May’s issue of the journal Tissue Engineering featured a report (paid subscription required) that could potentially change the lives of Hindus, Jains, and Vegetarians everywhere. The report titled, “Commentary: In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production,” by Edelman et. al. looks at artificially produced, real meat:
Most edible animal meat is made of skeletal muscle tissue. The idea that skeletal muscle tissue-engineering techniques could be applied to produce edible meat dates back at least 70 years, but has been seriously pursued by only three groups of researchers. Their efforts can be divided roughly into scaffold-based and self-organizing techniques.
In scaffold-based techniques, embryonic myoblasts or adult skeletal muscle satellite cells are proliferated, attached to a scaffold or carrier such as a collagen meshwork meshwork or microcarrier beads, and then perfused with a culture medium in a stationary or rotating bioreactor. By introducing a variety of environmental cues, these cells fuse into myotubes, which can then differentiate into myofibers. The resulting myofibers may then be harvested, cooked, and consumed as meat. van Eelen, van Kooten, and Westerhof hold a Dutch patent for this general approach to producing cultured meat. However, Catts and Zurr appear to have been the first to have actually produced meat by this method.
A scaffold-based technique may be appropriate for producing processed (ground, boneless) meats, such as hamburger or sausage. But it is not suitable for producing highly structured meats such as steaks. To produce these, one would need a more ambitious approach, creating structured muscle tissue as self-organizing constructs or proliferating existing muscle tissue in vitro.
Wicked! It’s like Franken-food. Oh come on. You guys are curious to see what it tastes like too. The Guardian has more:
According to researchers, meat grown in laboratories would be more environmentally friendly and could be tailored to be healthier than farm-reared meat by controlling its nutrient content and screening it for food-borne diseases.
Vegetarians might also be tempted because the cells needed to grow chunks of meat can be taken without harming the donor animal.
Experiments for NASA, the US space agency, have already shown that morsels of edible fish can be grown in petri dishes, though no one has yet eaten the food.
Mr Matheny [of the University of Maryland] and his colleagues have taken the prospect of “cultured meat” a step further by working out how to produce it on an industrial scale. They envisage muscle cells growing on huge sheets that would be regularly stretched to exercise the cells as they grow. Once enough cells had grown, they would be scraped off and shaped into processed meat products such as chicken nuggets.
Of course, the Vegetarian Society had to be spoiled-sports when asked to comment on the news:
“The Vegetarian Society is concerned that while this has the potential to decrease the number of meat-producing animals in factory farms, there are still a number of question marks regarding the origins of the cells and the method of harvesting.“It won’t appeal to someone who gave up meat because they think it’s morally wrong to eat flesh or someone who doesn’t want to eat anything unnatural,” Ms Bennett added.
“Personally I wouldn’t want to, but I suppose if they’re going to make chicken nuggets with it, then it’s probably not going to taste much different.”
I was going to make a chicked curry, but I think now I’m going to make a salad for dinner tonight instead…thanks, Abhi..
(lost my appetite entirely. ..the cells needed to grow chunks of meat ..eeeuugghhh)
It don’t know if it would really change the lives of Jains or Hindus who are strict vegetarians for religious reasons.
Why not? That’s precisely whose moral problems will be addressed. No life is taken.
Artificial scaffolding actually increases the grossness factor. It’s like the marketing problem of quorn mycoprotein.
Yes, this sounds highly marketable 🙂 /end sarcasm
Yeah I read about this in the Independent, and then researched it a bit more – it’s unlikely they’ll ever be able to make anything other than severely processed meat, like nuggets as you mentioned. But I’ll eat it.
Two quotes above are rather interesting. NASA confirm they’ve grown fish “but so far no one has yet eaten the food”. I wonder why not?
And the hippy flare-wearing flower-power long-haired sandal-wearing save-the-squirrels vegetarian spokesperson Ms Bennett:
“It wonÂ’t appeal to…someone who doesnÂ’t want to eat anything unnatural”
Meat’s unnatural? Wow, this is a shell-shock. Who made it?
To all the veggies out there – all meant in jest. If you met my future mother-in-law, you’d understand why I make fun of vegetarians.
If God had wanted us to be vegetarian, he wouldn’t have made steak so damn tasty. I need to eat. Chow!
So ‘Meat is Murder!’ becomes ‘Meat is Embryonic Myoblasts Fused Into Myotubes Via Collagen Meshwork Perfused With A Culture Medium In A Bioreactor!’
Needs work.
All joking aside there is convincing published evidence (genetic and paleontological) that traces meat-eating directly to the rise of human intelligence. Meat provides calories more efficiently to the brain thereby allowing it to develop faster than the brain of a herbivore. Specifically it is when humans started preserving and eating dead meat that intelligence arose (this coincided with a long intense dry spell in sub-Saharan Africa that killed much vegetation). Of course, that doesn’t mean to imply that vegetarians are less intelligent. If they and their offsprings remained strict vegetarian for many generations and didn’t live in a civilization that made food plentiful, then you’d see an evolutionary effect.
Abhi writes: If (vegetarians)…remained strict vegetarian for many generations and didn’t live in a civilization that made food plentiful, then you’d see an evolutionary effect.
You’re saying that vegetarians who lived in a society(for generations) without vegetarian food would be less intelligent. I would say – they would die!! Unless, of course they adapt.
Here’s a related article by your truly…
M. nam
I already eat enough pseudomeat to eliminate any desire for test-tube baby lunchmeat. Texturized vegetable protein is the bestest.
steps on soapbox
I’m a firm carnivoire, but I think if you’re going to eat animal, you can’t be squeamish about it. I eat it all, from pig-cheek to ox-tail. Prefering to think of your steak as a rectangular shrink wrapped piece of goodness that was born in the refrigerator…that’s the sort of seperation between nature and modern life that I think creates some weird problems. Also..waste no, want not, yeah?
But this sort of bioengineered crap is exactly what most people complain about these days. I highly doubt this will actually taste anything like real fish or meat. We’ve all experienced (or had parents and relatives tell us about) that first visit to an American grocery store..ogling the huge, perfect red tomatoes, blemish-free vegetables, frothy gallons of milk, gigantic chickens, etc…Only to be sadly disappointed much later by how poorly all of it tastes. LIke smelling a scratch’n’sniff sticker instead of the real thing. The last thing we need is further seperation from what our grandparents took for granted.
steps off soapbox
No, I am saying something much simpler. I am saying that people that remained strict vegetarians in a society that didn’t have plentiful food (see North Korea) would be weeded out of the genepool or die. When food is scarce you must take on calories any way you can (especially your brain). If you choose out of principle to eat grass rather than the equivalent weight of rats then the rat-eaters and their offspring would win out.
Abhi: I am saying that people that remained strict vegetarians in a society that didn’t have plentiful food (see North Korea) would be weeded out of the genepool or die.
Agreed. Although I’m not so sure NK’s are strict vegetarians.
M. Nam
Sadly, too many of them are although not by choice.
I’m trying to avoid a knee-jerk gross-out reaction and think rationally about this, but honestly, I’m too distracted by mental images of raw, fleshy mold, blossoming in petri dishes.
Working in a chicken processing plant is bad enough already, but can you image life for the poor soul who’d have to work at this place?
Come now Cicatrix, can you honestly tell me that you wouldn’t want to go into work everyday just so you could scream, “It’s alive. It’s alive!” while laughing madly?
Lunch breaks would also be fun at the company cafeteria.
Laughing madly while I “exercise the muscle-sheets”? no thanks 😉
You might have a point about the lunch breaks. Food fights involving raw fleshy muscle bits? I’m intrigued.
But I’m really holding out for a job where I can scream “Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!! People, I tell you, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Causing harm and incurring karma are only a few of the reasons that Hinduism recommends against eating meat. Lowering your consciousness is another big one and, though the Vedas probably don’t address in-vitro cultured meat, I’m sure it falls into the same category as any other dead flesh.
From an article called Hindu Ethics on Hinduism Today’s website: “In the yoga-infused verses of the Tirumantiram, warning is given of how meat-eating holds the mind in gross, adharmic states: ‘The ignoble ones who eat flesh, death’s agents bind them fast and push them quick into the fiery jaws of Narakaloka [lower consciousness].'”
Also, it is widely held that, prior to Muslim and British invasions, for thousands of years India was largely vegetarian.
I am a little uneasy with veggie burgers and not-dogs, let alone some scary frankenmeat. No thanks!
Ok, I think its time people pitched in with anecdotes of the gross-est things they have ingested.
I’ll pitch in – rats. Yes I actually ate ’em. They were slipped into my plate by a conniving aunt. I must confess it tasted awesome until I was told what it was.
Apparently fried frog legs are a delicacy in Kerala – especially in the roadside toddy/liquor shops. Wonder if anyone else here has tried anything “exotic”?
When I was a kid, I once ate shrimp. With something that looked like ketchup. Gross.
The view of meat in original “hindu” texts is uncertain at best. Also, the Budhha himself ate meat if it was offered to him, but not if it was specifically prepared for him.
well, what’s ‘exotic’? I made the mistake of mentioning to a friend that as children, my sister and I fought over a certain delicacy in Sri Lanka. Ever since, she introduces me as “and this is cicatrix, you know, my friend who eats ___.” If I didn’t love her dearly and give her the same sort of shit, I would’ve clobbered her ages ago.
Veggie burgers aren’t weird at all. At least when they’re basically a bunch of veggies smooshed into a flat patty. Imagine Samosa filling as a plain patty..not so gross, is it?
I actually like soy-meat..no idea how they make it, but it’s sort of tasty once you get used to it.
ms, it’s an impressive feat, but prepare to be taken down. I’ve eaten crickets (fried), roaches (yes the cock- variety, fried as well), shredded snake, crocodile, kangaroo, live fish, live octopus, snails, frogs, raw rabbit (out of necessity, not at a restaurant) and goat brain. I’ll eat more or less anything put in front of me.
Whilst some of these were abroad, most were in London. London went from boiled beef and overcooked sprouts in the ’60s to the gastronomic centre of the universe in 4 decades.
Immigration rocks!
Bet none of you have eaten dog-meat. It’s called kheema in India – tastes like chicken.
M. Nam
Ooh, Bong Breaker, you’re a man after my own..stomache. Have you eaten at the Fergus Henderson restuarant? He’s serving up offal to snooty patrons, charging them something awful per plate! Love it. Wish I could go 😉
I’ve had: cow tongue, cow udders (milky!), intestines, beaf-heart, chicken gizzard, pig-everything, ox-tail (with bone) fish eyes, cheeks, fins, bones. Sushi, including raw octupus. calves brains, alligator, goat, rabbit, pigeon, squid, shark, grasshoppers, and raw minced lamb with spices. The last was an Ethiopian dish, and I finally met my match. Mostly because raw meant doesn’t actually taste like anything..just sort of..pasty. Ate about a third, then took the rest home and cooked into a burger.
Cic + BB: you guys are meat hos 😉
I forgot snails and frogs. But does that count as exotic?
Dog-meat? Yow. no. And I wouldn’t want to either. Line must be drawn somewhere.
But I have, inadvertendly eaten cat. Used to eat at this really cheap Cantonese place all the time when I was a poor starving student (as opposed to the poor starving adult I now am) …the Health Department closed the place down after I’d eaten their for a year because they found remains of cat carcasses in the back kitchens.
And I swear that the Chinese delivery I get now (no one else will deliver to my ghetto palace) is not chicken. Much too soft and ..springy..
Hehe, I was expecting you to say ‘I gave up’ but your aunty-ness is showing once again (try as you might to deny it) but aunty trait number 18:
Don’t waste food beta!
Wasn’t heart really tough? Raw meat is a bit weird. I don’t know the Ethopian dish you mention, but the rabbit I killed had to be dried out for a while before we could eat it and it was too wet to start a fire. So there wasn’t too much blood. I stopped one short of one my mates who ate part of a human in the dissection room during anatomy class for about a tenner or something. Well, he WAS my mate.
Yes I have been to Henderson’s restaurant! St. John was very near my girlfriend’s old flat. But I just had crab when I visited. It’s odd you mention him as I recently glanced at his book, I think it’s called Nose to Tail Eating. I’ve had pig’s trotters, they’re not too outlandish, but some of his recipes look very odd.
I forgot to mention haggis – if you know how it’s made it’s worse than anything else! But I do like it 🙂
Peace out, Meat Ho.
I’v eaten termites and grubs straight off of trees in the Amazon. They are minty. 🙂
Dude, did you just confess that your buddy is a cannibal? I’d check the freezer the next time you go over to his flat.
Indeed he is, technically, a cannibal. We tend to avoid him, it’s not the only weird thing he does.
I pity his future patients. Hopefully he’ll become a pathologist.
MD, want to weigh in concerning the dietary habits of pathologists?
Hey! Quit with the aunty thing!! I’m barely (sort of) older than you are, smartass! It’s actually my FOB-y side coming out, is what it is.. and as you can see from my meat-eater manifesto (#11) wasted anything really does bother me 🙂
Heart was not so good. I like gamey meats, but the texture and taste of this was really not so palatable. Not much blood in the raw lamb.. it was served on injira bread, surrounded by all those tasty ethiopian vegs, looking like a 2pound lump of ground chuck from the supermarket. Bit weird. Not bad, just didn’t actually taste like anything.
Aren’t cadavers pumped with formeldehyde? I must say, your friend stands alone. Cannibal and necrophile in one fell swoop. Did he get sick afterwards?
I know people who worked on the Henderson book, which is why I know of him in the first place. I dunno how many of those recipes I feel like tackling at home, but I’m willing to eat if someone else cooks 😉 I love that he’s got a thing for marrow, cause I love it too.
Haven’t eaten haggis, always been curious. I’m not fond of oatmeal used to stretch a dish, so I’m going to guess that I won’t find this a culinary highlight. But of course I’ll try it.
Also, re: haggis, boiled meats never ever taste very good. Waste of perfectly good food, imo. (like the time I visited Cape Cod and almost cried at the sight of all these large, lovely clams and quehogs, boiled to rubberyness. Beautiful fresh oysters were absolutely smothered in cheese, cream and other atrocities, and baked until tasteless. Raw people! only way to eat an oyster!)
Back to you, Meat Ho
Bet none of you have eaten dog-meat. It’s called kheema in India – tastes like chicken
Thats ridiculous. No one eats qeema of dog meat in the Desi community. Its cooked with either lamb or beef.
Amfd writes: >>No one eats qeema of dog meat in the Desi community.
I meant – in India(where I ate). I’ve not heard of dog-meat in the west, least of all desis eating it. I think it is banned in the US – bunch of hypocrites.
M. Nam
Wow, you make me think the book world is very small. Or is it just by chance you know these people who worked on his book?
Cadavers are pumped full of formaldehyde, or the updated, equally-stinky equivalent. Although to be fair to him, it was a tiny chunk. Not even a chunk, more like a morsel. I think it was fat. Eating human flesh isn’t what bothered me per se, the first thing I thought was the preserving fluid must taste disgusting and secondly I try to be as respectful as I can of the cadavers as these people were nice enough to donate themselves to us. Eating is a one-off, students routinely do equally stupid things with bits of dead people.
Haggis is great, with a bit of gravy on top. I wouldn’t call boiling it a waste, as if you see the raw ingredients of a haggis, it IS waste. It’s offal and tripe and odds and ends about which some Scottish McScotsman one day thought:
“Och aye! That’ll taste good inside of a stomach!”
“You mean inside YOUR stomach?”
“Nor, cook it in a stomach mon!”
Yes, I’m sure that’s exactly how it was invented.
Yah, but my point (which went unstated, so sorry) is that all that offal and tripe and whatnot can taste pretty damn good if cooked well. Humble ingrediants don’t always deserve one great boiling up, you know. Damn saxon-pict-celt people never seemed to understand that.
I’ve had tripe and loved it. I made a Sri Lankan pork dish a while ago, and fed to friends who had seconds and thirds and loved it. Told them over dessert that they’d had pork shoulder with skin and fat still attached.
I dunno..what do you think about culinary engineering? Like cooking everything in a stomach? I’ve been rather fascinated and horrified by turducken…chicken cooked inside a duck cooked inside a turkey. Curious to try it but also, like, “stop the madness!”
Amfd writes: >>No one eats qeema of dog meat in the Desi community.
I meant – in India(where I ate). I’ve not heard of dog-meat in the west, least of all desis eating it. I think it is banned in the US – bunch of hypocrites.
M. Nam
Someone pulled a fast one on you buddy.. Only a few tribes (remote ones) eat dogs and cats. Kheema is made from minced beef or lamb and not dogs. Yuck! Speaking of dog food..I once volunteered at a dog shelter and the lady in charge asked if I had ever eaten dogs and whether they eat dogs in India. Grossed me out.
The Weirdest meat I’ve had is gator meat. It’s tough.
BongBreaker, turn that guy in.. he’s a Dr. Hannibal wannabe.
Also, it is widely held that, prior to Muslim and British invasions, for thousands of years India was largely vegetarian.
i don’t believe this is true at all. in fact, from what i recall the vast majority have of people have alway supplemented their diet with meats when they could, unlike elite upper caste people who had a more steady supply of grains, beans and other wholesome foods which could counterbalance their lack of animal protein. i believe cow consumptions is alluded to in the rig veda. in india, food taboos seem partly correlated with caste. tribal people have few taboos, while brahmins have the most.
also, re: abhi, there has been a lot of change in human diets over the past 10,000 years with agriculture. today you guys are freaking out over meat things, but no doubt 10,000 years ago many of the first syrian farmers were scorned for sowing seeds and tending the earth and extracting grain from it with their labor, instead of being more ‘natural’ and taking what nature offers.
p.s. food taboos/aversions (which are usually fixated on meats) tend to kick in around age 4-6. remember the joke about how you know that adam and eve weren’t chinese? cuz eve would have eaten the snake!
vomit
ms, you get to help clean-up, since the gross-out fest was YOUR inspired idea. 😉
:+:
abhi, it woulnd’t address my family’s reasons for being wedgetarian– during lent you can’t have flesh, period. no matter how freakish the origins of this…stuff it’s still animal, so it’s still verboten. yech.
also, i’m surprised and perplexed by your “eating meat” = rise of human intelligence comment. i wish you had provided links. 🙂
How sure are you? Isn’t this more of a philosophical question? When have you heard of the term “flesh” not associated with a live animal? Is it really “flesh” if it was never alive?
Dictionary.com defines flesh: flesh n. – The soft tissue of the body of a vertebrate, covering the bones and consisting mainly of skeletal muscle and fat.
Technically this material never came from a live vertebrate.
As far as my comment about “eating meat=rise of human intelligence,” it is widely believed to be true, especially when analyzed from a multidiciplinary perspective. Here are a couple of the MANY related references that deal with meat eating in proto-humans. Those proto-humans that were vegetarian and didn’t adapt ALL went extinct. It’s important to note that hunting for meat even had secondary benefits to human intelligence. One had to make weapons that are not necessary to hunt a plant. Also, tracking an animal leads to group strategy:
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s6549.html
http://www.ridgecrest.ca.us/~do_while/sage/v9i7f.htm
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Anthropology/SocialCultural/?view=usa&ci=0195131398
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6921
http://williamcalvin.com/1990s/1998SciamShorter.pdf
vegetarianism can lower IQ.
with our short guts we need a really dense source of calories. meats, nuts, tubers, etc. there is a reason that remains from grain fed agricultural societies show a physical regression in robustness and health (as assayed via teeth growth layers for example) vis-a-vi their hunter gatherer ancestors.
Interesting articles…but as with most paleo research, we have to do a lot of best guessing. There is substantial evidence to “support” a theory that meat led to an overall increase in intelligence, but that’s all it is and will probably remain as such: a theory, a best guess. There are just too many variables in play. For comparison, no matter how much wind we shoot through a T-REX’s skull(or data mine via computers), we’ll never truly know what the beast sounded like 65 mil years ago. It is just a best guess. I’m not sure what is in place to measure intelligence. Population spikes? Tools created? The evolution of hunting? These are all constructed baselines, created by each author and agreed upon by his/her peers.
Meat led to overall increase in intelligence? Maybe, maybe not. Too many variables in place. Its all a theory, no matter how much you swirl it around, you’ll just never really know…
Very discouraging to hear someone say that. You sound like you might support Intelligent Design as well…
So a time honored tradition for pathology residents is to take a piece of a hot dog, freeze it, cut it, stain it, and look at it under the microcope. Enough to turn the most hard core meatarian into a vegetarian.
FYI, kosher hot dogs seem to have more meat (skeletal muscle) than regular hot dogs which have all sorts of things in them, when viewed under the microscope, which makes eating them seem like an episode of Fear Factor.
Ok, I just read the cannibalism comment. That kid needs to be talked to. Seriously talked to. Bodies in anatomy class need to be treated with respect, and pathologists especially, need to be sensitive to this. Sad, sad, sad…
So what’s in ’em?
Actually I’m not a fan of ID,but thanks for the compliment: as a scientist I cannot discount any theory…so ID may or may not be true, just like eating meat led to increase brain power may or may not be true. Three pint glasses appear to be all the same height, but add a few significant digits and they are not. One will always be the tallest, one the shortest, and one in the middle. Just about how you view things. Getting locked into a theory with so many unknown variables doesn’t make me a good scientist, but acknowledging these variables does.
Oh..now I see. That sort of explains the ‘imitation crab meat’ the lady at my awphiss cafeteria served me.
It looked like white chicken cubes. She said, “it’s not really crab. It’s some kinda veg+otherstuffwhichIcudntmakeout, which is specially processed for days and frozen, and it’s sourced frm Japan”. For days I was not able to convince myself that in this land of milk and honey, there could be something called as ‘imitation meat’. Any ideas people, what was it really that I ate? Actually, it was quite decent. Tasted like a paneer crossing a shrimp.. Yummm!
moornam, kheema is basically chopped meat- usually beef, sometimes mutton as well. I don’t know of any place in India which openly serves dog meat. Though there are ocassional cases of shady dhabas(trust me, they are not anything like the Punjabi dhabas – just cheap desi tharra and cheap nonveg) on outskirts, serving it.
And now that we are on kheema, let me share an interesting piece of info frm Bbay abt the local inexpensive restaurants managed by chillia community from Gujarat(there are many in South Bbay, Muslim dominated areas), take orders for kheemas in units of “ek aadha”, “do aadha” [one half-plate(servings), two half-plate] :-)) This is peculiar only to these chilia restaurants and that too only for kheema. Any ideas? Could it be some kinda cultural export frm Gujarat? (Gujjubhai, Gujjudude, gyaan??)