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Would you eat lab-grown meat?

Would you eat lab-grown meat?

  • I'm a vegetarian, but I would be willing to try it

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    24

Kandahar

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In-vitro meat: Would lab-burgers be better for us and the planet? - CNN.com

I found this article fascinating. With the way biotechnology is progressing, it seems very likely that by the end of the decade, we'll be able to grow meat in laboratories at a price that is competitive with meat grown in ranches. The benefits of this are hard to overstate.

1. The environmental impacts will be HUGE. Every pound of beef requires 30 or more pounds of crops to feed the cow. Pork and chicken don't require quite as much feed per pound, but still a huge amount. This is a huge drain on our water supplies and farmland. If our meat was grown in a lab, it could completely eliminate these problems, freeing up our land and water supplies to be used for other productive things or returned to nature.

2. The health impacts could be very large too. As it stands now, red meat is extremely unhealthy. It has been linked to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer. Growing our meat in the laboratory would enable us to tinker with the genes to make it more nutritious. Imagine eating something that tastes like a cow, with the nutritional content of a fish.

3. Those with moral or religious qualms about eating meat could sleep easily at night, knowing that no animal was killed so that they could eat dinner.


I think that right now, the "yuck" factor might dissuade people from trying it. But I think this is really just a matter of how the lab-grown meat was marketed. If it had the same taste and texture of actual meat, I definitely could see this becoming very popular. And after it became commonplace, the "yuck" factor would disappear on its own. What do you think? Would you eat lab-grown meat, assuming it had the same taste and texture of regular meat, at a reasonable price?
 
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How exactly do they expect to replicate the texture of meats? From what I understand of cultured meat (See Wired Magazine Article), they take a bunch of cells from muscle and grow them, but you don't get the same structure in cultured as you do from a real animal.

I'd be willing to try it, but I see real problems getting it to mimic or be identical to the real thing.
 
That yuck factor does dissuade me. Once improved i would try it. Although at its current state, I would much rather eat real meat :).
 
How exactly do they expect to replicate the texture of meats? From what I understand of cultured meat (See Wired Magazine Article), they take a bunch of cells from muscle and grow them, but you don't get the same structure in cultured as you do from a real animal.

I'd be willing to try it, but I see real problems getting it to mimic or be identical to the real thing.

Basically the idea would be to "stretch" the cells manually in the lab, to mimic the muscle movements of a live animal. It's not an easy task, but lab experiments have shown that it can be done. We'll probably see lab-grown hamburgers several years before we see lab-grown steak, for this very reason. Foods where the texture isn't as important (e.g. hamburger) will be much easier to create in a lab than foods where the texture is very important (e.g. steak).
 
Basically the idea would be to "stretch" the cells manually in the lab, to mimic the muscle movements of a live animal. It's not an easy task, but lab experiments have shown that it can be done. We'll probably see lab-grown hamburgers several years before we see lab-grown steak, for this very reason. Foods where the texture isn't as important (e.g. hamburger) will be much easier to create in a lab than foods where the texture is very important (e.g. steak).

I guess a hamburger wouldent be so bad. I love hamburgers :). It's just the way the meat looks that completely turns me off. No. That isn't what she said.
 
Basically the idea would be to "stretch" the cells manually in the lab, to mimic the muscle movements of a live animal. It's not an easy task, but lab experiments have shown that it can be done. We'll probably see lab-grown hamburgers several years before we see lab-grown steak, for this very reason. Foods where the texture isn't as important (e.g. hamburger) will be much easier to create in a lab than foods where the texture is very important (e.g. steak).

But how do you get the veins to grow in the correct spots? This seems really hard to do. But you do have a good point in that hamburger would be easier. Same for chicken nuggets. There's no grain in chicken nuggets for a reason. I suppose any meat that can be extruded would bypass the texture problem.
 
I'll try just about anything once. This wouldn't be any exception.
 
Sure. I'll have a Frankenburger with lettuce and tomato, por favor. :mrgreen:

If it looks and tastes the same, and isn't going to make me grow eyeballs on my fingertips, and it is LESS EXPENSIVE, I'll buy it. Meat is ridiculously expense these days.
 
I would be fine with it... as long as they needlessly killed an animal in my lab-meat's stead.
 
I probably would give it a go, one thing I would support is that lab-grown meat should be labled as such to distinguished from standard farm raised meat.
 
Lab grown meat doesn't appeal to me. Nor does it sound good. The flavor of a animal's flesh picks up what ever the animal mostly eats. For example there is a difference in flavor between a corn fed cow and a grass fed cow, a pig that eats grain and a pig that eats acorns and so on. Animal meat also has fat which is also flavor and helps retain moisture when cooking. I think it would be a few decades before I ever eat lab grown meat,mostly to see that there are not any adverse side effects to eating lab grown meat.
 
Assuming it wasn't a danger to my health and was reasonably tasty and cheap, than I would buy it.
 
Basically the idea would be to "stretch" the cells manually in the lab, to mimic the muscle movements of a live animal. It's not an easy task, but lab experiments have shown that it can be done. We'll probably see lab-grown hamburgers several years before we see lab-grown steak, for this very reason. Foods where the texture isn't as important (e.g. hamburger) will be much easier to create in a lab than foods where the texture is very important (e.g. steak).

Can a lab grown meat also have fat?


Answer to Different Grades of Ground Beef
The differences between ground beef, ground chuck, ground sirloin and ground round is basically the difference in the amount of fat in the ground meat.

* Ground Beef - 73% Lean, 27% Fat

* Ground Chuck - 80% Lean, 20% Fat

* Ground Sirloin - 85% Lean, 15% Fat

* Ground Round - 90% Lean, 10 % Fat
 
On a strange tangent, I was reading this sci-fi book awhile ago, and...

One of the characters came from a culture that for various reasons ONLY ate lab-grown (or "vat-grown", in this case) meat.

And upon moving to a culture that did not, was horribly repulsed (due again to the various and vast differences in cultural standards) to the point of puking when informed that the steak just eaten was not "vat-grown".

Much the opposite of what many people here seem to be saying…
 
Given the way many poultry and swine factory farms are set up nowdays it might be an improvement.
 
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