Pork grown in laboratory | Hacker News Reader

Pork grown in laboratory

timesonline.co.uk

31 pointsdc2k0828 comments

This will answer your first question:

"[b]So far the scientists have not tasted it[/b], but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time."

Another reason not to eat ground-anything. One, it's harder to keep ground meat clean; you can't clean off the e-coli once it's been mixed in.

Now we won't be able to tell whether we're eating real or synthesized sausage.

I would be reluctant to eat synthesized meat because we probably don't understand (or manufacturers will ignore) the entire relationship between a) the result of the complex process of growing meat on an active bone that's running around, and b) how our bodies evolved to process and benefit from exactly that configuration of protein, nutrients and composition.

We'll just have to see how your diet compares to my lab meat, multi-vitamin, Metamucil, acai berry extract, and Slim Fast diet.

Actually, one way to tell animal- from vat-meat will be to check for E. coli itself.

Does that make this pork kosher?

Technically, by the laws of kashrut, I'm fairly sure it would, since I don't see how it can be classified as meat. Or, alternatively, it can't be kosher, because I cannot see how it can be qualified as food.

It's real fun when 6000-year-old laws meet science, isn't it?

I suspect that it doesn't, since it's made from cells taken from a live pig, and the rules are based on characteristics of the animal the meat comes from. If they could synthesize it totally artificially, it might be kosher, but if it comes from a pig, it's probably not.

If it were truly synthesized from scratch -- individual atoms plucked one by one from the air -- the answer to the question of whether or not it is kosher is mu (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/mu.html) as kosher is inapplicable to non-food items.

Even if the donor cells are from non-kosher animals, there is a modest body of responsa (case law) that seems to permit it. Some authorities permit the use of gelatin made from non-kosher animal bones, claiming that the end product is totally different in nature than the starting (non-kosher animal) product; and that creating the gelatin required putting the animal product into a state of total inedibility, thus removing it from the domain of kosher/non-kosher, notwithstanding its subsequent reconstitution into edible food. Vat-grown meat is supposed to be very similar if not identical to bio-meat, so it's unclear if these authorities would rule the same way for vat-grown pork as they do for pork-derived gelatin.

Even amongst sources who do not abide by the above ruling (and it appears a majority do not), there may yet be hope for the kosher cheeseburger. If the donor cells which are vat-cultured are from a kosher cow, the resulting food may not be considered meat (with respect to the prohibition of mixing meat and milk). Again, based on responsa regarding the gelatin question, gelatin made from kosher bones and hides is parve (neither meat nor dairy). However, these responsa seem to agree that one of the main arguments that this is so is because one stage of gelatin creation is processing the raw material into what is essentially non-food, thus eradicating its inherent "meatness" (but nothing can remove its applicability to the question of kosher). This may or may not be applicable to the case of vat-grown meat; however, if the process entails some cells being stripped away from the meat and/or pulverized into something inedible for a period of time, the resulting product may well be kosher but not considered meat. The only question left would be: american cheese or whiz?

I forsee a future with 3 categories of meat: Synthetic, Factory and Free Range. With free range reserved for the top 1% of the population.

I forsee a future with two categories of meat: "cruelty free" and "contraband", with a voting majority viewing the latter as one small step removed from serial-killing.

Do you actually forsee that, given human nature, or do you just like to wish it were so?

Actually forsee, and don't particularly wish it was so.

It's like when cars got seatbelts. First they were a good idea, then they were the law.

It takes 20 years to completely turn over the most culturally productive sector of society. Children will grow up in the world described by maxklein - and I guarantee they will ask why cows and pigs are still dying. (There will be an element of spite-the-rich hiding under the high moral tone.)

Twenty years after that, "abbatoir" will be a word that lives in history books - and in horrific news stories of police raids on black-market Mafia farms.

The lab of the United States Congress has had them beaten to this discovery for years now.

On a serious note, I can see great potential for this, but the question is raised: Does the damage caused by creating the input outweigh the benefits of the output?

What is necessary to create it, and is it worth it monetarily? Does it truly decrease suffering or is there some aspect we are missing?

We can't answer those questions until someone tries to scale it up, which will be a ways off yet. However, it is not hard to imagine that it will be radically more efficient than current systems; you won't be maintaining much-less-useful organs in the pig, you won't be gated by the efficiency of the pig's digestive system (which is good as biological digestive systems go, but it's still a biological digestive system), you won't have the gut bacteria creating undesirable and effectively uncontrollable methane emissions, etc. (Some sort of waste will still exist, but it will be controllable, and the odds that it can be profitably used in some other application are much higher; methane is valuable when collected, it's just very difficult to collect from mobile animals.)

It's hard to do a full accounting, but it's hard to imagine how it won't be a much better environmental choice than current techniques.

This, by the way, is a small example of why I don't think total ecological panic is entirely justified. There are bad things happening for sure and we should take steps, but the implicit assumption that so many people hold that technology has already reached its apex is very wrong. Can you imagine a meat factory that takes the waste products from the meat, uses on-site solar power to re-energize the waste products back into biological food, and feeds them back to the meat with extremely high efficiency and only simple, safe inputs to the system? I can. (When I say "panic", I mean the emotional response, not that you shouldn't be concerned about anything.)

I am less sanguine on the efficiency issue. You have also thrown away very useful tissues comprising things like a functioning immune system and the circulatory system (gas and nutrient exchange and waste removal/filtration).

I would expect "lab meat" to demand much more purified, processed and energy intensive inputs than traditional farming. Laboratory cell culture is a hard and very expensive enterprise.

Cattle rancher here.

The amount of energy it takes to run a cattle ranch is dwarfed by the amount of energy it takes to, say, air condition a moderately large office building. In this case, you'd probably be air conditioning a huge factory. And what would you feed the lab meat? Some sort of sugar slurry? I'm not sure how that's any better than corn. Or, in your posited scenario of "re-energizing" waste, are you going to cook it? That takes a lot of energy. If not, you're going to end up with serious problems if you create a closed loop protein system (think BSE).

Then the big energy inefficiencies come when you start packing, shipping, refrigerating, and then throwing away (most of it, sadly, as most people don't buy deep freezers) your protein.

The amount of energy that you pay for is dwarfed by air conditioning, certainly. But if we're going to talk environmental impact, you have to count all the other inputs, too.

It would certainly start out less economical, but I still wouldn't care to bet about the final outcome if everything is considered. To some extent it would depend on your accounting; "tons of carbon" isn't my personal favorite.

What other inputs? Sunlight and water? Grass is an efficient way of harvesting solar energy. If you're talking about a growth cycle which doesn't involve animal fertilizer inputs, you've got to have a huge external energy source involved to manufacture fertilizer, so that's a pretty big cost of not raising animals on available pastureland.

That, and don't even get me started on methane emissions, which is a handy way to deflect discussions about CO2, but not a great way to actually do anything productive (look up radiative forcing and the relative atmospheric lifetimes of greenhouse gases).

I read most of the thread here but not all, so I hope I'm not repeating anything yet said: I'm convinced that once we can produce meat rather than butchering animals, why in the world would anybody want to farm animals? I guess cows and pigs would be the next animals going to be extinct soon.

So I doubt it's that a good idea to be able to produce meat.

Well, let's see.... perhaps the farmed animals taste better, perhaps some people enjoy the connection with the land and Nature by growing/raising their own food, animals aren't just raised for meat: many animals (sheep, goats, etc) are also raised because their wool/hair can be used for clothing, cows provide leather, beef shanks probably aren't going to be grown in a lab, but a slowly braised shank of beef is absolutely divine!

Put a simpler way: you can buy cheap beef at the grocery store, but the bison farm down the road from me that sells grass-fed, pastured bison meat still has a 4-6 month backlog on orders...

Is anyone else reminded of Better Off Ted?

"Tastes like despair" was the first thing that sprang to mind.

Yet another petri-dish I can not enjoy :-(

Seriously, this might be good news for people concerned about animal welfare or about the CO2 emissions of livestock.

For anyone concerned about the environment or aninmal welfare, they should find pasture raised animals, which sequesters carbon as the topsoil grows. This lab meat is going to end up getting its energy from oil until our society is powered by renewable sources of energy.

Not to mention the emissions from the back end of the hog which have been a huge problem for the environment - air and water - in places like North Carolina. Then there's the widespread use of low levels of antibiotics in hog barns which creates the perfect breeding ground for superbugs.