Meatless Meat - Semi-Living Food

[chappie]

By saying that we need to 'grow meat in a petri' dish we are being very simple-minded and narrow-focused and in my skeptical opinion another way to make a ton of money for someone. Animal protein is NOT the only protein out there, as mentioned, before entire civilizations have thrived without it and entire cuisines are more than delicious without using a single meat item. We really DO NOT need it. We WANT it. So, saying we have to do this in order to have food for everyone without killing animals and using resources for these animals is rediculous.

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My point was not to suggest we need to do this to feed people, and you are correct in that there are many other forms of protein than animal flesh. However, with current and increasing market demands for meat, I think you'll find it harder to convince the world to settle for beanburgers, tempeh and wheat gluten nuggets than you think.

Who knows, perhaps one day this kind of technology will be so commonplace and advanced, you could basically request an exact marbling percentage, grain structure and mineral background for a certain kind of "meat." (First off, it needs a new and highly euphemistic name. Contest, anyone?)

One of its biggest obstacles would be marketing it against Big Meat (is that even a term?) So the product wouldn't likely catch on until it was really good.

Originally I hadn't even considered humane treatment of livestock, but really, even on a medium-sized operation, who are we to know what kind of "quality" lives cattle, pigs (as smart as they are delicious) and sheep, et al, have lived. (OK, I'll give you Kobe beef...). If I shoot a deer cleanly through its lungs from a tree stand, I can be pretty certain it didn't suffer long and that up until that moment it lived a life deer evolved to live. I don't know that when I pick up my $1.99-a-pound chicken (which I do).

Sometimes when I try to imagine possible distant futures, an optimistic idea of people advancing beyond our contemporary faults, I think about stuff exactly like this. As much as we look back with horror at Colonial doctors filling an agonized patient with whiskey and sawing his leg off, people wearing itchy wool year-round and sucking on wooden dentures -- maybe some distant humans will laugh at the "primitive" notion of killing animals for food. It's not that far-fetched in the long run.

At any rate, the argument is all theory until something delicious emerges.

[Peter the eater]

One of its biggest obstacles would be marketing it against Big Meat (is that even a term?) . . . .

It is now!

[MSRadell]

I wonder if this technology would qualify for the one million dollar prize PETA has offered for someone to develop technology to grow commercially viable meat?

[chappie]

I wonder if this technology would qualify for the one million dollar prize PETA has offered for someone to develop technology to grow commercially viable meat?

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Read the link I pasted a few posts up (the Slate one). That's what it talks about.

[chappie]

Ooooh: We could call it Reincarne!

[chappie]

I went to sleep last night thinking about "Reincarne." I imagined a scenario in which its mastery coincided with the rise in artificial intelligence, to the point where machines "learned" how to perfect this cultivated muscle tissue ...

To the point that the machines learned to grow the tissue into bodies for their own locomotion.

OK, so I am a vivid dreamer.