I’m in San Francisco, at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon not made of meat in the traditional sense but of plants mixed with “cultivated” pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barns got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitamins—essentially replicating the conditions in her body. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal’s fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami.
I’ve been struggling to describe the experience, because cultivated meat short-circuits my brain—my mouth thinks I’m eating a real pork meatball, but my brain knows that it’s fundamentally different and that Dawn (pictured above) didn’t have to die for it. This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s Diet Meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so too are cultivated meatballs. They simply taste a bit less meaty, at least to my tongue. Which is understandable, as the only animal product in this food is the bioreactor-grown fat.
Simpsons did it
But for real, I am super interested in the concept of cultivated meat. I’m no vegan, but if less animals need to be mistreated and murdered for my steak, I’m not going to complain.
I mean I think in this case Norse mythology beat the Simpsons to this at least a few centuries before with Heidrun
If the animal has been given the best possible life it could have right to the moment of death would you still have misgivings about meat?
I barely have misgivings about meat as it is. But yes, an animal that is raised on quality feed, and given space to grow before being harvested is always going to be preferable to the industrial levels of farming that capitalism requires to meet demands.
Makes sense I enjoy meat as well but I try to stay away from factory farmed meats and mostly get meat from family farms or hunting but that’s not a luxury that everyone’s able to do.
It blows me away that some towns or cities only have a walmart for their grocery store.
Most animals behave pretty clearly as if they don’t want to die, and humans have been really bad, historically, at deciding correctly who is person enough to mind being enslaved/genocided/colonialized.
Warfare would look quite different if the winner had to eat the loser.
Bosmer lore in a nutshell.
Yes, it is still murder and their life was not full. I don’t care how pampered the animal was its life was still cut short and its purpose was solely as a commodity for human consumption.
Sure it’s murder but meat is delicious and I care for my animals before I slaughter them and use everything I can.
Unfortunately - and this is the problem - it is incredibly inefficient to raise animals properly. Almost any ‘humane’ animal products that you can think of have very harmful practices embedded in them.
Firstly - the animals having the best possible life right to the moment of death would still allow things like lamb. Surely giving a baby the best possible life before killing it young is still barbaric?
Secondly - secondary animal products would still require harmful practices. For a dairy cow to produce milk she has to be pregnant / have a baby. Some farms produce ‘humane’ dairy which involves allowing the mother and calf to live together, but then it also requires them to sell the male calves to be killed for veal because… what else would a male calf be for?
And finally, onto the point of inefficiency. Do you have any idea how many chickens are killed every single day to supply our food system? You probably do, but you may be unaware of what that means - the Earth does not have enough land possible to raise these chickens, it is physically impossible and that is just one farm animal.
So the future of a humane world for animals either involves quality synthetic meat, or everybody is suddenly happy to go vegan, or more likely; everybody remains carnivorous and we continue to torture animals.
the vast majority of male dairy calves are brought to full weight before slaughter. practically none of them end up as veal.
I wasn’t familiar with that. When I wanted to see if I could buy ethical cheese I found one farm which reared calves with mothers, and read that although everything else they do seemed to be ethical, they did sell their male calves to be used for veal. That may have been incorrect and if it was, I was unaware.
The cheese was also extremely expensive too, like 10x the price of normal cheese.
The idea that a company can grow meat by just adding a few carbs and vitamins to a flask of cells is ridiculous. These synthetic meats are all fed fetal bovine serum. Fetal bovine serum (FBS) is made by drawing blood from bovine fetuses via cardiac puncture at government-approved slaughterhouses. The collected blood is allowed to clot, then centrifuged to separate the serum from the red blood cells. The raw serum is then frozen and undergoes further processing, including sterile filtration, to become suitable for use in cell culture.
Any steak made this way would have to cost thousands of dollars.
The idea that a company can grow meat by just adding a few carbs and vitamins to a flask of cells is ridiculous.
Right now it is. The attention these projects are getting is intended to pique the interest of people who can help fund research into making the process more efficient and affordable.
This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s Diet Meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so too are cultivated meatballs.
I hope that wasn’t meant to be a pitch for it. Diet Coke tastes like ass.
They simply taste a bit less meaty
See that’s the disconnect - diet Coke doesn’t taste like Coke that’s less Coke-y, it tastes like Coke that had the sugar replaced with a scoop of Grandpa’s ashes and a dash of betadine.
If we’ve made the meat equivalent to diet Coke, the best course of action is to just skip that nastiness and cook up some tofu or paneer or something.
If we’ve made the meat that’s just a little less meaty, okay cool, I’ll give it a shot.
…but those two are NOT the same thing.
One day they’ll breed an animal that makes it clear it wants to be eaten.
the Cow was the Dish of the Day at Milliways, which arrived when Zaphod Beeblebrox (accompanied by Arthur, Ford, and Trillian) requested to ‘meet the meat’. It was described as a large dairy animal, a “large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type.” It was said to have large watery eyes, as well as small horns and what might have been an ingratiating smile on its lips. The creature seems peaceful and at ease, and at one point is described to have “mooed.”
The creature offers Zaphod and his party his shoulder, braised in a white wine sauce, then goes on to offer other parts of its body, having worked hard to fatten itself up through force-feeding itself for months. Eventually, after Arthur and Trillian have expressed their shock and Ford has expressed his disinterest, Zaphod requests four rare steaks and the Dish of the Day goes off to shoot himself, telling Arthur not to worry, as he says “I’ll be very humane.”[1]
Indeed what I was referencing.
Okja kind of has similar themes about a fictional animal bred for food.
Or we could you know, leave the fucking animals alone.
Did Dawn explicitly say “I would like to donate my fat”? No? Then it wasn’t a fucking donation. Pretty gross to characterize the story in this way.
That’s ridiculous. You know that’s ridiculous right?
People gonna eat meat. They can eat dead animals or they can eat this stuff. You choose which you prefer
What’s ridiculous is humans unconsensually raping and pillaging living beings for all they are worth just because you think your taste buds and minutes of pleasure outweigh a living breathing being with the capacity to experience. Sorry that my moral compass is more attuned than yours.
You forget the third option, leave animals the fuck alone and eat plants ffs.
no one is raping livestock
I can’t tell from the article or Mission Barn’s page whether they need a new sample for every batch, or just needed one sample to seed their bioreactors. I’m not sure (as someone who avoids meat for ethical and environmental reasons) if there’s a big difference.
I’m actually happy with Beyond burgers/sausages when I do want meat taste, but nice to have more options. (Mozzarella and Parmesan are what I’d look for next, though Rebel Cheese is doing a good job with some more cheese-platter varieties.)
It may not be an every batch thing but you would need more samples at least eventually. Cells have division limits. While these are somewhat bypassed in these types of setups you do run into issues for longer term.
I’m just gonna stick to beans
Uh, no.
They did not grow meat by adding carbs and vitamins, they grew the the pork tissue by feeding it fetal serum from a pig or cow.
The amount of utter bullshit around synthetic meat is just marketing to ignorant hippies.
You have a source for the bullshit you’re spouting?
I run a biomedical lab that does all kinds of tissue culture from cell lines to stem cells. Nothing grows without fetal serum, it’s not like growing plants hydroponically. There are countless bullshit techs claiming to have a serum-free medium, it’s all a con. There are countless soluble factors required to get cells to divide. Research labs spend $300 a litre for FBS, if there was a subsitute that actually worked it would save biomedical reasearch millions and any company would get rich. Can’t grow cells on bullshit.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666765722001508
I can throw random science articles too.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004222020958
