate taste & texture of meat but anybody wanting a fine steak is still going to get it from good old fashioned cows."
On a side note, what would in-vitro mean for Halal/Kosher meat? Anyone care to speculate?
In short, no, it wouldn't be kosher, but meat grown from modified genes could be kosher.
That's not oppression.
Those folks are perfectly free to continue to do as they've done for centuries or to buy something else if they feel that the benefits are not worth the costs.
There's nothing wrong with charging more. Customers are always free to buy something else.
Their modified crops cross pollinate with standard strains and "become" the modified strains. Then they sue the farmers for not paying the license fees. They threaten to not supply farmers with GMO seed if they use normal seed for their other crops.
Similarly they attempt to patent strains that have existed for centuries in order to become sole providers. See the Basmati / Texmati rice case for just one example http://www.no-patents-on-seeds.org/index.php?option=com_cont...
They have made every effort to remove other options from the farmers and are creating monopolies through questionable business practices and IP abuse.
It's a dirty business all around and it's a clear indication that the patent system is broken. Commodities are cheap, because they are commodities. Simply because anyone can jump on in and have a go at producing them. That's the free market at work, cheap and lots of it.
Contrast commodities with the protected patented good. Expensive and a limited supply typically, since you can only get it from the IP owner or a licensee. Why innovate if you don't have to and if you do, make sure it's patentable and stretch it out.
If patents were fair and equitable all around then people would not be trying so hard to turn commodities back into patented goods.
It's not tenable and it is the cause of our current economic malaise. It's a high tech world and the path to economic growth is blocked because as soon as you computerize or mechanize, you run into a wall of intellectual property that you can't get around without gobs of money for lawyers.
The software startup world was the wide open frontier ten years ago, a place where you could make money with just an idea, but it's gradually getting the life choked out of it by IP law.
Sorry, I did not initially mean for this to become a patent rant, but it is connected to everything I have been thinking about for the last year or so and it's really pissing me off how far it's tentacles go.
Oh really?
Since you didn't understand the article that you cited, I'll quote it "It should be perfectly clear that what RiceTec patented was not the genome of basmati rice or a genetically developed variety (RiceTec makes the point that all its products are natural). It was simply a hybrid of basmati obtained from cross-breeding with an US long rice variety."
RiceTec has a patent for its hybrid. That patent does not cover anything else, such as pre-existing strains of Basmati.
The whole argument that what RiceTec has done is somehow wrong is "By including basmati name into the patent definition, RiceTec could claim wide-ranging rights over a traditional name, for which it did not acknowledge the origin or the originality, let alone the copyright."
That's factually incorrect. Patents don't grant any protection for names. Copyright and trademarks do.
I've got a patent for a method of branch prediction. No one thinks that said patent gave me any rights over the term "branch prediction" (or even "programmable branch prediction", a term which was arguably novel when I filed the patent.)
There is no way that humanity has figured out all the complexity that billions of years of evolution has created when it comes to animals eating each other.
Corporations are now coming up with new types of 'food' that they can sell for much more profit than the things our species have been surviving on for thousands of years. Take margarine for example - no cows to raise and milk, therefore a much bigger profit margin than butter. They also tell us it's much healthier too. But then studies like this come along http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/05/us/study-links-heart-disea... , and the whole french paradox, which indicate the opposite may be true.
"When In-Vitro Meat (IVM) is cheaper than meat-on-the-hoof-or-claw, no one will buy the undercut opponent." I seriously doubt it. Even though a grass fed, dry aged steak is quite expensive, many people splurge because they are delicious. Has the author heard of the organic movement growing 20% a year over the past decade? People buying more expensive food because it's healthier and tastes better, that defies logic.
The article claims that this IVM is also healthier for the planet, but it neglects to mention where all the raw ingredients for the IVM will come from. Mother nature already created the perfect way to stay healthy - plants get energy from the sun to grow, animals eat plants, and excrete fertilizer to grow new plants. This happened for millions of years before humans came along. Unfortunately, our farms are no longer run using this perfect natural solution (another issue entirely), but I don't see how IVM would solve this.
My favorite quote from the article: "We won't even choke to death because IVM contains no malicious bones or gristle." It's amazing our species has survived so long with so many malicious bones and evil gristle after us. Malicious bones - I cant stop picturing zombies, haha.
Anyway, I don't see any particular reason to expect 'natural' food to be more healthy. Most of nature, given its druthers, would like to kill you.
In the old court days they used to have a person that would taste the food (I don't know the English word for such a person, sorry) and if that person wouldn't keel over within half an hour of tasting the food the food would be considered safe.
I fully intend to use that part of humanity that doesn't care about issues like this for exactly that purpose, but I'll set the time quite a bit longer than half an hour.
(silly old timers, never heard of slow acting or cumulative poisons...)
"The surnames of the Maltese Islands: an etymological dictionary" by Mario Cassar (http://bit.ly/assayer) confirms what I'd read elsewhere, it's called an "assayer". "food taster" is most commonly used though.
It depends on your definition of "need." You can obviously live to be old enough to reproduce on extra value meals from McDonald's - people do - but that doesn't mean its good for you.
>Anyway, I don't see any particular reason to expect 'natural' food to be more healthy. Most of nature, given its druthers, would like to kill you.
Because we're adapted to it and we're messing with systems that are not well understood. Some of this is obvious and well-known - for example, the link between sugar consumption and diabetes.
Well, at least we try to understand them. Nature doesn't even do that. Bananas--in any form--are new; a 10,000 year old irreproducible hybrid. Corn and cattle have undergone extreme selection and no small amount of random variation in that time. Nature produces viruses and parasites and mutations on proteins and poisons, none of which have us in mind. And it does it much, much faster than human evolution is going to be able to adapt to changing available food sources. Our generations are long, and little things like cancer at the end of life just don't hurt our offspring that much.
In a contest between engineered food -- whether cloned or GM -- and food that's just been genetically drifting for a few thousand years, I'll take the engineered food every time. Sure, the engineers are working with systems far beyond their ken. I get that. But nature wouldn't be shy about doing even relatively obviously dangerous things. Engineers might make sweeter apples and we discover many years down the road that some protein interaction upsets some delicate balance if you eat them with too many fish and it causes your teeth to turn blue. But nature might decide to make an apple all cyanide and not just the seeds.
Humans are pretty robust and adaptable. We can handle the random, arbitrary garbage nature throws at us. We wouldn't be here if we couldn't. So I'm sure the mistakes of a few engineers who trying very hard not to hurt us won't amount to much of anything.
I'm very skeptical, but it seems at least possible to me that test tube meat could be formulated to better approximate "natural" grass fed meat than the mass produced feedlot stuff we have now. They could fix the fatty acid ratios by "feeding" the meat with algae secretions. The only way to find out will be with experimentation.
Of course this brings us back to the question of what our food market would look like if all grain subsidies were removed. It's quite likely the vast corn fields would be converted to pasture and healthy meat would get cheap. And it's quite likely that proper pastured meat production is more efficient than all the test tube processes.
Not to be too nitpicky, but chickens are omnivores. They will happily eat worms, leaves, bugs, grass, flowers, seeds, flies, small frogs, other chickens, and I've seen them try to attack small snakes.
And trust me when I say they don't have to be forced to eat corn. Next to worms, it's probably their favorite food.
I do think there will be major changes in the way meat for the majority of meat eaters is produced in the future, but it won't be in three years, or even ten. The changes have to happen because meat production is simply too resource intensive for an ever-growing population to keep on eating more and more of the stuff without ever increasing environmental impact. But, they will come extremely slowly, because peoples habits change extremely slowly. People will choose "real" meat for a long time after cheaper in-vitro meats are available.
If I ate meat, I would be somewhat suspicious of the new stuff, just as I'm suspicious of most modern, and not so modern, lab-created food additives. As with most artificial sweeteners, HFCS, hydrogenated fats, etc., I'm suspicious of them as beacons for general poor quality when I see them on a label. I know if the manufacturer chose the cheapest options for the sweeteners and fats, they probably chose the cheapest garbage for the rest of the ingredients, too. Much like soy in burgers indicated to people in the '70s and '80s that it was a poor quality, cheap, food, in-vitro meats will probably go through a phase of being thought second rate. And, of course, a few years on, we now know that soy in some forms actually can be detrimental to health, particularly in men.
It will take a pretty brilliant marketing coup to overcome that kind of resistance. Splenda and Nutri-Sweet both had very effective marketing that seems to have countered any feelings of badness about them. Though what Nutri-Sweet replaced (Saccharine) had such a bad reputation at the time that anything probably would have been a shoe-in. It's not coincidence that Splenda began to hit big just as questions about the safety of Nutri-Sweet/Aspartame started to get mainstream attention. I'm not sure people will be convinced about the unhealthiness of meat, since artificial meats aren't exactly mainstream today, despite many of them being quite tasty (certainly tastier than diet sodas) and reasonably healthful. This makes me think the desire for healthier substitutes for meat isn't very high, and the awareness of most folks of the environmental impact is even lower.
I raise chickens as a hobby. I don't even try to market or sell my product, yet I have people asking me if they can buy eggs (no, I just give them away if they ask) because they're willing to pay more for fresh eggs from chickens living in natural surroundings than the "battery farmed" ones in supermarkets.
Premium products will always command premium prices.
Our food is already processed within an inch of it's life (then a good three yards past it). Tour Spam will be grown in a vat, rather than fed hormones and ground in a factory. Big deal.
You think PETA is unethical? Just wait for the smear campaigns that will crop up when MegaCorp can actually make some money off scaring people out of living meat.
This mystifies me. All you have to say is "genetically modified" and Europe flips its proverbial wig. Aren't savvy English cattle farmers going to say "Oh-my-Gaia this is Frankenfood! It is unnatural! It is cloned! It probably has DNA in it! Phone your representative, this should be banned!"
(The reference to savvy farmers is an oblique reference to the fact that the difference between GMO soybeans/corn/etc and non-GMO soybeans/corn/etc is that a preference or requirement for non-GMO product shuts American-grown stuff out of the market. What a handy coincidence.)
I'm european, and I seriously doubt that. I'd say that the US would pick it up before Europe. In Europe, we are much more wary about "unnatural" way of growing things, you just have to see with GMO ...
I suspect almost all of set B would eat vat meat and that set B is larger than set A.
And I really wonder why that got you modded down, it's perfectly on-topic.
For myself (vegetarian for philosophical reasons), if no plausibly sentient being was harmed to create this stuff, I'd likely have no ethical reasons against eating it.
I'd also add 'Yuck Factor' to that list. I'm not sure how IVM would effect this.
Anyone else thinking of "Transmetropolitan"?