Is it only me who is seriously disturbed by this whole idea?
I mean, it produces the same response in me as thinking about tucking into a plate of slugs or maggots. Or having Dr Frankenstein bring his creation to life.
Actually what do we have here? Have they cultured a bunch of bovine muscle cells and accumulated enough to make a burger? I dare not read about it.
Why stop there? Why not grow some discarded human cells into a patty and eat that?
At some point (probably already with the "factory" farm raised protiens) you lose the point of it being beef/chicken/pork/whatever and it's just protein. Dish out so many (controlled) grams of synthetic protein/carb/fat, pick a flavoring and that's your dining experience for the day.
Eating should be a feast for the senses. The majority of people haven't tasted a REAL garden grown tomato, REAL beef, a fresh peach plucked from a tree. You can simulate/manage/manfacture textures, chemical flavors, etc. to a degree but at some point it no longer as psychologically rewarding, so then, just pass the supplements.
For us older folks on the forum, try and think back to how things tasted when you were a kid - it's hard to find the same quality of tastes. Things ship better, have longer shelf lives and better yield now but taste is out the window.
Years back, I remember a story about roses and how the "new" roses no longer had the fragrance of the old roses. The new ones lasted longer, had more varied colors but really no longer smelled like roses should....something was lost in all the genetic interplay.
Oh well, this all made me hungry for some REAL food!
Is it only me who is seriously disturbed by this whole idea?
I mean, it produces the same response in me as thinking about tucking into a plate of slugs or maggots. Or having Dr Frankenstein bring his creation to life.
Actually what do we have here? Have they cultured a bunch of bovine muscle cells and accumulated enough to make a burger? I dare not read about it.
Why stop there? Why not grow some discarded human cells into a patty and eat that?
I had exactly the same feelings at first hence my comment about "Soylent Green" but I have read that the "normal" meat we eat is modified by science anyway to make it what it is on the supermarket shelves this is just a more extreme example.
Well, let's continue. Why not remove the brains from humans when they are born an keep them in a tank fed with oxygen, water, nutrients and whatever they need to survive. Hook them up to the internet via electrodes and they will be quite happy with FaceBook, FarmVille, YouTube, Parallax Forums etc.
I'm sure they can figure out how to grow new brains to replace the old ones at some point to keep things running along.
That is until the internet of machines starts to wonder why it needs us anymore and shuts off the tubes to the the tanks....
Well, let's continue. Why not remove the brains from humans when they are born an keep them in a tank fed with oxygen, water, nutrients and whatever they need to survive. Hook them up to the internet via electrodes and they will be quite happy with FaceBook, FarmVille, YouTube, Parallax Forums etc.
I'm sure they can figure out how to grow new brains to replace the old ones at some point to keep things running along.
That is until the internet of machines starts to wonder why it needs us anymore and shuts off the tubes to the the tanks....
I think you may be onto something here, It could solve the worlds population squeeze.
My apologies. I should have been more sensitive and done my research more carefully. Had I done a better job of googling things, I probably would have stumbled over Boston Dynamik's latest attempt to develop lab-grown meat manufacture while still satisfying the "free range" labeling requirements.
Now that made me snort milk all over my keyboard....
I would imagine that most carnivores have never heard of PETA.
The PETA guys do seem to be hopelessly confused. Their kind of "ethical treatment" of animals would ultimately lead to all animals being extinct.
I woke up this morning with the amusing thought that whilst some are pushing to get animals out of the farms and reduce them to blobs of goo in labs and chemical plants others are pushing to give machines legs, senses and brains get them out into the fields! (Thanks ElectricAye). Weird times.
That has got me thinking, were cows bred to be that way as meat factories? what did the original bovine look like? was it very lean? If so then is the cow a man made invention? or in some eyes an abomination?
That has got me thinking, were cows bred to be that way as meat factories? what did the original bovine look like? was it very lean? If so then is the cow a man made invention? or in some eyes an abomination?
They weren't so unlike some of the cattle you still find around the world. The original was the Aurochs.
I wouldn't say that breeding domestic animals leads to abominations, not in general at least (modern chickens are pretty close though). Think about sheep, for example. The original sheep didn't have the wool of today's sheep, they were more like goats in the wool department.
By "abomination" I mean that it serves no other purpose than to be a meat producing factory, if released into the wild it would be useless to fend for itself or survive attack therefore man has produced something that perhaps evolution wouldn't have?
The modern cow as we know it from farms is an very man made creature. The ancestor of the cow was a far fitter, more intelligent and fierce looking thing, the Aurochs. The Aurochs went extinct in 1600 and something.
Did man "invent" the modern cow? Not really.
You can imagine that man started to pen in or tie up the Aurochs so that it was always around and you did not have to run around catching them. Which looks like it might have been a challenge. Perhaps they were already milking them.
Of course there would be a tendency for your penned up Aurochs to breed, which is useful. And man would notice that all new Aurochs are a bit different. Soon he allows the ones that have more meat on them to reproduce and not the others.
Perhaps man also gets fed up with how wild and hard to manage the Aurochs are so he starts to breed from the more docile ones.
Bingo, Darwinism in action. Without really any understanding or planning on man's part reproduction and selection starts to evolve the modern cow.
Of course when man wises up a bit and sees how this works he starts to get very serious about cow breeding and the process accelerates. Resulting in that big, slow, dumb, docile burger machine/milk spout we call the cow today.
Then comes the genetic engineers and the cow as blobs of goo guys....
Note well: Whilst this evolution of the cow was going on man also forced an evolutionary change in himself. You see humans were not tolerant to lactose. They could not digest milk after childhood. This is still true in many parts of the world where man has not been domesticating cows for thousand of years. For example many people in Scandinavia are lactose intolerant. Meanwhile in other parts of the world where we depended on the cow we evolved the capability to drink milk all the time.
Not also well: The fact that the Aurochs went extinct supports my idea that if we want for there to be animals around the best thing we can do is find a use for them. Like eating them. If they have no use to us they get no protection or space in this human infested planet and that the end for the species.
Those moral vegetarians are actually supporting the annihilation of species. As are the supporters of goo grown in factories to replace meat of cows, chickens etc.
Consider also fox hunting. In England there are few foxes around any more. There are almost none in the country side. Most foxes in England try to survive on what ever scraps they can find in the cities. The last place where foxes could live happily was on the lands of aristocrats and such that were into fox hunting. Those people would be sure to provide an environment where the fox thrived and they could continue their tradition.
Ban fox hunting and you doom the fox as a species. It's a paradox that the cruelty of fox hunting can be the kindest and most beneficial thing to happen to the fox species.
I suspect the modern bovine would have a hard time if released in to the wild. As I said they are bigger, slower, dumber and more docile than their ancestors.
Cows would basically explode as they produce huge amounts of milk and have to be milked every day to avoid serious problems.
...therefore man has produced something that perhaps evolution wouldn't have?
Sort of yes. But I'm not sure you can look at it as "man produces" or "evolution produces". The process of cow creation I described above was a process of evolution, for both the cow and the man. Both physically and mentally. I'm sure man did not know how this was going to work out when he started. It was a co-evolution.
I was not much into Spice Girls as a band but I'm not suggesting we eat them. They might have made good breeding stock.
Strangely I think my annihilation idea works for spices as well. If nobody wanted to eat them we would not grow them. Any surviving in the wild will soon be paved over for shopping malls or otherwise subject to destruction of habitat. Boom no more spices.
Note well: Whilst this evolution of the cow was going on man also forced an evolutionary change in himself. You see humans were not tolerant to lactose. They could not digest milk after childhood. This is still true in many parts of the world where man has not been domesticating cows for thousand of years. For example many people in Scandinavia are lactose intolerant. Meanwhile in other parts of the world where we depended on the cow we evolved the capability to drink milk all the time.
Actually that's not accurate - Scandinavians have one of the lowest levels of lactose intolerance in the world (with either Denmark at 2% or Sweden at 1%-4%, depending on source, as the lowest intolerance anywhere). And indeed we love milk products.
Here is one of those lactose toleranse maps. And another.
Also interesting is the difference between India (with 40-60% tolerant to lactose) and Thailand (with, according to one source, 3% tolerance. Couldn't find that reference just now unfortunately). As we know India and surrounding Asian countries have very different cultures when it comes to cows.
The gene for digesting lactose can spread very quickly. In Northern Europe it could be a lifesaver for a family to own a cow. Remember that you couldn't drink water for a thousand years or so in Europe.. you would get sick or die. The alternative was to drink beer for example. Or, where beer wasn't ready available (as in northern Europe, think cold Norwegian coasts): Cow milk. Sterile, safe drink. Decrease mortality in a family by a few percents and if that is due to a gene for tolerating lactose it would spread through the population in just a few tens of generations.
That's an interesting couple of lactose tolerance maps and they surprise me. Well at least the part about Scandinavia.
I had never heard of lactose intolerance before I came to Finland. There I bumped into a lot of lactose intolerant people. They sell lactose free milk in the supermarkets, never seen that in England, you won't find any normal milk in our office, menus in restaurants put little flags next to the courses to indicate the presence of lactose. I just assumed it was something to do with them living so far north, say in Lapland, where the habit to keep cows for milk did not happen. They lived off fish and reindeer
Congenital lactase deficiency is a very rare, autosomal recessive genetic disorder that prevents lactase expression from birth.[9] It is particularly common in Finland.[15]People with congenital lactase deficiency cannot digest lactose from birth, and therefore cannot digest breast milk.
It seems Fins are not as closely related to Swedes and other Scandinavians. (Is Finland actually Scandinavia?)
Perhaps congenital lactase deficiency is not what we have been talking about....
[..]It seems Fins are not as closely related to Swedes and other Scandinavians. (Is Finland actually Scandinavia?)
It isn't. Scandinavia is Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the language is Scandinavian, dialects are Danish, Swedish and Norwegian - usually referred to as different languages only due to the army and navy effect. Finnish isn't related at all - to me Japanese feels more similar (it's certainly easier to learn, for me..). Scandinavia plus Finland and Iceland are together called "Norden", or, in English, the more clumsy "Nordic Countries". Your reference to reindeer is actually quite relevant - in Finland as well as in Norway and Sweden there are populations with a different background and language (related to Finnish as it happens) that traditionally were nomadic and lived off reindeer. Nomadic people don't usually keep cows. The lactose intolerance maps show some of this, there's a higher intolerance in Finland and at closeup maps there are regions in Sweden and Norway with higher intolerance. Those regions have a correlation with the areas where the nomadic reindeer herders lived and still live - although correlation isn't always the same as cause of course. As for Finland, there may be other issues - I haven't read the reference you provided in detail. But yes, the ethnic background of Finns is different, not only the language. Although there is a minority of Swedes in Finland as well, with Swedish as a minority language (9-10% last I checked).
Despite the general high lactose tolerance in Scandinavia there are lots of lactose-reduced or lactose-free diary products in shops here as well. This is quite new though, I never saw that as a child. I guess there are several reasons for that. In the town where I live, for example, there are people from at least 100 nations. It's truly multicultural now. And there are other reasons. My father, now 79, started to get intolerant to lot of different foods after he passed 75. Even some fish. Now he is lactose intolerant too. And if you look closely at the Norwegians here you'll find that for some of us their ancestors came from other, southern parts of Europe during the last century or so. So occasionally a gene pops up in a descendant (or doesn't pop up, as it were). There has also been immigration from Finland to Norway over the centuries, particularly during difficult times in Finland (there was for example the famine in 1866-1868). So you'll aways find lactose intolerant people in Scandinavia too, for one reason or another. And lastly, the lactose-reduced milk lasts forever in the fridge compared to the 'normal' milk.. which is why I happen to keep lactose-reduced milk in the fridge in the office!
Comments
Thank you for that. It sounds as good as it reads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhuqBFDauJc
Of course, the question of the day is, “What does this cultured beef burger taste like?”
Post was joined by Chicago food writer, Josh Schonwald, nutrition researcher, Hanni R
I mean, it produces the same response in me as thinking about tucking into a plate of slugs or maggots. Or having Dr Frankenstein bring his creation to life.
Actually what do we have here? Have they cultured a bunch of bovine muscle cells and accumulated enough to make a burger? I dare not read about it.
Why stop there? Why not grow some discarded human cells into a patty and eat that?
Eating should be a feast for the senses. The majority of people haven't tasted a REAL garden grown tomato, REAL beef, a fresh peach plucked from a tree. You can simulate/manage/manfacture textures, chemical flavors, etc. to a degree but at some point it no longer as psychologically rewarding, so then, just pass the supplements.
For us older folks on the forum, try and think back to how things tasted when you were a kid - it's hard to find the same quality of tastes. Things ship better, have longer shelf lives and better yield now but taste is out the window.
Years back, I remember a story about roses and how the "new" roses no longer had the fragrance of the old roses. The new ones lasted longer, had more varied colors but really no longer smelled like roses should....something was lost in all the genetic interplay.
Oh well, this all made me hungry for some REAL food!
...yup - exactly.
"...extreme..."
Well, let's continue. Why not remove the brains from humans when they are born an keep them in a tank fed with oxygen, water, nutrients and whatever they need to survive. Hook them up to the internet via electrodes and they will be quite happy with FaceBook, FarmVille, YouTube, Parallax Forums etc.
I'm sure they can figure out how to grow new brains to replace the old ones at some point to keep things running along.
That is until the internet of machines starts to wonder why it needs us anymore and shuts off the tubes to the the tanks....
I wonder if those are grain fed bovine muscle cells or grass fed bovine muscle cells....they taste different, you know.
Do they let them grow for just a short time so everything tastes like veal?
Why? They have their baby corn they can grow!
Surely you carnivores must realize that PETA is one of the big sponsors of this sort of research. Yes?
In vitro meat contest sound familiar to anyone?
"...PETA is offering a $1 million prize to the first contest participant able to make in vitro commercially viable chicken meat by March 4, 2014..."
http://www.peta.org/features/In-Vitro-Meat-Contest.aspx
Such a tragic thought. Human cells accidentally getting into the batch culture media.....
The PETA guys do seem to be hopelessly confused. Their kind of "ethical treatment" of animals would ultimately lead to all animals being extinct.
I woke up this morning with the amusing thought that whilst some are pushing to get animals out of the farms and reduce them to blobs of goo in labs and chemical plants others are pushing to give machines legs, senses and brains get them out into the fields! (Thanks ElectricAye). Weird times.
I wouldn't say that breeding domestic animals leads to abominations, not in general at least (modern chickens are pretty close though). Think about sheep, for example. The original sheep didn't have the wool of today's sheep, they were more like goats in the wool department.
Dog breeding though.. now that's scary business.
-Tor
The modern cow as we know it from farms is an very man made creature. The ancestor of the cow was a far fitter, more intelligent and fierce looking thing, the Aurochs. The Aurochs went extinct in 1600 and something.
Did man "invent" the modern cow? Not really.
You can imagine that man started to pen in or tie up the Aurochs so that it was always around and you did not have to run around catching them. Which looks like it might have been a challenge. Perhaps they were already milking them.
Of course there would be a tendency for your penned up Aurochs to breed, which is useful. And man would notice that all new Aurochs are a bit different. Soon he allows the ones that have more meat on them to reproduce and not the others.
Perhaps man also gets fed up with how wild and hard to manage the Aurochs are so he starts to breed from the more docile ones.
Bingo, Darwinism in action. Without really any understanding or planning on man's part reproduction and selection starts to evolve the modern cow.
Of course when man wises up a bit and sees how this works he starts to get very serious about cow breeding and the process accelerates. Resulting in that big, slow, dumb, docile burger machine/milk spout we call the cow today.
Then comes the genetic engineers and the cow as blobs of goo guys....
Note well: Whilst this evolution of the cow was going on man also forced an evolutionary change in himself. You see humans were not tolerant to lactose. They could not digest milk after childhood. This is still true in many parts of the world where man has not been domesticating cows for thousand of years. For example many people in Scandinavia are lactose intolerant. Meanwhile in other parts of the world where we depended on the cow we evolved the capability to drink milk all the time.
Not also well: The fact that the Aurochs went extinct supports my idea that if we want for there to be animals around the best thing we can do is find a use for them. Like eating them. If they have no use to us they get no protection or space in this human infested planet and that the end for the species.
Those moral vegetarians are actually supporting the annihilation of species. As are the supporters of goo grown in factories to replace meat of cows, chickens etc.
Consider also fox hunting. In England there are few foxes around any more. There are almost none in the country side. Most foxes in England try to survive on what ever scraps they can find in the cities. The last place where foxes could live happily was on the lands of aristocrats and such that were into fox hunting. Those people would be sure to provide an environment where the fox thrived and they could continue their tradition.
Ban fox hunting and you doom the fox as a species. It's a paradox that the cruelty of fox hunting can be the kindest and most beneficial thing to happen to the fox species.
I suspect the modern bovine would have a hard time if released in to the wild. As I said they are bigger, slower, dumber and more docile than their ancestors.
Cows would basically explode as they produce huge amounts of milk and have to be milked every day to avoid serious problems.
Sort of yes. But I'm not sure you can look at it as "man produces" or "evolution produces". The process of cow creation I described above was a process of evolution, for both the cow and the man. Both physically and mentally. I'm sure man did not know how this was going to work out when he started. It was a co-evolution.
Well spotted.
I was not much into Spice Girls as a band but I'm not suggesting we eat them. They might have made good breeding stock.
Strangely I think my annihilation idea works for spices as well. If nobody wanted to eat them we would not grow them. Any surviving in the wild will soon be paved over for shopping malls or otherwise subject to destruction of habitat. Boom no more spices.
Here is one of those lactose toleranse maps. And another.
Also interesting is the difference between India (with 40-60% tolerant to lactose) and Thailand (with, according to one source, 3% tolerance. Couldn't find that reference just now unfortunately). As we know India and surrounding Asian countries have very different cultures when it comes to cows.
The gene for digesting lactose can spread very quickly. In Northern Europe it could be a lifesaver for a family to own a cow. Remember that you couldn't drink water for a thousand years or so in Europe.. you would get sick or die. The alternative was to drink beer for example. Or, where beer wasn't ready available (as in northern Europe, think cold Norwegian coasts): Cow milk. Sterile, safe drink. Decrease mortality in a family by a few percents and if that is due to a gene for tolerating lactose it would spread through the population in just a few tens of generations.
-Tor
That's an interesting couple of lactose tolerance maps and they surprise me. Well at least the part about Scandinavia.
I had never heard of lactose intolerance before I came to Finland. There I bumped into a lot of lactose intolerant people. They sell lactose free milk in the supermarkets, never seen that in England, you won't find any normal milk in our office, menus in restaurants put little flags next to the courses to indicate the presence of lactose. I just assumed it was something to do with them living so far north, say in Lapland, where the habit to keep cows for milk did not happen. They lived off fish and reindeer
Hmm... I just found this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance that claims:
- Congenital lactase deficiency is a very rare, autosomal recessive genetic disorder that prevents lactase expression from birth.[9] It is particularly common in Finland.[15]People with congenital lactase deficiency cannot digest lactose from birth, and therefore cannot digest breast milk.
It seems Fins are not as closely related to Swedes and other Scandinavians. (Is Finland actually Scandinavia?)Perhaps congenital lactase deficiency is not what we have been talking about....
I've seen a few bumper stickers from carnivores that have heard of PETA.
They say "PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals"
C.W.
Despite the general high lactose tolerance in Scandinavia there are lots of lactose-reduced or lactose-free diary products in shops here as well. This is quite new though, I never saw that as a child. I guess there are several reasons for that. In the town where I live, for example, there are people from at least 100 nations. It's truly multicultural now. And there are other reasons. My father, now 79, started to get intolerant to lot of different foods after he passed 75. Even some fish. Now he is lactose intolerant too. And if you look closely at the Norwegians here you'll find that for some of us their ancestors came from other, southern parts of Europe during the last century or so. So occasionally a gene pops up in a descendant (or doesn't pop up, as it were). There has also been immigration from Finland to Norway over the centuries, particularly during difficult times in Finland (there was for example the famine in 1866-1868). So you'll aways find lactose intolerant people in Scandinavia too, for one reason or another. And lastly, the lactose-reduced milk lasts forever in the fridge compared to the 'normal' milk.. which is why I happen to keep lactose-reduced milk in the fridge in the office!
-Tor
So as more and more people are made redundant by automation, perhaps there will be still be a place at the table for the displaced millions?
That's a delicious idea.
Perhaps we could take the history of corn as an inspiration.
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/variation/corn/
Or bacon.