I brought this up once before and it got a negative reaction that surprised me. So I am prepared for more of the same. I am undeterred. So here it is: Cultured meat. I rather like the idea: growing meat in tissue culture.
From a (largely negative) article on Alternet:
Take some stem cells, or myoblasts, which are the precursors to muscle cells. Set them on "scaffolding" that they can attach to, like a flat sheet of plastic that the cells can later be slid off of. Put them in a "growth medium" -- some kind of fluid supplying the nutrients that blood would ordinarily provide. "Exercise" them regularly by administering electric currents or stretching the sheets of cells mechanically. Wait. Harvest. Eat. (Traci Hukill, AlterNet)
There are a lot of technical problems to solve and there are social, economic and political worries, too. But the same is true of the current way we produce animal protein -- from whole animal corpses. There would seem to be significant advantages. Perhaps easier to control pollution, more efficient way to produce protein since you aren't inefficiently making bone, brains, etc., possibility of engineering it so the fats are healthier, and, perhaps most importantly for many people (including us), no need to raise sentient animals, pen them up, feed them crap and then slaughter them in gigantic inhumane industrial killing machines.
Or so it seems to us. But lots of people have extremely negative reactions to the idea. For Mrs. R. it conjured up Soylent Green images of a dark future where everything is artificially produced in the bowels of some laboratory with unsavory connections and sources. "Not natural," was another of her reactions. Some are concerned with what this would mean to the larger balance that includes humans and food raisers:
Fred Kirschenmann of Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture just hopes there will be plenty of testing. "I'm not saying some of these new ideas can't be done and they won't work at some level, but every time we mess around with our ecological heritage there are always unintended side effects that come from it," he says. "We have a long history of unintended consequences.
"We've got all these animals out there right now," he adds, "and if we suddenly decide we don't want to raise them, what does that do to the larger ecology?"
It so happens I know Fred (although he doesn't know me as Revere) and we once had a spirited argument over whether it was ever permissible to destroy a living species. I got him to admit he didn't approve of wiping out smallpox because biodiversity trumps everything else. I'm guessing he would feel the same about H5N1. It goes without saying I don't agree. When last I raised this, one of my commenters was concerned it would further propel us into the arms of Agribusiness. Instead of the ones with the mammoth factory farms, they would not be the ones controlling the mammoth fermenters. The world will lose its ability to farm while the Big Guys will control all the food.
That would indeed be a bad outcome. But what if we could have our own little home fermenters or petri dishes? Instead of backyard farmers, we would become harvesters of our own backyard or basement vats. Want some chicken? Add a little dehydrated envelope of chicken muscle stem cells and nutrient and turn the dial to promote white meat or dark meat.
The big question is whether the seemingly instinctive aversion to "meatri" is just a matter of getting used to the idea or in fact a deep seated natural prejudice that dooms it from the outset. When I mentioned my surprise at the reaction to my first post and the tenor of the AlterNet piece, Mrs. R. said the surprising thing to her wasn't why people felt that way but why I didn't.
What do you think? And why? I am genuinely curious.
- Log in to post comments
As I've said on my blog, "I do not worry about eating GM food. I will eat GM food all day long, sim-meat grown in vats, whatever." You point out some arguments we keep hearing in favor of vegetarianism - it's mean to the animals, it's bad for the earth, cows farting add to global warming (ok you didn't add the one about the farting), etc. Kirschenmann's argument is kind of irritating after all the granola-crowd complaining that we should stop raising animals for the sake of the environment and now he's afraid it could harm the environment? I mean, people make up your minds, will NOTHING make you happy??? And do vegetarians not read the box on their sim-chicken that's made of mycoprotein grown in smelly vats? If they're worried about eating cultured, processed, "artificial" food, they've got a surprise coming. (I eat that stuff, by the way, since I have a vegetarian in my household.)
But people are always talking in extremes. I would envision "meatri" just giving people another option. There's no way it would bring about the end of animal-grown meat. Most people probably would not adopt it as part of their diet, for purely psychological reasons. In fact a majority of people would not believe "meatri" was actually meat; they just wouldn't understand it. What would be interesting is whether some vegetarians would go back to eating meat if they could get it grown in a dish?
I'm with you - I think it'd be a great idea. There is one ethical issue that worries me, though... have you ever read an Arthur C. Clarke story entitled "Food of the Gods"?
Corkscrew - Yes, I have..
The interesting thing from an ethical/environmental standpoint is that agriculture, even the most organic type, is very environmentally unfriendly. You take a natural ecosystem and turn it into a monoculture. Compared to the 100-year effects of AGW, the effects of agriculture even without pesticides and fertilizers is far worse. Virtually no temperate grassland ecosystems exist any more.
So eating vat grown meat - if it leads to a net decrease in farmed area - is far more environmetally firendly than being a vegetarian. And more animal-friendly.
Indeed, if ALL human food could be grown/synthesized in underground factories, then perhaps 90 percent of all the planet's land area could be turned into wilderness/national parkland. THAT is environmentally friendly.
> The big question is whether the seemingly
> instinctive aversion to "meatri" is just a
> matter of getting used to the idea or in
> fact a deep seated natural prejudice that
> dooms it from the outset.
The former, which will come about when meatri production becomes more economical than the traditional alternative, something that seems highly likely to occur in a big way given various present trends in energy and water resources, demographics, technology, climate and so on.
Having spent yesterday befouling the planet's air in the pursuit of the perfect rack of baby back ribs, I have to agree with B'n'G Gal, that meatri might supplement, but not supplant animal-grown meat. Unless you can get those little stem cells to grow bones for me to chew after I've carefully removed all the meat I can gnaw off of them.
OTOH, for the hotdog eaters of the world...
I do not see a problem with "meatri" but I wonder if it would really make sense economically or if it would really solve the problem that you seek to address.
Tissue culture is complicate and expensive. The cultures themselves are tricky and easily contaminated by bacteria and fungi. We try to alleviate some of those problems by adding antibiotics and antimycotics to the the media, but I can't see that happening on the kind of scale that would be needed to do this for food. Many types of cell culture also require expensive supplements like insulin, a variety of growth factors, and newborn calf serum.
That's not going to please the vegan crowd.
I'm a vegetarian, the sort that Bugs'n'Gas Gal loathes, so I'll speak up. Obviously I wouldn't be eating meatri, so questions about nutrients--or even flavor--wouldn't bother me. Grass-fed meat, wild game, factory farm meat all taste different (I haven't always been a vegetarian). I suppose folks would get used to meatri. But how dull, don't you think? Anyway, it wouldn't be my problem.
The hyperbole about even organic farming being "very" environmently unfriendly has some merit in some respects (for instance, if you take the view that humans are bad for the environment), but not enough. I suspect Andrew's confusing ranching with small, sustainable, diverse farms. But it does bring to mind the notion that out here, on the western side of the Revere's home Commonwealth, dairy farming is about the only thing holding developers at bay. As the farms go under, the McMansions sprout up like noxious weeds. So you can pick how you'd like your environment destroyed: sprawling housing developments with their lawns and paved roads and driveways; or farms, organic or otherwise.
The energy equation of meat on the hoof vs. meatri is tantalizing. How much energy to keep the cells incubating and to exercise those "muscles"? How much energy expended to develop the nutrients to make the meat have nutrional value?
More humane? Yes. But to judge from most of the comments here, that's not a consideration.
I admit, I do have a bit of an aversion to this idea. I'm not sure it's primal, I think it's more related to my "haven't these scientists read any science fiction?" response whenever they enthuse about how we will all have robot servants in the future, or whatnot.
Part of what I take issue with, though, is that I just don't trust the people developing this stuff, and I definitely don't trust the people who will be marketing it. Lots of testing, sure, just like they tested all the GM soy that kills baby rats before adding it to our food supply. And even if I believe they will be scrupulous with their testing, some effects and outcomes might only show up when whole populations were eating this new engineered food.
And then there's the fact that what is healthy and good for you changes every decade as more studies are done and more evidence emerges. Like everyone thought margarine was great. My grandparents ate it, no doubt because a doctor told them to, for heart disease. It was after most of them passed away (not due to the margarine, but after years of them dutifully eating it instead of butter) that it was learned that the trans-fatty acids created by partially hydrogenating vegetable oil to make it solid at room temperature are even worse for you than saturated fat. You might argue that this meat would be identical to hoof-raised, but just because we couldn't measure any differences yet doesn't mean they might not be there.
So yeah, I could see myself eating dish-grown meat, maybe... after it had been on the market for twenty years... after some longitudinal studies...
Although, I'm not sure that I could enjoy a juicy "meatri" filet, my opposition is political. If I were more idealistic, the "significant advantages" mentioned by Revere would be a great incentive to developing this type of food. But with our pro-business government, I can't imagine allowing agribusiness to grow my meat in a gruel of "growth medium". When profit takes precedence over ethics who knows what they'll be "engineering" to make this venture cost-efficient.
What problem about meat consumption are we trying to address with this new technology?
Is it cruelty to animals? I raise animals for meat and I am not cruel to them. I don't, for instance, "pen them up and feed them crap" -- they eat grass free choice and are fed small quantities of grain. There are humane ways to slaughter animals as well, such as the halal method of butchering.
Is it that meat contains some unhealthy fats? Well, grass-fed meat contains much more omega-3 fatty acids than grain-fed meat does, so choose your food wisely. Can scientists model "better" fats? Last time they tried this on a large scale, they came up with trans-fats (aka "partially hydrogenated" fats and oils) which kept the food from getting rancid for a longer shelf life, but it wasn't so good for us humans health-wise. The FDA now recommends we consume absolutely no trans-fats, much to the chagrin of the food industry. I am still trying to convince people that margarine ISN'T healthier than butter after all those years of indoctrination. Ironically, we have the French to thank for that product.
As for each of us having our little meat vats at home, that does seem charming, but where do those little packets of stem cells come from? Probably some big multinational. And, you can believe they'll be cutting corners on safety and cleanliness to save time and money just like the beef processors do now.
I also can't believe that the meatrie dish industry taken as a whole would cause less pollution. There would still be effluent from the meat vats, which I think would be similar in stench and toxicity to effluents from abottoirs, except perhaps for the manure, and one can use that for fertilizer. After all, you are making a similar product. All you would miss out on is a little bit of terrior, and millennia of connectedness to our planet. Then again, perhaps there is more to our food than scientists currently understand, a complexity developed over many thousands of years of co-evolution of our species and the species that we consume for food.
Lots of good and interesting comments. Here's more of what I had in mind. The meat proteins (maybe more than one and maybe also including fats, etc.) would be "manufactured" using bacteria or yeasts or some other biological system. We do this now with drugs and of course, bacteria make proteins to stay alive. The raw materials thus made would be formulated in various ways to be culturally acceptable. We also do this now when we make "meat substitutes" with soy or other vegetable protein. We also do large and small scale cultures when we make cheese and yogurt, etc.
The problem seems to have several parts to it. One is how the protein is made, via an animal or via bacteria or yeasts. In either case a biological system is making the protein (although I don't see why a cell free system couldn't be devised at some time to do it).
Then there is how the protein is "packaged" or presented as a foodstuff. This is a matter of acculturation and other social and economic processes. My daughter won't eat anything with tofu in it because I once said tofu was the stuff taken from between people's toes. She is now a married adult but can't get the image out of her head, even when the tofu is in a form she can't recognize. Just knowing it's there is enough for her. For some people meatri will never be acceptable, but over time, if that's what people eat, it won't be a problem.
Then there is the problem of who makes it. The justified suspicion of agribusiness gaining control of the process seems to be involved here, but of course they already are gaining control of the process with animal protein. I don't see why we couldn't have kitchen or backyard fermenters just like some people have backyard flocks of chickens or a cow or two. Lurking in the background always seems to be Soylent Green (if you haven't seen the movie, you should; it's a great flic, even if it has Charlton Heston in it). And obviously there are potentially ethically and environmentally noxious ways to go about it, but the don't seem necessary to me. And it's hard to think of worse ways than the ones we now employ in that regard.
I'm not a vegetarian. I happen to really like meat. That's why I'd like a more humane and environmentally friendly way of indulging this vice. Maybe this isn't it. thought I'd throw it out there for some discussion.
The last time I showed Soylent Green to my class of 8th grade students I had an irate fundamentalist parent ready to take me to the school board for "traumatizing" her child with a movie about cannibalism. Laughable. The thing to remember about that movie is its message: that humans had destroyed the environment so badly there was no farmland left on which to grow natural food. Meatri is just a proactive solution to the looming problem we face in the not too distant future. The world population keeps growing, and the arable farmland and potable water diminishing. We've overfished the oceans, so don't look there for protein, (although the aquaculture business is doing pretty well in Hawaii, so there may be some hope there.) Corax says: " As the farms go under, the McMansions sprout up like noxious weeds." Exactly. And they will continue to do so as the population grows and needs more places to live. So if H5N1 doesn't send the world population back to 1972 and give us a chance to rethink our ways, implement ZPG and other environmental protections like we should have back then, we would be wise to pursue the development of all kinds of factory farming or face mass starvation. Oh, and speaking of H5N1...(nice segue, huh?) what about Henry Niman's report of suspicious deaths of swine in China?
I have no problem in principle but fear that 'real' meat would then become outrageously expensive and I would be faced by a very limited range of choice. I already find it takes a great deal of effort to find good quality ingredients with real taste, supermarkets seem to be interested in appearance and shelf life not flavour. I have to admit I am often too lazy to drive into the city to find a decent butcher or veg. merchant (the two supermarkets in my local town mean there is no longer a choice) even there you can not by a good loaf of bread.
For all our 'humanness', we are essentially a technological creation. We owe our existence as a successful species to technology: agriculture, medicine, industry etc. We sure fight the idea as we move along through popular culture, but nevertheless we use it daily while we complain about it.
We will use meatri, we will bio-engineer ourselves, we will use available technology to survive because to not do it means the end of us. The debate is moot: not because I say it is, but because as living beings we are intrinsically wired to do whatever it takes to survive and procreate economically and successfully. Technology achieves that for us.
With the caveat of adequate planning and foresight, (something that remains to be seen, pun intended), I support anything that increases the efficiency and effectiveness of food production and delivery- meatri included.
Mr./Ms Corax, where'd you get the idea that I loathe vegetarians? I think some of my family members would take issue with that. But I have no judgment about them one way or the other. It's a free country, and we're free to consume whatever kind of extruded goo we want -- mycoprotein, meatri, who cares? I eat it all. Have a great dinner.
I vote a wholehearted "yes" for meatri - if you just HAVE to eat meat, this is a better option from an environmental standpoint than factory-raised, inhumanely killed animals. The secret is to get past all the negative mental connotations (it's not natural, it's too Soylent Green-ish, too sci-fi, etc.). Die-hard meat eaters who wouldn't touch fake meat (textured vegetable protein) with a 10 foot pole have scarfed up many a tasty dish I've cooked with TVP. And asked for seconds. (Hey Mikey, I think he likes it!) The moral: don't ask, don't tell!
Mr./Ms Corax, where'd you get the idea that I loathe vegetarians?
Your mocking tone. The way you generalize about what "vegetarians" ("granola-crowd") think and say, and what their values are. It's actually quite bigoted language.
Back to the subject at hand, here's a question: People being what they are, do you think a black market would develop for human "meatri"?
My fears of meatri are two fold. I am no fan of agribusiness in the sense that, as with all corporations, their allegiance is always going to be with the shareholders. What is good for business is not always good for the customers of that business. I have to admit though that I'm not so naive as to pretend we aren't already mostly at the mercy of agribusiness. How much corn syrup would the meat makers be adding to the vats to get the fake meat to taste better?
Secondly, I agree with the rib eating commenter, but my weakness in the meat world is the just right crispy skin from a perfectly roasted chicken. I'd hate to give up a lot of what I like about meat that I doubt could be engineered into vat grown meat. Could you grow a perfect ribeye that exuded it's own sauce when cooked exactly rare?
These however are my problems. For all our discussion, I see a future with more and more engineered foods, and my kids or their kids may one day be a little amazed that meat actually once came from animals.
Animals raised for slaughter are machines. (Meaning that is how we use them, even if we like to see them as creatures worthy of love and respect.) They turn grass, vegetable matter, other 'natural' things, and many 'unnatural' ones into protein we like to eat, in complicated chains - e.g. corn grown with fertilizer and tractors and pumped water to feed cattle to kill them to feed humans, to mention just one much discussed, and decried, example.
If some way of producing edible protein in a different kind of machine, more elegant, less wasteful, less intrusive, more respectful of 'nature', whatever that is, could be found, it would be a good thing.
I have no problem with the concept of "meatri" and it may work to solve many problems mentioned above.
However, right now I think that Homo sapiens are only getting further and further from their heritage as hunter/gatherers. We really do not know the consequences of this: most people living in cities with no knowledge of how to grow their own food or survive a night in cold weather. I fear we have become an extremely vulnerable species, most of us being dependent on the 1% who grow our food. Most have no understanding of the importance of preserving our soils and forests in order to maintain any sort of ecosystem that will support us and other species.
"Meatri" could be just another step of removal of us from understanding the importance of the biosphere that supports us, and could just further convince people that there is a "technological solution" to all our problems, which of course there is not, because in the end one runs into the laws of physics which define the amount of energy entering the planet as finite as well as the law of conservation of matter that says all our nutrients must be cycled through the ecosystem or we run out.
So though "meatri" may be a great idea, right now I am more interested in people being MORE in touch with the source of their natural foods. Raising and having to kill your own food animals surely makes us appreciate this food more, and therefore much less likely to waste it. Getting your hands dirty working the soils while growing vegetables helps one to appreciate the ecological footprint we all have just to feed us.
A vegetable garden and a few chickens are teaching me a lot. Jared Diamond is also helping with his books "Collapse" and "Guns, Germs and Steel". What we need now is a CLOSER connection to the natural world that makes our lives possible. As a species we need to get a deep, experiential understanding of our dependence on the earth, or we are in great danger of not understanding this, and thus becoming the engineers of its, and subsequently our own, destruction.
Oh my God, Green Eggs and Ham! Well for those of you who are environmentalists, there is the biggest reason for this. It will besides putting the beef industry out of business, clean up the streams in Colorado and many other states from blood and body parts, poop pollution. It will also remove all of the cow farts which I am told produces more greenhouse gas than any other source on the planet. It would also likely remove all oft the steroids and antibiotics from one food source. Its not such a bad idea. This particular GM doesnt bother me too terribly much. Kind of fucks with the idea of a T-Bone though Revere.
Progress?
I do not remember the source of this information, so perhaps it is not accurate, but I recall reading that a great many manufacturing processes, from industrial to biomedical, are heavily dependent on all sorts of derived substances from non-food cow parts.
With the assumption this is at least partially true, it seems certain that any phasing out of commercial meat farming would be a very slow process, one that would affect everyone.
I agree with Caia on the point of skepticism over the safety of meat produced in this manner, although I can imagine some pretty rigorous safety trials being done prior to, and over, the long process of phasing this stuff in. I would also expect negatively affected parties, such as agribusiness, to contribute to an overall closer scrutiny of meatri, if only as a delaying tactic for their own defense.
My guess is this type of food production will be the way of the future sooner or later. Now as for the likelihood of Revere's idea about this kind of thing on an individual/household scale, I have some doubts. I am not a chemist or biologist, so perhaps it is only my relative ignorance talking; but with every material even conceivable as a precursor for making drugs/bombs/wmds/bio-"terra" being under close scrutiny by law enforcement (except for gasoline, of course), this seems unlikely to me. PZ Myers wrote a post a while back about how a company tried to recreate the old Mr. Wizard chemistry set, but nearly every chemical it originally included was now restricted in some manner.
Even though this is a hypothetical, I like it on so many levels.
First, any new approach results in a comparison to the old and sharp scrutiny. I'm not sure the general meat eating masses want to know what's in their food. Books like Fast Food Nation and Carnivore's Dilemma paint such a grotesque picture that they are not in the mainstream by necessity and ignorance. Having worked with ~1000 women on food and exercise, I wuold say that the number one thing about food is that is the ultimate life source. That being said, how people 'do' food is, from my experience, how they do life. The "I can't be bothered to actually know what's in the food I'm eating or how it's been prepared so long as it sustains me" way of thinking is beyond pervasive. Meatri (soon to be added to a Webster's near you) would have some people actively engaged and others actively disengaging themselves.
Second and I think most importantly...whether agri-business succeeds or not with something like this ultimately boils down to what many other posters have talked about, taste. If it tastes good, people will eat it. Period. A friend makes fat pill - Oreos mashed up, mixed with cream cheese dipped in chocolate. We eat them. The masses eat so many things based taste that would probablhy have them wretching if they actually knew how it was made.
Personally, I'm a tinkerer. I would love to go over to my friends place as see how he's 'brewing' his tri-tip. What ratios of fat cells is he putting in to get good marbling? We could compare our electricity notes on mitochodrial density. Men are proud of their lawns, their BBQs, why not proud of the meat they MADE. What better way to celebrate your labors on Labor Day than with a meatri BBQ!!!
Darin...let us not forget texture. Equal in importance to taste. It is hard to imagine in vitro meat products being, well...meaty. I envision a sort of sloppy mushy ground beef, sort of like meatloaf before you add the breadcrumbs. It will, I am sure, be awhile before meat eaters are truly accepting of such stuff. However when it becomes necessary, when there aren't other choices out there, they'll eat it. They'll just have to get over the rare steak on the bone craving.