Cultured Beef

On a more technical level, the major problem I see is that they think the way to grow "meat" is to have muscle tissue...almost pure protein, when in fact what the human body needs is fat, not so much protein.

The way the government pushes their "healthy agenda" today, I can't realistically see lab-grown meat ever having the appropriate amount of healthy fat included.
 
Lost Spirit said:
On a more technical level, the major problem I see is that they think the way to grow "meat" is to have muscle tissue...almost pure protein, when in fact what the human body needs is fat, not so much protein.

The way the government pushes their "healthy agenda" today, I can't realistically see lab-grown meat ever having the appropriate amount of healthy fat included.

Indeed, and looking at the article Kniall posted showing who's behind it, suggests it is just the $$$ potential that is the main consideration.
 
Thanks for merging the threads!

Pob said:
Lost Spirit said:
On a more technical level, the major problem I see is that they think the way to grow "meat" is to have muscle tissue...almost pure protein, when in fact what the human body needs is fat, not so much protein.

The way the government pushes their "healthy agenda" today, I can't realistically see lab-grown meat ever having the appropriate amount of healthy fat included.

Indeed, and looking at the article Kniall posted showing who's behind it, suggests it is just the $$$ potential that is the main consideration.

I agree, the money factor plays a role, as well as control.
The lack of good fats on modern shelves, & the push on protein. I guess food that's addictive is definitely easier to sell than food that is optimal.
 
SotT now carries another article with the latest developments as a follow up story of sorts:

http://www.sott.net/article/279418-Biotech-factories-to-farm-fake-meat
 
Ran into a similar story about artificial milk today (10 embedded hyper-links omitted):

_http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141022-lab-grown-milk-biotechnology-gmo-food-climate/

Milk Grown in a Lab Is Humane and Sustainable. But Can It Catch On?

Would consumers rather get milk from cows or from genetically engineered yeast?

By Linda Qiu
National Geographic
Published October 22, 2014

The world's first test-tube hamburger has already been synthesized and cooked at a cost of more than $300,000. Now a pair of young bioengineers in Silicon Valley are trying to produce the first glass of artificial milk, without a cow and with the help of genetically engineered yeast.

Like the creators of in vitro burgers, the scientists behind yeast-culture dairy are concerned about animal welfare and agricultural sustainability—but also about creating a food that will find a mass market. (Read: "Test-Tube Meat: Have Your Pig and Eat It Too.")

Because their petri dish milk will mirror the formula of the real thing—the yeast cultures will be churning out real milk proteins—it will retain the taste and nutritional benefits of cow milk, says Perumal Gandhi, a co-founder of the synthetic dairy start-up Muufri (pronounced Moo-free) in San Francisco, California. That will distinguish it from soy- and almond-based alternatives.

"If we want the world to change its diet from a product that isn't sustainable to something that is, it has to be identical [to], or better than, the original product," Gandhi says. "The world will not switch from milk from a cow to the plant-based milks. But if our cow-less milk is identical and priced right, they just might."

The Hard Life of Cows

Gandhi and Muufri co-founder Ryan Pandya are both vegans who view the livestock industry's practices as inhumane. The cows in a modern dairy, they argue, live in crowded barns. Their horns are removed to keep them from injuring themselves or farmworkers, their tails are often docked so that workers won't get a feces-laden smack in the face, and they're given growth hormones and antibiotics.

What's more, the cows are artificially inseminated every year so they'll keep producing milk—and then, as soon as they give birth, their calves are taken away, to make the milk available for humans.

"Fundamentally, you're controlling the reproductive system of an animal. It's incredibly invasive," Pandya says. "A lot of people are motivated by the environmental factors, but imagine that happening to an animal. Really, if you consider yourself an environmentalist and then you consume dairy, it's all for naught."

The industry's environmental impact is also substantial. Dairy production is responsible for roughly 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions each year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, mostly because cows belch methane. And although dairy is already a more efficient way than meat of converting plant feed into animal protein, bioengineers can do even better than nature, Gandhi says.

"Making an entire cow to make just the milk is inefficient," he says. "You're giving it all this feed and water, and most of it goes towards growing legs, growing a head, growing a liver and lungs—just living."

In contrast, Muufri's system can be likened to "an out-of-body udder" that only churns out milk.

Let's Make Milk

Making milk, while complicated in its own way, is nonetheless much simpler than growing meat.

"If you look at all the components, less than 20 make milk milk—give it the taste, structure, color you expect when you drink milk," Pandya says.

Muufri will contain only those essential proteins, fats, minerals, and sugars. Pandya and Gandhi's plan is to insert DNA sequences from cattle into yeast cells, grow the cultures at a controlled temperature and the right concentrations, and harvest milk proteins after a few days. The process is extremely safe, says Gandhi: It's the same one used to manufacture insulin and other medicines.

Although the proteins in Muufri milk come from yeast, the fats come from vegetables and are tweaked at the molecular level to mirror the structure and flavor of milk fats. Minerals, like calcium and potassium, and sugars are purchased separately and added to the mix. Once the composition is fine-tuned, the ingredients emulse naturally into milk.

By controlling the ingredients, however, Pandya and Gandhi hope to make milk more healthful. The team is experimenting, for instance, with sugars other than lactose, which 65 percent of adults have trouble digesting. And it has engineered a more healthful, unsaturated fat that retains the distinct flavor of dairy. Reproducing that flavor is a prime goal for Gandhi and Pandya, who were not always vegan—and who say they miss the taste of cheese, butter, and ice cream.

The Dairy Race

Last month Muufri, which began lab trials in May, received two million dollars in seed money from Horizons Ventures, a Hong Kong-based investment firm (no relation to Horizon Farms organic milk) whose portfolio of "disruptive start-ups" includes Siri, Spotify, and Facebook. Muufri hopes to perfect its concoction by next spring and to deliver it to store shelves as early as 2017, says Gandhi. A carton of Muufri is projected to cost twice as much as a carton of cow's milk, at least initially.

Muufri is not the only team attempting to create cow-less dairy products. Impossible Foods, started by a former Stanford University professor, focuses on animal-free meat business, but it's working on cow-less American cheese to accompany its burgers. It has $75 million in financial backing. Another outfit, Real Vegan Cheese, is run on crowdsourced funding by volunteer bioengineers in Oakland, California.

Meanwhile, worldwide dairy consumption continues to grow every year. Will consumers go for milk that's made in a lab by genetically modified organisms (GMOs)? The proteins made by Muufri yeast will be indistinguishable from natural ones, Pandya says, and the yeast itself is harmless.

"People who are anti-GMO who have legitimate concerns usually worry about supercrops taking over the natural world," he says. "We've essentially crippled the yeast, so if it does go out in the world, it'll produce only milk proteins and die within hours."

Some dairy scientists are skeptical that artificial milk will ever supplant the natural stuff. The 20 or so components of Muufri barely scratch the surface of milk's complex chemistry, says Philip Tong, director of the Dairy Products Technology Center at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California.

"We've been milking [cows] for seven or eight thousand years," Tong says. "I doubt biotechnology could fully reproduce what Mother Nature intended." (Watch: "I Didn't Know That: Milking a Cow.")

"Milk production using a cow worked, until a few decades back, when the human population was small, but that's no longer the case," Gandhi replies. "We need to innovate to allow everyone to be able to enjoy a glass of milk or their favorite dairy product 50 years from today."
 
Now chicken breast seems the next target:

http://www.sott.net/article/302380-Mad-Science-Move-over-test-tube-burger-theres-a-lab-grown-chicken-breast-in-the-works

The research is still in its infancy, but an Israeli scientist hopes to bring this animal-free meat to the masses.

Amit Gefen is midway through an experiment that could end in a recipe for the world's first lab-grown chicken breast. If things go according to plan, no chickens will be harmed in the process.

Gefen, a bioengineer and professor at Tel Aviv University, believes that lab-grown chicken could help satiate a growing global demand for meat at a time when livestock production is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, land degradation, water pollution, and biodiversity losses. Projecting into the near future, when land, water, and animal feed become less abundant, Gefen says:

"resources for the animals will become so expensive that the end product—native meat—will be too expensive for most of the population to consume regularly. It is our duty as researchers to prepare for such a future."

After learning about Gefen's tissue-engineering work, the Modern Agriculture Foundation, an Israeli nonprofit with a lab-cultured meat agenda, offered him a $25,000 grant to create a commercially viable lab-grown chicken. The project launched earlier this year. Gefen and his colleagues chose chicken, in particular, because it's a popular main course in Israel (and across the world), not because it would necessarily be easy to produce.

"It's challenging to come up with the texture and consistency of a product that will resemble the muscle fiber structure of a native chicken breast," Gefen says.

continued...
 
Now for the latest fad -- plant-based burgers:

http://www.sott.net/article/304003-More-mad-science-Big-money-for-the-fake-meat-of-the-future

<snip>

Impossible Foods is, indeed, trying to do something that seems to live up to the company's name: come up with a plant-based burger that looks, cooks, and tastes like real beef. Appropriate for Impossible Foods' home base of Redwood City, California, smack-dab in the middle of Silicon Valley. The company's founder, Patrick Brown, spent 25 years as a biochemistry professor at Stanford before setting out to revolutionize the food industry with science.

<snip>
 
Newsweek carries a story about yet another start-up in this field and also gives a rather superficial overview of the latest developments in this sector here:

_http://europe.newsweek.com/lab-grown-beef-will-save-planet-and-be-billion-dollar-business-430980?rm=eu
 
Archiving the latest overview of developments:

https://www.sott.net/article/346381-Cultured-meat-Lab-grown-chicken-nuggets-are-here
 
SOTT now carries a TechCrunch/Jonathan Shieber article on the first attempts to upscale production of lab grown meat to commercial levels with new players and new money:

https://www.sott.net/article/360131-Billionaires-Big-AG-join-venture-investors-funding-lab-grown-meat

SOTT comment:
Quite a promotion of 'non-slaughter' meat production. What the article doesn't offer are downsides or cautions intrinsic to tampering with nature. Nor does it specify what regulatory process will be its overlord. For a shiver, re-read the last sentence of Churchill's statement for the long-term future of this 'product.'

Last sentence of Churchill's statement:
The new foods will be practically indistinguishable from the natural products from the outset, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation.
 
Today SOTT carries an older (September 05, 2017) dr. Mercola article about lab grown meat:

https://www.sott.net/article/362846-Can-you-really-call-lab-grown-meat-clean

[...]
You need only watch the Memphis Meats video above to get a glimpse of the feel-good vibe the company is going for. The Good Food Institute (GFI), which seeks out entrepreneurs and scientists to form plant-based and lab-grown meat companies, also put out notice that the preferred term for the latter is "clean meat" - not cultured meat and certainly not lab-grown either. According to GFI:7

"When we talk about the fact that this meat is 'clean,' our conversations immediately focus on the aspects of this technology that are the
most relevant and beneficial for consumers: namely, that this meat is cleaner than the meat from slaughtered animals, both in terms of
basic sanitation and environmental friendliness ... First impressions are critical. We don't want to start a discussion by having to
disabuse people of negative associations and inaccurate assumptions."

But is it really accurate to call this new product "clean meat?" It would seem that this term already belongs to grass fed farmers who are raising animals on pasture, without reliance on chemicals or genetically engineered (GE) feed, in accordance with the laws of nature. In reality, the startup companies are using the term clean meat to refer to both meat produced without animal slaughter and plant-based meat alternatives.

What's clear is that their makers want these science experiments to appear like real meat, only better. It's promoted as a win-win for everyone, nonhuman animals included, but do you know who the biggest winners will be? The billionaire investors slated to get even richer if their fully patented meat products take off. No one can patent a natural cow, chicken or duck, but with the advent of lab-grown meat, the resulting beef, chicken and duck is very much patentable - and fully controlled by its makers.

As we've seen in the past with Monsanto's patenting of GE seeds, putting the food supply in the hands of a private corporation is rarely a good idea. (The patenting of seeds and the subsequent restrictions on seed have led to what is essentially a takeover of the farming industry by chemical companies.) There's more, even, than money at stake as, if you control the food supply, you essentially control the world.
[...]
 
whitecoast said:
Speaking of Soylent:

http://m.vice.com/en_uk/read/rob-rhinehart-interview-soylent-never-eat-again

Remember Rob Rhinehart? I'm sure you do because it's hard to forget about a guy existing solely on vitamin puke. A few months ago we wrote about Soylent, an incredibly nutritious "food replacement" smoothie that Rob, a 24-year-old engineer, had been making and consuming as his only food source for almost five weeks. On one hand, it did look a bit like semen, but on the other, Rob claimed that by drinking it every day he'd never have to eat again. Given that starvation is a fairly major problem in the world at the moment and the planet's population will likely surpass 9 billion by 2050, Rob's invention seems like an important one.

Since we last talked to him, Rob and Soylent have become famous. His project has been derided as "dangerous", "ludicrous", and "a red flag for a potential eating disorder" by nutrition experts. Fortunately for Rob, the supporters of Soylent have been generous: a crowdfunding project for his fancy health goo raised almost $800,000 in under 30 days. Now Rob is the CEO of the Soylent Corporation; his hobby has officially turned into a career. His management team might look like the kind of technically-minded nerds who'd want to consume most of their meals in the form of a beige, odourless powder mix, but they're also the potential forefathers of a famine cure.

With over $1 million in preorders already received for Soylent worldwide, it seems like this stuff is going to stick around. I caught up with Rob to ask how it's all going for Soylent – which some are already calling "the future of food".

Culturing, mining/synthesizing food... I think the overarching goal here is learning how to feed people in spite of a total biospheric collapse. It coincides well with the logic of the machine.

I saw a Soylent food truck parked on the street this week. The truck advertised that Soylent is sold on Amazon and in 7-11 stores.
_https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015DDEC0M

It's another crazy thing out in broad daylight like nothing is wrong with it.
 
Thanks for signaling this, hlat. :cool2:

Didn't think it would ever come to a purchasable product. Seven dollars a bottle to replace just one meal (breakfast) cannot be considered cheap and the list of ingredients didn't wet my appetite either:

amazon said:
Filtered Water, Soy Protein Isolate, Maltodextrin, High Oleic Algal Oil, Isomaltulose, Canola Oil, Rice Starch, Oat Fiber, Isomaltooligosaccharide, Soy Lecithin, Potassium Chloride, Calcium Phosphate, Magnesium Phosphate, Natural & Artificial Flavors, Dipotassium Phosphate, Salt, Choline Chloride, Gellan Gum, Sodium Ascorbate, dl-alpha-Tocopheryl Acetate, Ferrous Gluconate, Zinc Sulfate, D-Calcium Pantothenate, Niacinamide, Sucralose, Thiamin Hydrochloride, Copper Gluconate, Manganese Sulfate, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Vitamin A Palmitate, Riboflavin, Chromium Chloride, Biotin, Folic Acid, Sodium Molybdate, Sodium Selenite, Phytonadione, Potassium Iodide, Vitamin B12, Vitamin D.

Doesn't ship to my country though and I think I should be grateful for that. ;)
 
The war on beef continues.


New Zealand to kill 150,000 cows to end bacterial disease
May 28, 2018 08:08 PM PDT

http://www.kron4.com/news/world/new-zealand-to-kill-150-000-cows-to-end-bacterial-disease/1205253989
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — New Zealand plans to slaughter about 150,000 cows as it tries to eradicate a strain of disease-causing bacteria from the national herd.
Politicians and industry leaders announced the ambitious plan on Monday.

They say it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and, if successful, would be the first time an infected country has eliminated Mycoplasma bovis.

Farming is vital to the economy in New Zealand, whose isolation has helped protect it from some diseases which affect herds elsewhere.

Last July, Mycoplasma bovis was found in the country for the first time.

Found in Europe and the U.S., the bacteria can cause cows to develop mastitis, pneumonia, arthritis and other diseases.

They are not considered a threat to food safety, but do cause production losses.

Officials say they plan to kill all cows on any farms where the bacteria are found, even if some of the animals are healthy.

They say many of the cows will be slaughtered at processing plants and used for beef, but some cows will have to be killed and buried on the farms or dumped in approved landfills.

Officials have the legal authority to forcibly enter farms and kill animals even in cases where a farmer might resist, but they said they hope they don't have to use those powers.

Katie Milne, the national president of the advocacy group Federated Farmers, said it was important to try to get rid of Mycoplasma bovis while there was still a chance.

She said they would try to make sure affected farmers had all the support they needed, including adequate compensation.

"This is a tough time, and the pain and anguish they're going to go through is really hideous," she said of the affected farmers.
"And we have to support them as neighbors, community members, farmers, friends."

New Zealand is home to some 10 million cows, about double its human population. About two-thirds are dairy cows and the rest beef cattle.

Milk products represent the country's largest single export, and much of it is sold to China and used in infant formula.

Mycoplasma bovis has so far been found on 38 farms throughout New Zealand, officials say, a number they expect to rise to at least 142 farms based on computer modeling.

They say all the infections found so far can be traced back to a single farm, and that the bacteria likely arrived in New Zealand 18 months before they were first identified.

Officials are still trying to figure out how the bacteria got into the country despite strict biosecurity controls.

About 24,000 cows have already been killed in recent months and at least 128,000 more will have to be culled, most over the next year or two.
The cost of the eradication program is estimated at 886 million New Zealand dollars ($616 million) over ten years.


The government plans to pick up about two-thirds of the tab while farmers and the cattle industry will pay the rest.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she believes it's still possible to eradicate Mycoplasma bovis.

"We don't know, in the long-term, what impact it could collectively have on an industry that is incredibly important to New Zealand's economy," she said. "So if we have an opportunity to be the country that eradicates this disease, then we'll take it."

Officials say they expect to know by the end of the year whether the eradication plan is working.
 
Last edited:
Adapt 2030 Published on May 31, 2018
The media is trying to get your perception of acceptable foods to now focus on insect powder and cockroach milk crystals. Additionally New Zealand says it needs to cull 150,000 cows due to a disease. Is the way the can limit beef consumption and save more grain for the human population? What about cricket farming to raise Indian Runner Ducks, media wont cover that common sense topic.
 
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