6 ms·

Hacking Meat: Can technology make us eat fewer animals?

28 points by daegloe 14y ago

hdivider 14y ago
Really cool. It's good to know that there are hackathons for this kind of thing. Ignoring, for the moment, all the overbearing ethical problems with factory farms (those kinds of discussions are almost never constructive), I wonder if a first principles calculation would reveal the sort of potential efficiency gains to be made if you could make in-vitro meat work and scale properly. I bet it's going to be far, far more energy-efficient to grow meat according to demand with nutrient solutions derived from plants or bacteria, than to use factory farms. And that's not even taking other critical resources like water into account.
eclipxe 14y ago
Meh. Meat is delicious, I don't want to eat less.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
ComputerGuru 14y ago
What is it with this modern obsession with not eating meat? Meat is good. It's healthy, it's very sustainable, it's got an incredible protein:volume ratio, and it's delicious.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- ahelwer 14y ago
  That's overly simplistic and you know it. There are pretty obvious ethical issues. Not that I really want to start a discussion on them, because if there's anything more played-out on the internet than the piracy debate it's the meat-eating debate. That in addition to how inefficiently the nutritional value of giant animals is generated. Disclaimer: I eat meat.
  - nathos 14y ago
    Also, it it truly sustainable? The demand for low-cost animal protein has in part led to increased factory farming, antibiotic use, growth hormone use, etc. (I'm also a meat eater, but I eat less beef than I once did, largely because of cost & health concerns)
- blahedo 14y ago
  Meat (or rather, animals) also consume a lot more resources to produce the same amount of available-nutrient output. I'm a meat-eater too, and I agree with your assessment, but it's a little disingenuous to pretend that vegetarians have no reasons for their actions. (Also, IME there are as many reasons to be vegetarian as there are vegetarians---they all have a slightly different answer.)
  - Turing_Machine 14y ago
    "Meat (or rather, animals) also consume a lot more resources to produce the same amount of available-nutrient output." Depends on how it's raised. Grain-fed meat, sure. Grass-fed meat, not so much. People can't digest grass.
    - luser001 14y ago
      https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+of+grass+fed+beef https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+of+grass+fed+beef Only 3% of beef in the US is grass-fed. For chicken, the equivalent would be "pastured", and I bet it far less than 1% (I've never seen it for sale in supermarkets and I know you have to join a coop or something to get it).
- bendmorris 14y ago
  Very sustainable? "Food production requires application of fertilizers containing phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium on agricultural fields in order to sustain crop yields. However modern agriculture is dependent on phosphorus derived from phosphate rock, which is a non-renewable resource and current global reserves may be depleted in 50–100 years." Raising animals to eat is a much less efficient use of non-renewable phosphate than eating plants ourselves. Source: Dana Cordell, Jan-Olof Drangert, Stuart White. 2009. The story of phosphorus: Global food security and food for thought. Global Environmental Change, Volume 19, Issue 2, Pages 292-305. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937800800099X http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378008...
  - Turing_Machine 14y ago
    The phosphate doesn't actually get used up. It winds up back in the ocean from whence it came (most phosphate rock is limestone formed from krill and the like). There's no reason we couldn't use krill directly. It would be more expensive, but also 100% renewable.
    - bendmorris 14y ago
      We don't really have the infrastructure in place for doing that at the necessary scale, so it would be so much more expensive as to cause food prices to skyrocket. I'm sure that as supplies get lower more research will be done on recycling phosphate efficiently, though.
      - Turing_Machine 14y ago
        You don't need a lot of infrastructure. Krill nets are pretty low-tech. Also, it's not like we're going to wake up one morning and all the phosphate rock is gone (which is the usual unstated assumption with "peak" this or that). The price will go up gradually until the point where alternative sources become more economic.
        Turing_Machine 14y ago
- stcredzero 14y ago
  > Meat is good. It's healthy, it's very sustainable, it's got an incredible protein:volume ratio, and it's delicious. I had been doing the low carb thing recently, so I agree with most of this. Unfortunately, the relative scarcity of meat in our history has resulted in our wanting to eat too much of it for our health. That said, imbalances in our global civilization's distribution of food is a much bigger problem than calories per acre. (I guess one could argue that realistically we need to produce an overabundance of food to compensate.)
- diminish 14y ago
  "Meat is the biggest thing you can steal from some creature, it kind of destroys her presence, and discontinues her future. meat-eating is killing for theft of the functional body.". Every organism must collect their energy, aminoacid, vitamins themselves rather than stealing from their peers. I am against all eating including eating of vegetables, honey etc and critical of the current earth-based life. when designing the post-humans we must exclude "eating" for body build-up and energy intake.
- xiaoma 14y ago
  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And some of your claims are extraordinary. >What is it with this modern obsession with not eating meat? It's not a "modern obsession". Varying degrees of vegetarianism have been part of human culture since ancient times. People, especially Americans, are eating far more meat than they did 50 or 100 years ago. There is a greater variation, but the mean is definitely rising. >Meat is good. It's healthy Meat consumption (particularly red meat and processed meat) has been linked to higher rates of cancer, cardio-vascular disease, and overall mortality in a dose dependent manner. Furthermore, some vegetarian populations are extremely long-lived compared to the their omnivorous peers. >it's very sustainable Meat eating is not sustainable at our current technological level. Mass production of animals to be slaughtered for our consumption accounts for the majority of human-caused methane production, causes the majority of anti-biotic resistant disease, requires many times the energy expenditure that growing plant-based foods do and is an enormous threat to bio-diversity. If all the world ate as much meat as Americans, it would be a disaster in terms of public health and the environment both. >* it's got an incredible protein:volume ratio, Protein != intrinsically good. >and it's delicious. Taste is subjective, but a lot of people would agree with you.
  - duaneb 14y ago
    There's a big difference between eating meat and eating meat like the modern american does. Eating meat every day and being vegetarian are far from the only options.
- Yaggo 14y ago
  I'm not even going to mention the horrendous ethical issues of meat production industry, but sustainable? "[...] current production levels of meat contribute between 14 and 22 percent of the 36 billion tons of "CO2-equivalent" greenhouse gases the world produces every year." http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-greenhouse-hamburger http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-greenho...
- HorizonXP 14y ago
  I'll bite. Meat, and red meat in general, has got a bad rap because of various studies linking it with poor health (i.e. cancer and cardiovascular issues). Personally, I would argue against it. We know from anthropology studies that humans only evolved to our current state because we started to eat larger quantities of meat. Fact is, there is no better source of nutrition and calories when you're looking at foods obtainable from the environment. In the 20th century, we're in a different situation. Food and calories are easy to come by, to the point that many Westerners are gluttonous and we eat too much. We don't need to eat meat to obtain more calories, removing it as a requirement from our diets. Vegetarians will argue that their diets have less of an impact on the planet, and that they're healthier overall. You can argue that point either way, but anecdotally, I've met few vegetarians that are actually "healthy." Many do not understand that if you remove meat as a source of protein, you need to supplement it with another source. Vegetarian sources of protein are not very protein-dense, so you need to eat a lot of food to get your daily requirement. Moreover, you need to ensure that you're obtaining all of your essential amino acids, which many plant-products don't provide. That's why Indians, a predominantly vegetarian society, will eat rice with daal. Rice lacks lysine, which daal contains. Together, they are a whole source of protein. I've personally tried the vegetarian diet, and it's not for me. It's not for everyone. I found that to hit my protein requirements, I had to eat a lot of carbohydrates along with it, which meant a lot of calories. Right now, I'm overweight, so I'm trying to hack my diet and lose weight in a completely different way. I eat absolutely no carbohydrates. All I eat is lamb (I'm Hindu, so no beef or pork), fish, and poultry. I also eat lots of green vegetables, nuts, mushrooms, and cheeses. Oh, butter and heavy cream too. It's called the ketogenic diet if you're interested. I've never felt better. No intestinal issues or bloating. I'm losing weight steadily. And I get to eat awesome, healthy meals that taste amazing. And I would bet that my environmental impact isn't all that high. My grocery list is very simple, sticking to the outer corridors of the store. It's not for everyone. But it works for me. I would bet that most studies that say red meat is bad, didn't control for carbohydrates. The biochemical processes that occur in the body in reaction to carbohydrate intake is likely what contributes to the issues surrounding red meat. Of course, few studies have been done to confirm this because of a general disposition that high-fat diets are bad. In summary, people are against meat because they keep hearing that it's bad. They don't seek out alternate opinions, and would rather be ignorant than educate themselves.
- exodust 14y ago
  There's nothing in this article about "not eating meat". The whole point is that meat can be grown in the lab, so you can eat it all you like then. Meat comes from animals who have pretty miserable lives up until death in the modern factory farm. and then the environmental stress from feeding and transporting livestock is huge. And the protein health benefits comes with some warnings not to eat too much meat! Raw meat is dangerous too, causes much sickness annually. Left over chicken, oops don't touch that. Tastes great though, so let's grow the world's meat in big vats and the cow can have a well earned vacation. Fair?
  - davidp 14y ago
    Well, > "... the hackathon’s goal is to come up with technological answer to the problems of meat supply, processing, distribution, health and ultimately consumption. One of big problems the group will tackle is how — simply put — to get people to eat less meat." That said, it's true that meat production (beef at least) is a very inefficient use of arable land, in terms of nutrition per acre. Curse their tasty hides.
    - exodust 14y ago
      Yes you're right, I missed that bit. Quite interesting that "butchers, farmers, and food industry executives" would be tackling the "problem" of getting people to eat less meat! Perhaps they are vegetarian butchers.
- guygurari 14y ago
  Others have already answered, but to address the health issue allow me to mention a credible source [1], written by one of the leading experts on the relation between nutrition and health. The word 'vegan' appears only a couple of times in this book, but what it advises approaches veganism, based on purely decades-long research. The research shows that more than a little meat is not healthy (unless you have no better alternative), and there is no harm in not eating meat at all. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Eat-Drink-Be-Healthy-Harvard/dp/0743266420/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1355000270&sr=8-2&keywords=Eat+healthy http://www.amazon.com/Eat-Drink-Be-Healthy-Harvard/dp/074326...
- naner 14y ago
  There are a lot of motivations for discovering ways to synthetically produce meat. Cheaper and easier to make, higher yield, better nutrition, better taste, consistent quality, etc. I don't think the ethical considerations are the driving force.
tossacct 14y ago
The only value of the article is to briefly mention the existence of "in vitro meat" and the concept of a scientific approach to flavor and taste. The article also includes some namedrops that I don't think are significant, but is otherwise completely worthless after you read the first sentence of this comment. For actual information on these topics beyond a mentioning of their existence, please visit wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavor Catchall for any sensory experience involving food or eating. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste What happens with the taste buds of a human.
tossacct 14y ago
Some people in western culture choose not to eat animal products or meat, and have historically referred to themselves as vegans or vegetarians, respectively. Some of these people make the choice due to their ethical concerns about the food producing animals involved in the process. In this comment, they will be lumped into the group of "ethivegs". In my experience, a fair percentage of ethivegs are either luddites and technophobes, and vanishingly few of the technology embracing ethivegs are generally interested in science. Absolutely no ethivegs that I have met has been aware of in vitro meat research. Which is odd, since in vitro meat research meat has the ability to almost completely remove ethical concerns for an animal from the production of food. Interestingly, PETA has heard of the technology and did a little advertising stunt for the research. Anecdotally, none of my NPR listening or PETA supporting acquaintances have ever heard of this stunt (which was on NPR) or the concept of in vitro meat. Happily, every single ethiveg that I have introduced to the concept of in vitro meat has felt very positive and excited about it. So in my experiences with ethivegs, the consequence of in vitro meat research coming to fruition is this: eating meat will no longer require an animal to be treated unethically. Interestingly, many ethivegs have lamented that currently "unethical meat eaters" will no longer be punished with mad cow disease, high prices, or nutrient imbalances. However, they are generally more concerned with the ethical treatment of animals than they are with punishing humans who currently eat meat. I find this interesting because some groups are less interested in correcting the sin, and more interested in punishing the sinner: http://i.imgur.com/Irgo2.gif http://i.imgur.com/Irgo2.gif
- jicksta2 14y ago
  I'm a highly technical "ethiveg" vegan and every vegan I've met have not only heard of in vitro meat but strongly supports it.
  - tossacct 14y ago
    I am not an ethiveg. I ask literally every ethiveg I meet if they have heard of in vitro meat, because asking them is an incredibly easy thing to do, and if they spread awareness and generate support for the science then the world will be a measurably better place. I am impressed that you ask literally every ethiveg you meet if they have heard of in vitro. Keep up the good work, improving the world is the responsibility of all those who can help improve the world.
dbecker 14y ago
One of the big trends in current nutritional thinking is that we should eat natural, whole foods... and processing foods, even when done to enhance nutritional qualities, has been a major mis-step. In-vitro meat and printing steaks on 3d printers sound like a steps in the wrong direction.
- stdbrouw 14y ago
  Why would a "natural" steak be intrinsically better than an "unnatural" steak? And what does that have to do with current nutritional thinking?
  - dbecker 14y ago
    The most popular author claiming natural foods are better is Michael Pollan (who is admittedly a writer rather than a scientist, but whose views appear to be widely shared in the scientific community). Googling will show as many links as you could possibly want, but you might start with http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....
    - stdbrouw 14y ago
      My point was more basic: current nutritional thinking does not and cannot make any claims about a food type which doesn't yet exist, and food is not good or bad simply because it belongs to a certain category like "natural". (That said, thanks for the link.)
      - dbecker 14y ago
        The claim is basically that humans are incapable of manufacturing healthy food. You may disagree with the premise, but the conclusion "food manufactured on a 3d printer will not be healthy" does follow logically from it.
brasmasus 14y ago
>...but we’re still years away from seeing viable, affordable artificial meat – and probably many more years from convincing the public to eat it. What about Quorn's 'mycoprotein'? They've been making it for years, and people have been eating it. There's some controversy, of course, but go into any grocery store and it's there. Not half bad either imo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn
- kfitchard 14y ago
  (Disclaimer: I'm the article's author.) Quorn isn't an artificial meat. It's a meat substitute or imitation meat. There are a lot of these on the market right now like Beyond Meat. In-vitro meat actually seeks to grow animal muscle cells. Think cloning steaks :)
  - stdbrouw 14y ago
    I think the OP was pointing out that it's not impossible to convince people to eat stuff like this. If you can get people to eat fungus grown in large vats (Quorn), then with the right marketing you can probably get them to eat artificial meat.
Mz 14y ago
Eww. I have a different hack: Eat kosher or organic meat. I do that because my body does not work right. Eating better quality food has substantially reduced the amount of food I require on a daily basis. It seems especially helpful with meat, probably because toxins concentrate in the fats as you go up the food chain, so the negative impact of bad practices multiplies.

28 points by daegloe 14y ago

Really cool. It's good to know that there are hackathons for this kind of thing. Ignoring, for the moment, all the overbearing ethical problems with factory farms (those kinds of discussions are almost never constructive), I wonder if a first principles calculation would reveal the sort of potential efficiency gains to be made if you could make in-vitro meat work and scale properly. I bet it's going to be far, far more energy-efficient to grow meat according to demand with nutrient solutions derived from plants or bacteria, than to use factory farms. And that's not even taking other critical resources like water into account.

eclipxe 14y ago

Meh. Meat is delicious, I don't want to eat less.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

ComputerGuru 14y ago

What is it with this modern obsession with not eating meat? Meat is good. It's healthy, it's very sustainable, it's got an incredible protein:volume ratio, and it's delicious.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ahelwer 14y ago
That's overly simplistic and you know it. There are pretty obvious ethical issues. Not that I really want to start a discussion on them, because if there's anything more played-out on the internet than the piracy debate it's the meat-eating debate. That in addition to how inefficiently the nutritional value of giant animals is generated. Disclaimer: I eat meat.
- nathos 14y ago
  Also, it it truly sustainable? The demand for low-cost animal protein has in part led to increased factory farming, antibiotic use, growth hormone use, etc. (I'm also a meat eater, but I eat less beef than I once did, largely because of cost & health concerns)
blahedo 14y ago
Meat (or rather, animals) also consume a lot more resources to produce the same amount of available-nutrient output. I'm a meat-eater too, and I agree with your assessment, but it's a little disingenuous to pretend that vegetarians have no reasons for their actions. (Also, IME there are as many reasons to be vegetarian as there are vegetarians---they all have a slightly different answer.)
- Turing_Machine 14y ago
  "Meat (or rather, animals) also consume a lot more resources to produce the same amount of available-nutrient output." Depends on how it's raised. Grain-fed meat, sure. Grass-fed meat, not so much. People can't digest grass.
  - luser001 14y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+of+grass+fed+beef https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+of+grass+fed+beef Only 3% of beef in the US is grass-fed. For chicken, the equivalent would be "pastured", and I bet it far less than 1% (I've never seen it for sale in supermarkets and I know you have to join a coop or something to get it).
bendmorris 14y ago
Very sustainable? "Food production requires application of fertilizers containing phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium on agricultural fields in order to sustain crop yields. However modern agriculture is dependent on phosphorus derived from phosphate rock, which is a non-renewable resource and current global reserves may be depleted in 50–100 years." Raising animals to eat is a much less efficient use of non-renewable phosphate than eating plants ourselves. Source: Dana Cordell, Jan-Olof Drangert, Stuart White. 2009. The story of phosphorus: Global food security and food for thought. Global Environmental Change, Volume 19, Issue 2, Pages 292-305. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937800800099X http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378008...
- Turing_Machine 14y ago
  The phosphate doesn't actually get used up. It winds up back in the ocean from whence it came (most phosphate rock is limestone formed from krill and the like). There's no reason we couldn't use krill directly. It would be more expensive, but also 100% renewable.
  - bendmorris 14y ago
    We don't really have the infrastructure in place for doing that at the necessary scale, so it would be so much more expensive as to cause food prices to skyrocket. I'm sure that as supplies get lower more research will be done on recycling phosphate efficiently, though.
    - Turing_Machine 14y ago
      You don't need a lot of infrastructure. Krill nets are pretty low-tech. Also, it's not like we're going to wake up one morning and all the phosphate rock is gone (which is the usual unstated assumption with "peak" this or that). The price will go up gradually until the point where alternative sources become more economic.
      - Turing_Machine 14y ago
stcredzero 14y ago
> Meat is good. It's healthy, it's very sustainable, it's got an incredible protein:volume ratio, and it's delicious. I had been doing the low carb thing recently, so I agree with most of this. Unfortunately, the relative scarcity of meat in our history has resulted in our wanting to eat too much of it for our health. That said, imbalances in our global civilization's distribution of food is a much bigger problem than calories per acre. (I guess one could argue that realistically we need to produce an overabundance of food to compensate.)
diminish 14y ago
"Meat is the biggest thing you can steal from some creature, it kind of destroys her presence, and discontinues her future. meat-eating is killing for theft of the functional body.". Every organism must collect their energy, aminoacid, vitamins themselves rather than stealing from their peers. I am against all eating including eating of vegetables, honey etc and critical of the current earth-based life. when designing the post-humans we must exclude "eating" for body build-up and energy intake.
xiaoma 14y ago
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And some of your claims are extraordinary. >What is it with this modern obsession with not eating meat? It's not a "modern obsession". Varying degrees of vegetarianism have been part of human culture since ancient times. People, especially Americans, are eating far more meat than they did 50 or 100 years ago. There is a greater variation, but the mean is definitely rising. >Meat is good. It's healthy Meat consumption (particularly red meat and processed meat) has been linked to higher rates of cancer, cardio-vascular disease, and overall mortality in a dose dependent manner. Furthermore, some vegetarian populations are extremely long-lived compared to the their omnivorous peers. >it's very sustainable Meat eating is not sustainable at our current technological level. Mass production of animals to be slaughtered for our consumption accounts for the majority of human-caused methane production, causes the majority of anti-biotic resistant disease, requires many times the energy expenditure that growing plant-based foods do and is an enormous threat to bio-diversity. If all the world ate as much meat as Americans, it would be a disaster in terms of public health and the environment both. >* it's got an incredible protein:volume ratio, Protein != intrinsically good. >and it's delicious. Taste is subjective, but a lot of people would agree with you.
- duaneb 14y ago
  There's a big difference between eating meat and eating meat like the modern american does. Eating meat every day and being vegetarian are far from the only options.
Yaggo 14y ago
I'm not even going to mention the horrendous ethical issues of meat production industry, but sustainable? "[...] current production levels of meat contribute between 14 and 22 percent of the 36 billion tons of "CO2-equivalent" greenhouse gases the world produces every year." http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-greenhouse-hamburger http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-greenho...
HorizonXP 14y ago
I'll bite. Meat, and red meat in general, has got a bad rap because of various studies linking it with poor health (i.e. cancer and cardiovascular issues). Personally, I would argue against it. We know from anthropology studies that humans only evolved to our current state because we started to eat larger quantities of meat. Fact is, there is no better source of nutrition and calories when you're looking at foods obtainable from the environment. In the 20th century, we're in a different situation. Food and calories are easy to come by, to the point that many Westerners are gluttonous and we eat too much. We don't need to eat meat to obtain more calories, removing it as a requirement from our diets. Vegetarians will argue that their diets have less of an impact on the planet, and that they're healthier overall. You can argue that point either way, but anecdotally, I've met few vegetarians that are actually "healthy." Many do not understand that if you remove meat as a source of protein, you need to supplement it with another source. Vegetarian sources of protein are not very protein-dense, so you need to eat a lot of food to get your daily requirement. Moreover, you need to ensure that you're obtaining all of your essential amino acids, which many plant-products don't provide. That's why Indians, a predominantly vegetarian society, will eat rice with daal. Rice lacks lysine, which daal contains. Together, they are a whole source of protein. I've personally tried the vegetarian diet, and it's not for me. It's not for everyone. I found that to hit my protein requirements, I had to eat a lot of carbohydrates along with it, which meant a lot of calories. Right now, I'm overweight, so I'm trying to hack my diet and lose weight in a completely different way. I eat absolutely no carbohydrates. All I eat is lamb (I'm Hindu, so no beef or pork), fish, and poultry. I also eat lots of green vegetables, nuts, mushrooms, and cheeses. Oh, butter and heavy cream too. It's called the ketogenic diet if you're interested. I've never felt better. No intestinal issues or bloating. I'm losing weight steadily. And I get to eat awesome, healthy meals that taste amazing. And I would bet that my environmental impact isn't all that high. My grocery list is very simple, sticking to the outer corridors of the store. It's not for everyone. But it works for me. I would bet that most studies that say red meat is bad, didn't control for carbohydrates. The biochemical processes that occur in the body in reaction to carbohydrate intake is likely what contributes to the issues surrounding red meat. Of course, few studies have been done to confirm this because of a general disposition that high-fat diets are bad. In summary, people are against meat because they keep hearing that it's bad. They don't seek out alternate opinions, and would rather be ignorant than educate themselves.
exodust 14y ago
There's nothing in this article about "not eating meat". The whole point is that meat can be grown in the lab, so you can eat it all you like then. Meat comes from animals who have pretty miserable lives up until death in the modern factory farm. and then the environmental stress from feeding and transporting livestock is huge. And the protein health benefits comes with some warnings not to eat too much meat! Raw meat is dangerous too, causes much sickness annually. Left over chicken, oops don't touch that. Tastes great though, so let's grow the world's meat in big vats and the cow can have a well earned vacation. Fair?
- davidp 14y ago
  Well, > "... the hackathon’s goal is to come up with technological answer to the problems of meat supply, processing, distribution, health and ultimately consumption. One of big problems the group will tackle is how — simply put — to get people to eat less meat." That said, it's true that meat production (beef at least) is a very inefficient use of arable land, in terms of nutrition per acre. Curse their tasty hides.
  - exodust 14y ago
    Yes you're right, I missed that bit. Quite interesting that "butchers, farmers, and food industry executives" would be tackling the "problem" of getting people to eat less meat! Perhaps they are vegetarian butchers.
guygurari 14y ago
Others have already answered, but to address the health issue allow me to mention a credible source [1], written by one of the leading experts on the relation between nutrition and health. The word 'vegan' appears only a couple of times in this book, but what it advises approaches veganism, based on purely decades-long research. The research shows that more than a little meat is not healthy (unless you have no better alternative), and there is no harm in not eating meat at all. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Eat-Drink-Be-Healthy-Harvard/dp/0743266420/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1355000270&sr=8-2&keywords=Eat+healthy http://www.amazon.com/Eat-Drink-Be-Healthy-Harvard/dp/074326...
naner 14y ago
There are a lot of motivations for discovering ways to synthetically produce meat. Cheaper and easier to make, higher yield, better nutrition, better taste, consistent quality, etc. I don't think the ethical considerations are the driving force.

tossacct 14y ago

The only value of the article is to briefly mention the existence of "in vitro meat" and the concept of a scientific approach to flavor and taste. The article also includes some namedrops that I don't think are significant, but is otherwise completely worthless after you read the first sentence of this comment. For actual information on these topics beyond a mentioning of their existence, please visit wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavor Catchall for any sensory experience involving food or eating. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste What happens with the taste buds of a human.

tossacct 14y ago

Some people in western culture choose not to eat animal products or meat, and have historically referred to themselves as vegans or vegetarians, respectively. Some of these people make the choice due to their ethical concerns about the food producing animals involved in the process. In this comment, they will be lumped into the group of "ethivegs". In my experience, a fair percentage of ethivegs are either luddites and technophobes, and vanishingly few of the technology embracing ethivegs are generally interested in science. Absolutely no ethivegs that I have met has been aware of in vitro meat research. Which is odd, since in vitro meat research meat has the ability to almost completely remove ethical concerns for an animal from the production of food. Interestingly, PETA has heard of the technology and did a little advertising stunt for the research. Anecdotally, none of my NPR listening or PETA supporting acquaintances have ever heard of this stunt (which was on NPR) or the concept of in vitro meat. Happily, every single ethiveg that I have introduced to the concept of in vitro meat has felt very positive and excited about it. So in my experiences with ethivegs, the consequence of in vitro meat research coming to fruition is this: eating meat will no longer require an animal to be treated unethically. Interestingly, many ethivegs have lamented that currently "unethical meat eaters" will no longer be punished with mad cow disease, high prices, or nutrient imbalances. However, they are generally more concerned with the ethical treatment of animals than they are with punishing humans who currently eat meat. I find this interesting because some groups are less interested in correcting the sin, and more interested in punishing the sinner: http://i.imgur.com/Irgo2.gif http://i.imgur.com/Irgo2.gif

jicksta2 14y ago
I'm a highly technical "ethiveg" vegan and every vegan I've met have not only heard of in vitro meat but strongly supports it.
- tossacct 14y ago
  I am not an ethiveg. I ask literally every ethiveg I meet if they have heard of in vitro meat, because asking them is an incredibly easy thing to do, and if they spread awareness and generate support for the science then the world will be a measurably better place. I am impressed that you ask literally every ethiveg you meet if they have heard of in vitro. Keep up the good work, improving the world is the responsibility of all those who can help improve the world.

dbecker 14y ago

One of the big trends in current nutritional thinking is that we should eat natural, whole foods... and processing foods, even when done to enhance nutritional qualities, has been a major mis-step. In-vitro meat and printing steaks on 3d printers sound like a steps in the wrong direction.

stdbrouw 14y ago
Why would a "natural" steak be intrinsically better than an "unnatural" steak? And what does that have to do with current nutritional thinking?
- dbecker 14y ago
  The most popular author claiming natural foods are better is Michael Pollan (who is admittedly a writer rather than a scientist, but whose views appear to be widely shared in the scientific community). Googling will show as many links as you could possibly want, but you might start with http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....
  - stdbrouw 14y ago
    My point was more basic: current nutritional thinking does not and cannot make any claims about a food type which doesn't yet exist, and food is not good or bad simply because it belongs to a certain category like "natural". (That said, thanks for the link.)
    - dbecker 14y ago
      The claim is basically that humans are incapable of manufacturing healthy food. You may disagree with the premise, but the conclusion "food manufactured on a 3d printer will not be healthy" does follow logically from it.

brasmasus 14y ago

>...but we’re still years away from seeing viable, affordable artificial meat – and probably many more years from convincing the public to eat it. What about Quorn's 'mycoprotein'? They've been making it for years, and people have been eating it. There's some controversy, of course, but go into any grocery store and it's there. Not half bad either imo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn

kfitchard 14y ago
(Disclaimer: I'm the article's author.) Quorn isn't an artificial meat. It's a meat substitute or imitation meat. There are a lot of these on the market right now like Beyond Meat. In-vitro meat actually seeks to grow animal muscle cells. Think cloning steaks :)
- stdbrouw 14y ago
  I think the OP was pointing out that it's not impossible to convince people to eat stuff like this. If you can get people to eat fungus grown in large vats (Quorn), then with the right marketing you can probably get them to eat artificial meat.

Mz 14y ago

Eww. I have a different hack: Eat kosher or organic meat. I do that because my body does not work right. Eating better quality food has substantially reduced the amount of food I require on a daily basis. It seems especially helpful with meat, probably because toxins concentrate in the fats as you go up the food chain, so the negative impact of bad practices multiplies.