This could be a useful breakthough in terms of a cheaper protein source. Via Natural News, who is naturally whining about it.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems sort of related: Red meat makes you happier. The science is settled!
30 thoughts on “Test-Tube Hamburger”
Comments are closed.
I know that red wine makes me happier…
As Oliver Reed once said:
“Everything looks rosier through the bottom of a glass.”
…except the comments in this thread, for which there is no appetising redemption. Oprah herself could lose it and keep it off by making this her homepage.
If this blog was hosted by OWN, nobody would ever read the comments.
In related news, Safeway will stop selling pink slime hamburger.
Safeway has announced it will no longer sell what the meat industry calls “lean finely textured beef.” It’s the beef the public has come to call “pink slime.”
Safeway says in a statement “considerable consumer concern” led to its decision even though the chain believes its beef with the controversial filler in it is safe, according to ABC News.
Makers of “lean finely textured beef” and the USDA said that it is not an additive and need not be labeled, and is safe to eat. But critics, including former USDA scientists, contend the ammonia treated “pink slime” — made from low quality scraps once used for dog food and cooking oil — is less nutritious than pure ground beef.
The nutritional value has nothing to do with truth in labeling.
The stuff is not ground beef so the label should say if it is added to ground beef.
Truth? What a concept!
It sounds like Armour or Hormel “potted meat food product”
Ingredients: Beef tripe, mechanically separated chicken, beef hearts, partially defatted cooked beef fatty tissue, pork skin, and all the preservatives a growing body needs.
Stop it your making me hungry. 😀
Mmmmm,MMMM! Gotta get me some of that potted beef.
If the meat is potted, maybe some black coffee will sober it up…..
Test Tube hamburgers?
Soylent Beef?
Soylent Moo?
Nope, Soylent YUCK!
I wouldn’t assume that culturing beef in the laboratory will necessarily be cheaper than culturing it a cow. If tissue culturing was easy and cheap, there would be no need to harvest organs for transplant purposes.
Just speculating, but a gob of muscle cells is probably a lot easier than a functioning kidney.
And yet, we don’t have cheap laboratory-grown muscles for transplant purposes. (Note: “Cheap” in a medical context is probably three or four orders of magnitude more expensive than “cheap” in a food context.)
Also note: the heart is a muscle.
I don’t know why people have such a violent yuck-reaction to this. We all consume vast amounts of stuff that isn’t “natural” and plenty of “natural” stuff that is horrible for us.
The advantages of this technology are numerous, and obvious. Bring on the Faux Mignon.
The part that boggles me in discussions of ‘new foods’ is how wild some of our -old- foods are. And how poorly I expect they’d fare if they didn’t have either tradition or at least extensive historical usage in attempting to “be allowed” by the FDA.
I mean, lutefisk? Heck, just -pickling- something. “Ok, so… you want to add low molar acetic acid to it? …” Hot dogs, sausages, tripe, haggis, blood pudding, yoghurt, honey, wine, beer, koumis….
Reminds me of the jar of pickled pigs feet I used to see at the farmer’s market as a kid.
I’m not sure I’d want to read the label for haggis.
I’m not sure I’d want to read the label for haggis.
FWIW, the British have invented haggis-flavored potato chips. I saw them last week at Central Market. (But even the foodie in charge of the section thought it was probably a one-time thing.)
Via Amazon, which sells them:
Ingredients
Potatoes, sunflower oil, seasoning (sugar, natural pork flavouring, yeast extract, salt, pepper, rusk (wheatflour, salt) oatmeal, onion powder, spices, flavourings, citric acid, vegetable extract)
Well that’s not exactly haggis. I’m not sure the point of eating something flavored like haggis when you can’t even brag about eating the real thing.
The British love wierdly flavored potato chips. Or should I say “oddly flavoured potato crisps”?
The last time I was London, I saw favors like “prawn” and “roast beef.”
Never tried any, though. Like the “roast turkey and stuffing” soda from Jones Soda, even if they managed to get the flavor exactly right, it still wouldn’t have the right texture. Turkey should not be a fizzy drink!
lutefisk is disgusting no matter how it looks or smells.
The other stuff, hot dogs, which are sausages, the other sausages, haggis, tripe…it was all from frugality. People ate everything but the squeal, moo, honk or cluck.
Poor people ONLY ate that stuff.
I remember my parents talking about a small Sunday ham showing up on the dinner table for a week afterwards, in various forms. The final being the ‘seasoning’ for bean soup or just white beans with corn bread.
It was the Depression and it was frugality 101. I thank God for those storiest of ‘stuff’ like ham bones!.
I think it was Sam Vimes in the most recent Discworld novel who said he didn’t like yoghurt because it was just cheese that wasn’t trying hard enough…
Soylent Pink makes SPAM look wholesome.
How can it be meat if it never had a face?
DING, DING, DING, DING!
NO more callers please…we HAVE a winner!
It won’t make sense to eat synthocow if it doesn’t taste good AND pi$$ off the PETA people! I like food with a face. And I don’t even mind seeing it on the hoof now, on a plate later. Most meat eaters can’t even go there.
ISTR reading this story some months ago. At the time I noted that it was just another attempt to pass off vaguely cow-flavored Jell-O® as meat. I see nothing in the update to cause me to change my mind.
jello-O is a meat product. Cow, in fact. That’s why vegetarians refuse to eat it.
Personally, I like cows. Some of my best friends are cows. Being a hypocrite though, I still enjoy eating them. So synthetic meat would remove a major moral dilemma from my life with no cost to me. 🙂
“Oppose the NaturalNews people in approval or disapproval” is a frighteningly accurate heuristic, I find.
(And, in response to Larry’s quote, thus: Makers of “lean finely textured beef” and the USDA said that it is not an additive and need not be labeled, and is safe to eat. But critics, including former USDA scientists, contend the ammonia treated “pink slime” — made from low quality scraps once used for dog food and cooking oil — is less nutritious than pure ground beef.
Am I the only one that notices that “it’s safe” is being contrasted with “it’s less nutritious than pure ground beef”?
Those are not actually in tension. They bring up “ammonia treated” (o no!) but do not – cannot, scientifically – claim that it’s actually unsafe.
It’s a damned aesthetic argument, being presented as if it was a safety issue.)
Aesthetics are important when it comes to food.
The problem is, upper-middle-class people pressured Safeway to stop selling a less desirable, less expensive type of meat which they would never buy anyway. Lower-income people who would buy it will now have to choose between spending more money or doing without. The only ones who benefit are the dogs, who may get a few more scraps of meat in their food.
At least Larry wasn’t one of the people complaining when I talked about buying Kobe ground chuck last year. That would be too ironic.
I’m still crossing my fingers for the success of the Russo-Jap experiments in bringing back mastodons. Mmmmmm masto-ribeye… And will someone for the love of all that’s holy start raising wildebeest in the states? Lions and crocs in africa swear by them.