3 ms·

The "meat" you buy at the store is a hunk of muscle, fat, blood vessels, blood, nerves and connective tissue, and it's saturated in the myriad of vitamins, nutr

The "meat" you buy at the store is a hunk of muscle, fat, blood vessels, blood, nerves and connective tissue, and it's saturated in the myriad of vitamins, nutrients and other substances consumed or created by a living being. The "meat" created by this reactor is just a pile of muscle fiber. They extract a single kind of stem cell from an animal, coax it into becoming a muscle fiber, and grow lots of those fibers. Just muscle, fed by only what's in the gel it's grown on, no fat, no vasculature, no connective tissue, and without any of the substances an animal produces in other types of cells. It's not just missing a lot, either. It also has at least one thing added that "meat" doesn't necessarily: antibiotics. There's no immune system in a hunk of replicated muscle fiber, nor is this lab currently growing the tissue in a sterile environment, so it has to be treated with antibiotics. If you were to print a nutrition label for a pound of meat from the grocery store, and a pound of what this lab grows, not much on those labels would match up. Even the protein content: muscle fiber forms protein through exercise, but this slab of cells in a dish has never walked to a trough. How are they working around that? Watch for their patent filings.

such_a_casual 11y ago
You can stimulate muscles with electricity. So I don't think that will be an issue. However, I agree that the taste won't be the same. All natural meat does not taste the same, I don't see how something grown in a petri dish could taste like every other piece of beef when not every piece of beef tastes the same. It will certainly have its own taste to it. But I think in the end, it will taste better than what we can grow naturally because all of the variables are so controlled. Maybe it will taste like shit when it first comes out, but I'm sure they will engineer a way to make it taste better. They will be able to manipulate the nutritional information as well.
vidarh 11y ago
> Even the protein content: muscle fiber forms protein through exercise, but this slab of cells in a dish has never walked to a trough. Protein, in the form of muscle fibre is formed following exercise as a result of signalling triggered by the breakdown of muscle fibre. Exercise is only responsible as the trigger. There's no conceptual reason why we can't emulate that part of the process too. The question is if we need it - our body needs to amino acids, and they at least have been shown to be present in similar quantities in in vitro grown muscle cells. So if this "meat" can be made to taste and feel sufficiently like "natural" meat, then there may be no point to simulating the growth of "real" meat (which would also e.g. require a simulated circulatory system).

such_a_casual 11y ago

You can stimulate muscles with electricity. So I don't think that will be an issue. However, I agree that the taste won't be the same. All natural meat does not taste the same, I don't see how something grown in a petri dish could taste like every other piece of beef when not every piece of beef tastes the same. It will certainly have its own taste to it. But I think in the end, it will taste better than what we can grow naturally because all of the variables are so controlled. Maybe it will taste like shit when it first comes out, but I'm sure they will engineer a way to make it taste better. They will be able to manipulate the nutritional information as well.

vidarh 11y ago

> Even the protein content: muscle fiber forms protein through exercise, but this slab of cells in a dish has never walked to a trough. Protein, in the form of muscle fibre is formed following exercise as a result of signalling triggered by the breakdown of muscle fibre. Exercise is only responsible as the trigger. There's no conceptual reason why we can't emulate that part of the process too. The question is if we need it - our body needs to amino acids, and they at least have been shown to be present in similar quantities in in vitro grown muscle cells. So if this "meat" can be made to taste and feel sufficiently like "natural" meat, then there may be no point to simulating the growth of "real" meat (which would also e.g. require a simulated circulatory system).