Harvey Wallbanger Posted June 21, 2006 Share Posted June 21, 2006 ...and serve this stuff. from Wired news: Test Tube Meat Nears Dinner Table What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor? Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner. Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings within the next few years. Currently involved in identifying the type of stem cells that will multiply the most to create larger quantities of meat within a bioreactor, the team hopes to have concrete results by 2009. The 2 million euro ($2.5 million) Dutch-government-funded project began in April 2005. The work is one arm of a worldwide research effort focused on growing meat from cell cultures on an industrial scale. "All of the technology exists today to make ground meat products in vitro," says Paul Kosnik, vice president of engineering at Tissue Genesis in Hawaii. Kosnik is growing scaffold-free, self-assembled muscle. "We believe the goal of a processed meat product is attainable in the next five years if funding is available and the R&D is pursued aggressively." A single cell could theoretically produce enough meat to feed the world's population for a year. But the challenge lies in figuring out how to grow it on a large scale. Jason Matheny, a University of Maryland doctoral student and a director of New Harvest, a nonprofit organization that funds research on in vitro meat, believes the easiest way to create edible tissue is to grow "meat sheets," which are layers of animal muscle and fat cells stretched out over large flat sheets made of either edible or removable material. The meat can then be ground up or stacked or rolled to get a thicker cut. "You'd need a bunch of industrial-size bioreactors," says Matheny. "One to produce the growth media, one to produce cells, and one that produces the meat sheets. The whole operation could be under one roof." The advantage, he says, is you avoid the inefficiencies and bottlenecks of conventional meat production. No more feed grain production and processing, breeders, hatcheries, grow-out, slaughter or processing facilities. "To produce the meat we eat now, 75 (percent) to 95 percent of what we feed an animal is lost because of metabolism and inedible structures like skeleton or neurological tissue," says Matheny. "With cultured meat, there's no body to support; you're only building the meat that eventually gets eaten." The sheets would be less than 1 mm thick and take a few weeks to grow. But the real issue is the expense. If cultivated with nutrient solutions that are currently used for biomedical applications, the cost of producing one pound of in vitro meat runs anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000. Matheny believes in vitro meat can compete with conventional meat by using nutrients from plant or fungal sources, which could bring the cost down to about $1 per pound. If successful, artificially grown meat could be tailored to be far healthier than any type of farm-grown meat. It's possible to stuff if full of heart-friendly omega-3 fatty acids, adjust the protein or texture to suit individual taste preferences and screen it for food-borne diseases. But will it really catch on? The Food and Drug Administration has already barred food products involving cloned animals from the market until their safety has been tested. There's also the yuck factor. "Cultured meat isn't natural, but neither is yogurt," says Matheny. "And neither, for that matter, is most of the meat we eat. Cramming 10,000 chickens in a metal shed and dosing them full of antibiotics isn't natural. I view cultured meat like hydroponic vegetables. The end product is the same, but the process used to make it is different. Consumers accept hydroponic vegetables. Would they accept hydroponic meat?" Taste is another unknown variable. Real meat is more than just cells; it has blood vessels, connective tissue, fat, etc. To get a similar arrangement of cells, lab-grown meat will have to be exercised and stretched the way a real live animal's flesh would. Kosnik is working on a way to create muscle grown without scaffolds by culturing the right combination of cells in a 3-D environment with mechanical anchors so that the cells develop into long fibers similar to real muscle. The technology to grow a juicy steak, however, is still a decade or so away. No one has yet figured out how to grow blood vessels within tissue. "In the meantime, we can use existing technologies to satisfy the demand for ground meat, which is about half of the meat we eat (and a $127 billion global market)," says Matheny. Disgust. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HydrogenPeroxide Posted June 21, 2006 Share Posted June 21, 2006 heh, 'meat sheets'. is that like beef curtains? thats awesome and so disgusting at the same time. i imagine the meat sheets to look like giant slices of baloney. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
count chocula Posted June 21, 2006 Share Posted June 21, 2006 bacon doors Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Some1 Posted June 21, 2006 Share Posted June 21, 2006 Well if this shit goes down all those Peta fucker are going to commit suicide because they have nothing to live for anymore. MEAT IS MURDER!!! No nigga meat is a plant now! WE BE GROWNIN DAT SHIT! We are going to become over run with farm animals and they are going to take over the earth now that there is no reason to eat them...Shit I am going to go out and take a bat to a long horns head just so the rest of them know that FOR NOW I AM STILL IN CONTROL! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HESHIANDET Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 haha, eating abortions Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madsencarl Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 i can't wait 'til vegetarians hear about this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Some1 Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 I am going to punch them in the face over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oliver Clothesoff Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 ROFL LOL PIB <-----piss in butt Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
guerillaeye Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 and those fuckers will still inject the meat with all kinds of antibiotics and hormones. it wouldnt be the FDA if they didnt. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Some1 Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 Are you anti meat this is a serious question directed to guerillaeye Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
guerillaeye Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 ill tear a cow the fuck up nigga.. what the fuck of it! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
guerillaeye Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 i still dont agree with all the shit they pump into the cattle while keeping it couped up in a box untill its fat enough to eat. that shit is mean and sad. i would prefer that the meat that i do eat be organic and free-range... that it got to enjoy life somewhat before it ended up in my belly. but that my personal preference... and if you were about to tear into me if i was a veggie, fuck you if i was. you dont see any vegitarians pushing their "meat is murder" shit in this thread. to each their own, nigga. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Some1 Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 I think the quality control they have is good Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
makeithappennn Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 I eat children. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AyeBee Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 i still dont agree with all the shit they pump into the cattle while keeping it couped up in a box untill its fat enough to eat. that shit is mean and sad. i would prefer that the meat that i do eat be organic and free-range... that it got to enjoy life somewhat before it ended up in my belly. but that my personal preference Exactly Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harvey Wallbanger Posted June 22, 2006 Author Share Posted June 22, 2006 By the way, I'm a vegetarian, but not the pushy type. To each his own, nah'mean? But there's no way I'd eat this stuff. It raises interesting questions for vegetarians who don't eat meat because of religious or ethical reasons, which is why I posted this. But I just find the idea of eating muscles gross, just like eating feces, or brussels sprouts. Even if it never walked around, had sex, or was treated inhumanely, a 10x10 sheet of muscle from a laboratory still doesn't appeal to me. I'd be interested to hear Symbols weigh in on this one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madsencarl Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 tastes good but. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shameless self promotion Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harvey Wallbanger Posted June 22, 2006 Author Share Posted June 22, 2006 PEOPLE! What a wierd word to see spelled out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Some1 Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 Vegetarians are weird... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harvey Wallbanger Posted June 22, 2006 Author Share Posted June 22, 2006 How so? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CACashRefund Posted June 22, 2006 Share Posted June 22, 2006 Test Tube Meat Nears Dinner Table lolz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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