Lab grown burger, would you eat it, if you could afford it?

Czarcasm · 05-08-2013 03:09PM

April O Neill wrote: »

Offal is meat. Liver, kidneys etc. are offal.

Yeah I got the terminology wrong, I meant to say reconstituted meat- the fatty scraps that's minced, pureed, punched, pumped full of water and pressed into patties and cold meats.

Conmaicne Mara · 05-08-2013 03:13PM

AtomicHorror wrote: »

In what way is a petri dish more disgusting than an abattoir? I love my steak but I don't like to think about where it comes from. Most people similarly block out that thought. If we can eat meat that comes from a slaughterhouse and pretend that's not a bit disgusting, are you honestly suggesting we can't do the same for meat that comes from a lab or a factory?

Where did I mention disgusting?

AtomicHorror · 05-08-2013 05:40PM

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

Where did I mention disgusting?

What then is your problem with the idea of meat coming from "a petri dish", if not that you find it distasteful in some way?

Zascar · 05-08-2013 05:56PM

I'd eat it no problem! They'll probably be able to make it better for you than the real thing - and better for our world too.

Also check this out, its a food supliment called Soylent. Basically a milkshake that contains all the nutrients etc your body needs. Onviosuly its not meant to replace food but if you cannot eat normally you can eat this and still get everything your body needs in the right proportions. I think that for the amount of people that eat crappy food a lot of the time due to the inability to get/cook/eat proper nurticious food, this is a fantastic replacement

http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/21/soylent-crowdfunding-campaign-attracts-755k-so-people-can-survive-without-food/#FwT6D8WzYM68LURi.02

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSkOVkgd8hY

MJ23 · 05-08-2013 06:00PM

Sauce on the burger daddy, sauce on the burger.

Gatling · 05-08-2013 06:04PM

So what do you call a burger that hasn't got real meat in it

The Pheasant2 · 05-08-2013 06:05PM

I would have absolutely no problem eating this, beef muscle grown on an animal or in a petri dish is still beef. So long as it tastes fine it doesn't matter to me

claypigeon777 · 05-08-2013 06:38PM

In time all our meat and vegetables will probably be grown in labs.
Animals will no longer have to suffer and die in slaughter plants.
Human beings will probably be genetically engineered and grown in artificial wombs while nanotechnology inside our bodies will continually repair them and fight cancer.
The ever increasing speed of computers will accelerate and human thoughts will be downloaded and stored so there will be total recall.
Eventually computer intelligence will outstrip human intelligence by millions of times.
A world mind will probably be created connected every human on earth while food will be produced artificially by machines without any need for human intervention.
The natural world will be allowed to heal and return to its original state.
Human beings will live vastly extended life spans and when they die their consciences and experiences will be downloaded.
We are only experiencing now what future generations centuries from now will take for granted.

Sarn · 05-08-2013 06:40PM

I'd have no problem eating it. Back in the day I used to grow pig cells and often wondered if I grew enough and fried them would it be like eating ham. The trick to this is scaling it up to make it cost effective as I would imagine the cocktail of hormones, nutrients etc. for the cells to grow effectively could prove costly.

Czarcasm · 05-08-2013 06:42PM

Zascar wrote: »

Also check this out, its a food supliment called Soylent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IKVj4l5GU4

claypigeon777 · 05-08-2013 06:42PM

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

Absolutely no way would I eat that. I want my meat to come from an animal not a petrie dish.

An animal must suffer and die?

Growing meat this way could eventually become more economical and healthier.

Conmaicne Mara · 05-08-2013 06:45PM

AtomicHorror wrote: »

What then is your problem with the idea of meat coming from "a petri dish", if not that you find it distasteful in some way?

Meat, from animals derive their flavour from their diet. Proper hanging lends to tenderness. "Meat" from petrie dishes will not compare and will never be part of my diet.

You have the issues with abbatoirs/slaughterhouses, not I.

Conmaicne Mara · 05-08-2013 06:47PM

claypigeon777 wrote: »

An animal must suffer and die?

Growing meat this way could eventually become more economical and healthier.

Everything that lives dies, in case that has escaped your attention. Animals raised for food get eaten, shocker.

How you think something which will inevitably be created inside of a factory will be healthy is beyond me. Not that it will gain momentum which it won't.

dyl10 · 05-08-2013 06:55PM

hare05 wrote: »

There's a reason medicine made in labs is the standard and 'herbal treatments' are seen as quackery. The point of science is to take all arguments to their inevitable conclusions and find facts, comfort be damned, and the fact here is that lab grown meat is all but guaranteed to be safer, cleaner, healthier, less resource intensive and more ethically sound than slaughtering animals.

A couple of quick points:
-The herbal v 'scientific' debate is far more complex than that and the history of medicine and corporate pharmaceuticals would disagree with you.
-As far as cleanliness goes, the evidence would not fully support sterility for food. Healthier? that's trickier again and that can only be ascertained over the long-run. It's not possible to know whether that's true in advance. Further, healthier than what?

claypigeon777 · 05-08-2013 06:59PM

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

Everything that lives dies, in case that has escaped your attention. Animals raised for food get eaten, shocker.

If lab burgers take off then there is no need for animals to be killed would there?
Raising animals to suffer and die would become needless.

How you think something which will inevitably be created inside of a factory will be healthy is beyond me. Not that it will gain momentum which it won't.

If lab burgers become a cheaper alternative to meat from farm animals why wouldn't it take off?

You are aware that much of the world is malnourished and many people rarely get to eat meat and that arable land for crops and animals is deteriorating year upon year as the world population continues to rise?

Conmaicne Mara · 05-08-2013 07:14PM

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

Meat, from animals derive their flavour from their diet. Proper hanging lends to tenderness. "Meat" from petrie dishes will not compare

claypigeon777 wrote: »

If lab burgers take off then there is no need for animals to be killed would there?
Raising animals to suffer and die would become needless.

If all you want to eat is tasteless, bland, shíte food, I'm sure you'll be grand. There will always be a demand for the real thing, because some people value quality.

claypigeon777 wrote: »

You are aware that much of the world is malnourished and many people rarely get to eat meat and that arable land for crops and animals is deteriorating year upon year as the world population continues to rise?

I really don't give a crap, honestly. A lot of countries have way, way better farmland than Ireland but they prefer to fight amongst themselves, or reelect useless leaders like Mugabe time and again. Very much their problem, not mine.

claypigeon777 · 05-08-2013 07:29PM

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

If all you want to eat is tasteless, bland, shíte food, I'm sure you'll be grand. There will always be a demand for the real thing, because some people value quality.

You would rather see a poor animal suffer and die so you can have tastier food? Idiotic and selfish.

I really don't give a crap, honestly. A lot of countries have way, way better farmland than Ireland but they prefer to fight amongst themselves, or reelect useless leaders like Mugabe time and again. Very much their problem, not mine.

If you think the problem does not have a knock on effect in Ireland you are not living in the real world.

Conmaicne Mara · 05-08-2013 07:35PM

claypigeon777 wrote: »

You would rather see a poor animal suffer and die so you can have tastier food? Idiotic and selfish.

If you think the problem does not have a knock on effect in Ireland you are not living in the real world.

I see you've run out of argument then

Judgement Day · 05-08-2013 07:38PM

I think it's a great how everybody in the Third World now will now be able to eat burgers, and how this 'thing' has been created for the greater good rather than for some faceless multi-national corporation to make millions. :rolleyes:

Pai Mei · 05-08-2013 07:43PM

We may just save the Amazon after all :cool:

AtomicHorror · 05-08-2013 08:20PM

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

Meat, from animals derive their flavour from their diet. Proper hanging lends to tenderness. "Meat" from petrie dishes will not compare and will never be part of my diet.

Diet, ultimately, is just about the minerals and other chemicals to which the muscle matter is exposed. Hanging is just enzymes in the meat breaking down muscle matter and the meat dries out a bit and makes the flavours stronger. These are things that can be done with muscle matter that's grown too. Just a matter of trial and error really.

I reckon it probably will never be quite the same, but for most people, most of the time, it doesn't have to be.

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

You have the issues with abbatoirs/slaughterhouses, not I.

I get that, though I struggle to understand why.

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

Everything that lives dies, in case that has escaped your attention.

Including people, what exactly does that fact imply? Nothing. The fact that living things die doesn't give us the right to kill them at will, for whatever reason we conjure. There needs to be justification.

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

Animals raised for food get eaten, shocker.

Yes, but it is billions of animals, raised in captivity and killed by us. There's a clear and obvious moral difference between allowing nature to do as it does and taking the action of creating and extinguishing lives on a massive scale. We do it now because we are dependent on it- but we may be able to move beyond that some day. Isn't that a good thing?

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

How you think something which will inevitably be created inside of a factory will be healthy is beyond me.

Lots of things are made in factories. Bread, sugar, beer, yogurt, cheese- do you skip these as well?

There's nothing innately unsafe or unpalatable about food from factories. So why is it beyond you?

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

Not that it will gain momentum which it won't.

If I had to bet, in the long run I would bet against this and bet heavily. It might take 50 years, but I reckon killing animals for food will inevitably come to be seen as unethical and when that happens, people will start lobbying hard to ban it.

AtomicHorror · 05-08-2013 08:26PM

Judgement Day wrote: »

I think it's a great how everybody in the Third World now will now be able to eat burgers, and how this 'thing' has been created for the greater good rather than for some faceless multi-national corporation to make millions. :rolleyes:

Who says it has to be a faceless multinational corporation? Growing meat in a lab is a lot like making yogurt or beer (but more complicated)- small local companies could do it too. Maybe smaller craft meat growers could find a market selling slower grown, more authentic meats or something like that.

I'm with you on the third world thing though, stem cell meat will only be relevant to the hunger problem if and when it becomes cost effective.

ALiasEX · 05-08-2013 08:30PM

It wasn't the first lab grown burger. The 2 who ate this one thought it tasted like chicken (it was beef).

Conmaicne Mara · 05-08-2013 09:10PM

AtomicHorror wrote: »

Diet .... it.

Volumes of multi quoting bore me so I'll sum up rather more concisely.

You need a better understanding of meat, it's flavours, textures and how they're arrived at. It's not simply a process of injecting slab A with solution B.

Meat animals are raised for meat. I raise lambs for the store trade which are sent onto finishers. Though I have finished my own in the past, been right there from when the ewe conceived with the ram to stepping over the lambs heads in the slaughterhouse. Moral and ethical issues tend to arise in people far removed from the realities of actually raising food.

A quality Irish raised meat animal will never be beaten by anything cooked up in a lab or manufactured in a factory.

What the morality brigade need is a good dose of hunger.

AndonHandon · 05-08-2013 09:17PM

This meat can free up land where animals graze which can be used for crops which can be given to the poverty stricken. Reality dictates that survival involves sacrifice.

Judgement Day · 05-08-2013 09:39PM

AndonHandon wrote: »

This meat can free up land where animals graze which can be used for crops which can be given to the poverty stricken. Reality dictates that survival involves sacrifice.

Do you seriously believe that? Food that is produced - anywhere in the real world - is sold to those that can afford it not to those who desperately need it. :rolleyes:

Conmaicne Mara · 05-08-2013 09:42PM

AndonHandon wrote: »

This meat can free up land where animals graze which can be used for crops which can be given to the poverty stricken. Reality dictates that survival involves sacrifice.

Is that not one of Kim Yong Un's slogans

AtomicHorror · 05-08-2013 09:47PM

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

I raise lambs for the store trade which are sent onto finishers.

Wouldn't you say that gives you a powerful incentive to dismiss pretty much any argument I have to make? I don't know if you can really think about this objectively.

I agree with you on this: it's not likely that lab meat will ever be quite the same as real meat raised by good farmers and finished by good finishers, but it doesn't have to be. For me, it just has to be good enough to make it ethically preferable to killing animals.

I'd never make it as a vegetarian see, making my diet the centre of my life as so many of those folks see to, but if it's handy for me I'll happily substitute fake meat for real. I doubt I'd be alone in that.

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

What the morality brigade need is a good dose of hunger.

The "morality brigade", those pesky city folk who just don't have your insight into how ok it is to raise and then kill animals, will switch to stem cell meat if it's good enough.

It doesn't have to be grass fed, slow aged fillet steak quality. People don't eat that every day. They eat mince, they eat chicken fillets, they eat chops grilled beyond recognition. Stem cell meat just has to be "good enough" to make it seem to those soft-hearted townies like buying real meat is an unnecessary cruelty. You may not agree with their moral outlook, but there it is.

Johro · 05-08-2013 09:51PM

It's funny how some of us believe that goodwill and not financial gain is the motivator here.
On the grazing notion, I went back to Holland a while back and saw no cows in fields at all. They're all in sheds, all year round. So much so that a lot of them struggle to walk the few yards to the truck that'll take them to the abattoir. Maybe then from a welfare point of view 'lab beef' is a welcome notion. I'm not gonna eat it though. Probably better to just make sure our livestock is healthy and well looked after, and for us to eat less meat. Your digestive system will thank you for it anyway.
Producers keep producing regardless of demand. There's where the biggest problem is. Overproduction and waste.

Duggy747 · 05-08-2013 09:53PM

I'd eat it for the buzz, provided it didn't taste like shìt.

Though animals are killed for meat, the rest of their bodies like their skulls, bones, hooves, ears, organs, hide, etc are used to be put into products so I couldn't imagine a vast change in land being freed up in the near future.

Lab grown burger, would you eat it, if you could afford it?

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