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Engineering the $325,000 Burger
- nevinera 13y agoI thought that sounded familiar.. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1402241/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1402241/
- ekurutepe 13y agoCan a vegetarian eat meat if it's grown in lab a dish?
- shardling 13y agoThat's kind of a facile question -- it obviously depends on the reason why they're vegetarian.
- cwzwarich 13y agoDepends on the reason you're vegetarian. If it's for ethical reasons, then they probably would. If it's for health reasons, then probably not. If it's for environmental reasons, then it would depend on the environmental impact of in vitro meat.
- pdog 13y agoDon't forget taste -- some vegetarians simply don't like the taste of meat.
- Xylakant 13y agoIt depends on their reason for being vegetarian. Some think meat is unethical, those probably could. Others think it's healthier not to eat meat, those would probably pass. A friend of mine is allergic to most animal proteins - she probably won't want to eat that stuff either.
- aheilbut 13y agousing fetal bovine serum?
- alwaysinshade 13y agoI've had this discussion with a few vego's. My wife doesn't eat meat because she doesn't like animal suffering or confinement, so she would happily eat lab-grown meat. Yet her sister is disgusted by the texture/taste of meat on top of the suffering/confinement aspect, so the lab-grown meat only removes half of her aversion. Ultimately comes down to the individual's motive for being a vegetarian, which varies.
- gcheong 13y agoI believe that under a strict definition of vegetarianism - a person who abstains from eating meat - the answer would be no. If they did they would not be vegetarian. Maybe another classification would need to be created for those who will only eat cultured meat.
- jmilkbal 13y agoI have a lot of mixed feelings about developments like this. On one hand, I'll tell people that food for me is about quality and flavor. I'm not opposed to pink slime for what it is, but because it just makes for a poor result. I'm in favor of this on a sustainability level, but very opposed on a quality level—not consistency and reliable textures and taste, but that sort of unquantifiable property that things exude when they just feel right. That's quality and it's just not going to come from a lab, in my opinion. Meat isn't just about texture and a taste, it's about /terroir/. Meat can be raised sustainably and humanely, it just isn't as appealing to your local food conglomerate looking to work on economies of scale. We can all eat /better/, live /better/ and be /better/ without all the trade-offs if we'll put a little more thought into our lives and a have a little more moderation of consumption. Oh, and waste less.
- eridius 13y agoIt seems awfully close-minded to be dismissing the whole idea of eating lab-grown meat due to some ineffable "quality" before you've actually even tried it.
- jmilkbal 13y agoI said mixed feelings because that exactly how I feel. It's more hesitant, but I suppose you could say I'm cautiously optimistic.
- illuminate 13y agoYou're placing artifical constraints way too soon, though. It came off unnecessarily dismissive, not cautiously optimistic :p
- jmilkbal 13y agoI don't have much faith in the patent or global food system to create something with "ineffable 'quality'". Once the local food conglomerates are able to produce this, it's all about a price point and most frequently that price point is so low that anything you'd describe as high quality is not available. Think Salisbury steak. What will end up happening is a stratification of meat. Those with higher disposable incomes will eat dead things and the impoverished will get the poor economies of scale. You may find my lack of faith disturbing. Edited for Vader.
- return0 13y agoI wonder why he had to be funded privately. This seems to me as high priority research.
- smsm42 13y agoIf he'd being funded - which seems to be the case - what't the problem with it being private? I can understand calls for public funding where the need is there but the private funds to serve it for one reason or another are not - but here the funds are supplied already, I see no problem.
- mjs 13y agoI'm guessing the OP means: given the high stakes (environmental, financial, moral, and so on), why aren't governments more involved in this research? (They're already regulating and subsidising farming in pretty much every country of the world.)
- csense 13y agoI had an economics professor who noted that one of the main reasons rich countries don't suffer from famines is because they have a lot of livestock. When there's a food shortage, livestock can be slaughtered early to provide extra meat and free up food crops for human consumption that would normally be used to feed the livestock. Maybe this technology has too much potential to dangerously destabilize the world food situation for it to be fundable by a government.
- illuminate 13y ago"given the high stakes (environmental, financial, moral, and so on), why aren't governments more involved in this research" In the US? The beef industry has a strong enough lobby.
- return0 13y agoYes that's my guess too. Note that the lab is in Netherlands.
- lifeformed 13y agoSo who gets to eat it at the event?
- sethbannon 13y agoAs someone who doesn't eat meat for ethical reasons, I couldn't be more excited by the potential of this.
- TillE 13y agoI've gone back and forth a couple times between omnivore and strict vegetarian, and personally I've concluded that meat isn't particularly exciting. It's just convenient and fairly cheap. If this winds up being cheap, great. Regardless, I still prefer an interesting spicy black bean burger to anything made with ground beef.
- jckt 13y agoDo you mind explaining why you don't find meat particularly exciting? I personally have nothing much against vegetarians -- in all honesty my current diet (cheaper) is probably closer to that of a vegetarian's -- but whenever they dismiss meat as "uninteresting" they all seem to actually be quite ignorant of meat, and that they all seem to have ever bought theirs out of a styrofoam, shrinkwrapped package from a supermarket rather than a good butcher. But yes, a nice spicy black bean burger sounds interesting!
- nmcfarl 13y agoHaving known some vegetarians who claim meat is uninteresting and have had a good farm raised and wild caught meat in their pre-vegetarian days, I don't think this is a case. I think for some people meat, and pretty much of all food, is fairly uninteresting it is pretty much just a way to fuel their body. They take fairly little joy in their meals - which seems a bit incomprehensible - but it seems to be the way it is.
- snogglethorpe 13y agoCertainly meat can be exciting, but in many cases, and especially in modern western culture, it seems to be used as a crutch, in a sort of "just throw in some meat and you're done" way. For instance, I've found vegetarian Indian restaurants vastly more interesting than Indian restaurants that rely on meat. It's not that I hate meat (I don't, and I'm not a a vegetarian), but the former sort simply seem to offer more interesting food, with a much wider range of flavors. Note the stereotypical Airplane-meal question (where the actual dishes are quite different): "Chicken or beef?" I know they're just trying to be efficient, but this question seems to capture society's attitude: that once you know the type of meat involved, eh, the rest is just pointless detail. So while meat can be a wonderful and interesting part of a meal, I think it would be better if it lost some of its overwhelming dominance, and became just another ingredient.
- gfodor 13y agoI'm bullish.
- mjs 13y agoGlad this is getting closer! Aside from the moral issues, running sunlight, water and feed through a cow is such an inefficient and inelegant way of producing meat...
- Retric 13y agoI expect there still going to use sunlight/plants as a feed-stock in this process.
- mattzito 13y agoRunning grass through a cow is a remarkably efficient way of converting sunlight-capturing grass into calories we can actually digest. At least in the US, much of the scrubland can't support crops without intensive irrigation and fertilizer, but they can support cattle. If you take away the fundamental question of eating meat, it's the way cattle are raised today that's the problem.
- ams6110 13y agoAdditionally, the meat of grass-fed beef is much better for you than corn-fed (actually I believe the real difference is in the fat).
- zzzeek 13y agoI'd be super happy about this. Except if Monsanto took it over. Then we'd be paying license fees to go to McDonalds.
- csense 13y agoThe company or companies that make this work commercially will probably have patents out the wazoo. And manufacturers that use their technology will have to pay them license fees, which would probably be included in the price of the product. It has the potential to be economically much more efficient than growing livestock and massively increase the production of meat. The article doesn't talk much about the potential economic impact, focusing instead on environmental and ethical concerns, but considering the amount of land that is currently devoted to livestock grazing that would be able to be put to other uses when it becomes obsolete...it really is a game-changer that will make the human race much better off. The people who make it work will deserve the billions they'll earn.
- zzzeek 13y agoDid you take my comment to mean that I'm opposed to this technology or that I would actually expect consumers to pay for patents directly? It was merely a very poorly received joke, downmod away as humor is really not appreciated on hacker news, but at least know that it was sarcasm.
- dmourati 13y agopass
- mnml_ 13y agoI wouldn't beta test it
- haberman 13y ago> Dr. Post, who has conducted some informal taste tests, said that even without any fat, the tissue “tastes reasonably good.” I feel like the lesson of Tesla is that the way to sell new technology is to make it better than the status quo in some way. "It's reasonably good" will sell to a few environmentally-conscious people, but it's better if something is genuinely appealing in some way other than ethics. It's easier to sell the carrot than the stick.
- mayneack 13y agoYeah, but Tesla didn't invent the first electric vehicle. As he said, it's a proof of concept. Besides, the taste is probably less of a concern than the price tag at this point.
- jfoutz 13y agoIt's not going to taste all that great until there's fat embedded in the meat. In the long term, presumably you can embed seasoning right in the middle, which could be really amazing.
- damoncali 13y agoRead The Innovators Solution (or Dilemma). There is more than one way to skin a cat.
- kbenson 13y agoInteresting choice of words given the subject. In this case I guess you skin the cat by growing cat-meat in a dish, so you don't skin any cats.
- DigitalSea 13y agoThis is actually an exciting and much needed development for the meat industry to be honest. Everyone is quite content eating highly processed to the point they're questionably even meat products like salami already and the effects of farming cattle for meat like horrible conditions for the animals, high costs of feeding the cattle, transportation and the environmentally damaging effects of said practices. I wouldn't have a problem eating manufactured meat if it looked the same and tasted the same, if not better (which what seems to be promised). I already eat Spam and salami, what's one more processed product in my food arsenal?
- ofacup 13y agothe biggest problem with this is that it will end up with high-fructose corn syrup. just like everything else we eat...
- duopixel 13y agoI know this sounds repulsive, but I think a good shortcut to lab grown meat would be similar to KFC's urban myth of "headless organisms fed by tubes" [1]. If you give it a bit of thought, it might be more ethical raising brainless and senseless organisms for human consumption. It also solves many sanitary problems in farms (antibiotics, crowded living conditions) and it allows us to give pasture lands back to nature. Assuming that such meat was demonstrably safer for humans to consume, why would we choose to keep eating "nature's animals"? It's taboo what keeps us from doing this. http://www.snopes.com/food/tainted/kfc.asp http://www.snopes.com/food/tainted/kfc.asp
- phil_s_stein 13y agoI suspect this idea has occurred to the people working on this and it is not as easy as you assume - that there are problems in execution (so to speak) of this shortcut. Once the lab-in-a-test-tube thing is solved, it is a much cleaner and more elegant solution.
- ScotterC 13y agoI can't believe in the entire article they didn't mention who would be eating the 5 ounce burger. Who gets to try it!?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mattzito 13y agoMy concern with this is the health or nutritional profile of the engineered meat. Technology is great, but we've also found out years later that an "innovation" is really a step backwards health-wise. So, for example, the move from grass-fed to corn-fed beef allowed for vastly greater production in a much more efficient fashion, and even (for most people's palates) resulted in a better tasting meat. 20+ years later, we're finding out that the environmental cost of factory farm meat is much higher than we thought, and the corn-fed beef is much worse for you than grass-fed beef. 20 years from the meat cubes hitting the shelves, are we going to find out that cells grown on a straight glucose+vitamin mix are missing some micronutrient that helps our brain function correctly, or protects the gut against cancer? Our bodies have had a very long time to adapt to certain models of nutrition, and when we tamper with them, we often find unintended consequences.
- bickfordb 13y agoWould this reduce cancers with correlated animal protein consumption?
- nano111 13y agoI currently eat meat but I would rather not eat this... they already inject all kinds of stuff in "real" meat... I can't imagine what they would do to a completely engineered meat..
- jtchang 13y agoPlease let there be some ahi tuna in the product development pipeline after that. They wouldn't be going extinct if they weren't so damn tasty.
- chrisvineup 13y agoThe amount of vivisection that will take place to bring this genetically modified monstrosity to market makes it too unethical to bear for me.