Scientists create meat in a vat.
There are a bunch of caveats. The meat is not currently edible--they need to figure out how to "excercise" it to give it muscle tone. And it still seems to use some sort of meat brother for nutrients, which kind of defeats the purpose.
But it looks like vat meat may eventually be a reality, allowing vegans to indulge in juicy steaks and delicious chicken breasts without any intervening cruelty to animals. And if the environmental impact was lower than farming--as the article implies--it's an even bigger win. PETA may someday be a staid old lobbying group that spends most of its time carping about how people treat their housepets.
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We'll see. There is plenty of time before FAA approval for vegans to figure out why this is the latest abomination.
I rate the odds of this being found airworthy at 0%.
That got a pretty good laugh.
Being a mature individual, I curled my lip at your criticism of what is obviously a typo.
I then, being not much more than a big child, laughed until I wept...
Most likely it was grown in standard cell culture media, which contains about 10% fetal calf serum. Not too hard to see why this would still be objectionable to vegans (Wiki can help for how FCS is collected). If they can substitute donor calf serum (free range serum?), or a chemically defined media, those objections may be allayed.
I predict an amusing civil war among vegans over this issue.
Yup, like environmentalists and nuclear power. It will separate the ones who are honest about their motives from the ones who aren't.
Bill McKibben ominously predicted this 20 years ago in "The End of Nature". So there's one prediction of his that has almost come to pass.
The "flaccid and unmarbled" problems seem to plague every one of these efforts, so steak and tenderloin cuts may be a ways off as yet. Upshot: No further work required for the immediate manufacture of reduced-cruely hotdogs!
flaccid and unmarbled? Perhaps they can inject it with Viagra?
Just a thought.
Oh nonsense. Being a vegan is a mimetic autoimmune disorder among people without enough real problems about which to worry, or who have a difficulty identifying the real sources of their existential anxieties.
If you took away the "animal cruelty" issue, they'd just have to find something else to fret about masochistically.
Refusal to end a sentence with a preposition is a similar autoimmune disorder, and one I more just as quickly tire of.
I think you're also tarring quite a few vegans with the wrong brush there, though your comment is funny enough that I wish it were unambiguously accurate.
>allowing vegans to indulge in juicy steaks and delicious chicken breasts without any intervening cruelty to animals.
They would then need to find some other manner of self-denial to enable them to feel virtuous.
Old news... Scientists have been able to grow meat tissue in labs for years. But it's not quite yet something worth eating for a variety of reasons and it can't be done cheaply in large quantities yet.
I despair at times. How pathetic to think "juicy steaks and delicious chicken breasts" are the height of carnivorous delight.
True. This technique needs to produce ..... BACON!
and fois gras and venison and marrow bones and butter, among other things.
Wow....lots of vitriol here (some joking, some not so) towards vegans, and lots of stereotyping. Just let them be, for crying out loud.
But vegans want the vitriol. It unites them and justifies their disdain and contempt for meat-eaters and the world generally.
Which reminds of an awesome photo someone recently linked to (though the photo is old): http://www.flickr.com/photos/passiveaggressive/3642661392/sizes/o/
> But vegans want the vitriol.
You are wrong.
But vegans want the vitriol.
If you really think so, don't give it to them!
That's good news for a share of vegans. But at least some people choose a vegan diet due to health concerns (rightly or wrongly).
Personally, I'm sensible to the "cruelty to animals" argument when it comes to guaranteeing that said animals are not in permanent suffering from birth to death. I've got no problem with death itself.
So, killing chickens by the millions is fine by me. Stuffing more than 30 chickens on a 9 square-feet area (while beak trimming them so they don't eat each other) is another thing entirely.
Well, this will certainly help vegan along in their campaign to render domestic food animals extinct. The car wiped out the draft horse and vat meat will do in all the cattle, pigs, chickens etc. For thousands of years we've breed them to be our symbiotes and now we're going to let them just die off in the name of giving ourselves a self-rightous happy.
I sure hope they never try to save me from some horrible fate they imagine for me.
Yes. Opposing meat-eating is species genocide. PETA will go on. It just has to change sides.
it is demonstrable that this meat is less nutrient-filled than pastured meat that got to run around and eat a healthy diet before being turned into yummy.
so i don't see this vat-meat being more than a cute trick.
Sure. It's also possible to demonstrate that corn that was raised in ideally balanced nutritive soil will none the less give you pellagra if you don't apply caustic treatments or get niacin from vitamin enrichment or other grains. That why we, like, do those things.
Hmmm ... we've got Obama bashing gays, tossing the anti-war freaks under the bus, climate scientists shooting at each other and now the great Vegan Civil War to look forward to.
Pass the popcorn baby ... paradigms they are a shiftin'.
Given that you are a bit of a loon, I kinda wonder whether you are really unemployed or not. But if you are, shouldn't you be more worried about finding a job?
Don't waste you money on popcorn. Save it to cover your transportation expenses to job interviews.
You really don't know the first thing about me and it's obvious.
I really don't. But I'll bet there are many others I don't know anything about who find the current unemployment numbers as entertaining as you apparently find gay rights and AGW.
/sanctimony
I don't think it's entertaining that the President of the United States hates gay people. I think that's terrible. Don't you?
And he clearly hates them. How else could you explain that before the election he promised them he'd end the military policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and now he's extending it.
Only someone who hates gay people would hold out hope to them, only to snatch it away like a piece of candy from a baby. Darth Obama isn't just advocating a position - first, he sets up gays to give them hope before he then actively crushes that hope. That's grade A evil not seen since ... well, Dick Cheney.
He did the same thing to his anti-war supporters. He told them he'd end the illegal wars. And now he's authorizing the use of Hellfire missiles in Pakistan to murder women and children who's only crime is being poor.
Darth Obama first raised their hopes for ending the war ... and what does he do once elected? He increases the number of troops deployed. That's just dastardly to get people's hopes up and then to crush them like so many ants under his feet. Even Dick Cheney wasn't that evil. At least Dick Cheney didn't lead you down the primrose path before he bent you over and shoved it up your keister sans lube.
So, just to clarify, I see nothing entertaining about this Presidency at all.
But then again, maybe I'm able to see things that you cannot yet discern because of your blind loyalty.
I'd like to say that I'd pay a premium for the real thing, but if vat-meat (or "veat") only costs $2 or $3 per pound for a decent steak and the real thing costs $10 per pound, then I'd probably go for the fake stuff. Besides, with nationalized health care on the way I'll just have the rest of you suckers pay for my cancer treatments.
it's much more likely to be the other way round, hence why i think it is probably going to remain a cute parlor trick.
although there is a chance someone can be bullied into subsidizing vat-meat, as with all the other unhealthy foodstuffs americans currently subsist upon.
Think about this:
According to the article, they can make muscle tissue, but they need a way to tone it up so it can be cooked and consumed.
Soon, they'll invent something to stretch this muscle between two points, and then use a motor of some sort to "exercise" it and give it tone...
Next, they'll figure out that if they could just find a way to do this wirelessly, it would be more convenient.
Then, it would really be cool if they could find a way to stretch it in different ways and make the textures different for different types of dishes so they'll invent other types of "skeletal" forms to use to stretch it.
Then, someone will say that it's cool and all, but we're wasting too much electricity with all these forms stretching and toning all this meat for everyone to eat. Wouldn't it be even better if we could find a way to make it without using external power?
So someone would come up with a system that you feed a fuel that's cheap, plentiful, and renewable - say *corn* or *grass* for instance, and it will use that fuel to power internal systems that will exercise the meat for you.
It will take us a hundred years to get to this point and we will call this invention:
A COW!
So what we really need to invent is a masochistic cow.
For those PETA members concerned with the cruelty to animals of meat production and consumption, I suggest Soylent Green. It's delicious!!
But it's, it's made of...of......
Well, it's certainly not made of animals (in the PETA sense), and that's all that really matters.