Scientists are salivating at the prospect of testtube meat products, hoping to produce a whole hamburger within a year’s time. I’m not salivating, I’m just pre-retching everything I’ve ever eaten before. Meat from a tube is not a new thing, Germans have been using it in Liverwurst and (as the video above describes…painfully) many so called ‘chicken nuggets’ use a form of meat paste as their base. Now on to the horror: scientists are able to extract stem cells from the muscle tissue of live animals, then they grow these stem cells into muscle in a large vat. They take the muscle they grow in the vat and begin to ‘exercise it’ to bulk it up. It is harmless to the animal and is touted as a slaughter-free way to obtain meat. Perhaps most importantly, it is seen as a potential way of easing world hunger through mass production of cheap, cruelty free test tube meat. Hey, we’re already doing better with this than the suggestions out of Japan for poop meat from the folks at Okayama Laboratory. That meat is extracted from the fecal matter of mammals and shaped into patties, totally sanitary except for the temporary insanity that would grip any normal person who had just been told they had literally eaten crap. Disturbingly, synthetic versions of other kinds of meat are envisioned as well. Panda, anyone? Right. If the goal of said research is so that I can finally have that liger burger I’ve always wanted, then tally-ho good scientists. Although ghoulish and nasty to imagine, I could see this having amazing application in space exploration and colonization but that’s just the nerd in me. As for the poop burger, please relegate that to the dustbin of science: glad to know it can be done, but now it is time to ensconce that away for it will hopefully never have its day. The video above, of course, discusses the now commonly used chicken meat paste used in chicken nuggets. Basically, it is everything that was once thrown into the trash pureed into a thick, disgusting paste then breaded and shaped into nuggets, after being cleaned in ammonia and blanched white. The below video is from Okayama Laboratories and demonstrates poop meat. Science people. Science.
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I love new technologies generally, and perhaps if the technology is developed so as to demand less overall energy input, less h20 use, less fertilizer etc, per pound of meat…perhaps this could one day be much more efficient and be better developed. With stem cell technology developing we could build a more muscle like tissue (instead of just ground beef like meat as this is) and it be much more efficient than growing it on an animal. Obviously this would be less cruel to animals.
Problem is though for now, is that some of the details are still unclear and this technology may only be marginally more efficient than the status quo.
Of course this is an appropriate time to ask all of us to eat less mean in our diet to do what we can for our environment. Obviously vegetarianism is a good thing in this regard, but I like me some meat so….forget that 😀