Lab Grown Meat

[Earthmaiden Profile]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... tsxvAH5DjY

I'm not at all sure how I feel about this. I have heard of it before as a thing of the future and understand some of the pros but nevertheless .....

[ZeroCook Profile]

Have read bits here and there about it over the years. Perhaps it has to be done. Perhaps it needs to be done. Went digging around for some general background ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat

[dennispc Profile]

I’m happy to go along with the idea as we try to tread lightly on this planet and eat quality food - don’t think I’ve ever eaten chicken nuggets for example.

Apart from taste, I wonder what the difference is between cell based food and vitamin containing meat. Spector argues that, rather than taking fish oil supplements, better to eat an oily fish and get all the other benefits it contains.

Farming the land for vegetables produces a lot of greenhouse gas, how much carbon would be produced if when it goes into mass production?

The International Meat Secretariat seems up to speed on it and that must be a good thing.

Open mind at the moment. Thanks for the link ZeroCook, interesting quote from Churchill in 1931.

It'll be interesting how my evangelical vegan friend views it because if it's using animal cells, would it be considered animal exploitation? Pandemics come from that exploitation he tells us.

[Stokey Sue Profile]

Interesting that the first approved version is a chicken bite, I thought the holy grail was a thick juicy burger..

A chicken bite is generally made from chicken breast which is very homogeneous low fat meat, so relatively (relatively!) simple to put together. I think getting red meat with the subtle flavours that come from ageing and fat is going to be much, much, more difficult and personally I won’t bother to pay that price twice if they don’t get it right, and I don’t think a lot of other people will either

My guess is the fat is not difficult compared to getting the meat fibres made but the flavour from ageing may be very difficult

[Pampy Profile]

I don't know how true this is but I've heard that lab-grown meat isn't very environmentally friendly because of the amount of energy it takes to produce it.

[Earthmaiden Profile]

I think it discussed that in the Wikipedia clip Pampy.

I have very mixed feelings about the moral aspects of stem cell treatments, IVF and other such things but each give a great deal of joy to people and I'm sure I would want to partake of them if it affected me. I also discovered that a distant 2nd or 3rd cousin has done a lot of work with stem cells at a university in the USA which somehow made it more acceptable - heaven knows why! This doesn't seem so different, especially if they can do it in the new ways described and the nutrients are comparable. I think it's here regardless of what we think anyway. I agree that making the perfect 'burger' might be the big test. Moving forward, I wonder if we should be questioning if we need shedloads of meat if we can get the same nutrients from plants and possibly insects.

[Stokey Sue Profile]

I don't think there's any obvious moral issue with stem cells per se - people assume they are all foetal, but they aren't, in fact there's a lot of research into autologous stem cells currently - taking cells from the person who will ultimately be treated and persuading them to regress to stem cells to give a personal treatment

A lot of studies do use HESCs (Human Embryonic Stem Cells), but these days are collected from donor parents with full informed consent - at least by the people I know who work with them, and there are enough freely donated cells to use in research

Stem cells are one of the long term hopes for my condition, and many causes of blindness, they can be used to resurface the retina they think

I'd be intrigued to know exactly how they culture the "meat" - I doubt the energy issue is impossible to overcome, using renewable energy but most cell culture I have come across has need animal protein in the culture solution, and I'd be interested to know how they get over that

[karadekoolaid Profile]

Apart from the obvious ethical issues, my question would be: "Does it taste good?"

[jeral Profile]

An expert said they were now developing "scaffold" to given the skeiny texture of meat. I imagine they can create flavour or enhancers, maybe caramel or something, or whatever it was in those Fray Bentos tinned flakey pies from way back.

Now that veg plant meat has become so popular, I wonder if cell meat will be uneccessary or be wildly expensive so exclusively bought by the "haves".

[jeral Profile]

Does anyone know what the ethical issues are or might be? I'm struggling if the cells are used for food with no animals being harmed. Ta.

In the sense of manipulating humans, I think hat's already happening with gene identification, use of animal organs, albeit authorised for genuinely medicinal health treatments.

[Stokey Sue Profile]

I think getting the flavour of aged meat will be quite difficult, it's not just a case of adding flavour, it's a process of very slight breakdown which won't occur in the same way in a mass of a single cell type

I think it's up to people who have moral or ethical objections to something to say what they are, but I assume that the culture starts with a piece of flesh from an animal to seed it, and I suspect that would be enough for some people to have a problem with it,

[dennispc Profile]

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/d ... omplicated

[Stokey Sue Profile]

Very interesting Dennis
So they do need animal protein in the culture medium and a very particular kind ( the little bit of cell culture I did used purified albumin from regular meat processing)

[Badger's Mate Profile]

Meat-eating vegan

[scullion Profile]

yes, meat eating vegan - how lopsided is that?

I worry that if farmers can’t compete with food-tech alternative meat products, farms will close, jobs will be lost, and – most importantly – so will opportunities to bring the farming industry into alliance with climate action.

surely farmers are more adaptable than that? the pea protein, vegan meat alternative is a growing market, why wouldn't farmers (if geography allowed) get into growing peas etc?
and i'm not sure what she means in the last (quoted) sentence. if burping cows are responsible for large volumes of methane then that would decrease if cattle farming decreased - or is she only talking about chicken farming?

i don't think i'd bother considering it as a progressive addition to our vegetarian diet even if they could avoid the use of foetal calves.
i can't stop equating it to HeLa cells being grown in a lab!

[karadekoolaid Profile]

Meat-eating vegan? Oh come on! A dystopian argument from a woke journalist. Does she honestly believe the majority of the population actually care about where their chicken comes from, how it was killed, whether they played Bach to it before it was "humanely" slaughtered? What´s "humane" about killing an animal for food, anyway?
When you cut to the chase, we KILL animals in order to eat them. I would also hazard a guess that a large majority of people don´t care a fig where the animal came from; they´re more interested in the price, depending on what their income is.
There are 7.8 billion people on this planet; at least 3.6 billion live in poverty - and that figure is growing. If they could get their hands on at least ONE meal a day, they´d be extremely grateful. I doubt they´d be stressing themselves out wondering whether their chicken was organic, or free range, or cloned, or lab-constructed.

Sorry! Rant over!

[jeral Profile]

Every word true karadekoolaid IMO. My vegan friends happily eat fake meat, which has always seemed odd to me as it's perpetuating the taste and desire for meat (assuming liked), yet they won't use or wear leather things, which I'd think was an irrelevance being a by product of an animal reared for meat. Their incentive seems more about saving the planet and more of its people than just a few by dedicating resources to suit, rather than animal welfare which granted is much better now than 40 years ago.

If it's not a stupid question, what is lab cell meat given to feed on for it to grow?

[karadekoolaid Profile]

If it's not a stupid question, what is lab cell meat given to feed on for it to grow?

Foetal bovine serum and chicken cells. the first requires killing a cow, the second is done with a biopsy.

[Stokey Sue Profile]

If it's not a stupid question, what is lab cell meat given to feed on for it to grow?

Foetal bovine serum and chicken cells. the first requires killing a cow, the second is done with a biopsy.

No, it doesn’t feed on the chicken cells p, those are the seeds, the object is to grow chicken cells outside of a chicken

Most of what cells feed on in a bioreactor or other cell culture is sugar, but of course they also need minerals, vitamins and protein. The foetal serum is more about providing the right environment for cell growth than about feeding cells, and a bit of a search suggests there’s a lot of research going on to develop cell culture without serum - for many uses not just food

[karadekoolaid Profile]

Thanks for the explanation, Sue. ( Thank goodness we´ve got a scientist here!)
So basically, the chicken cells, extracted through a biopsy, are the "seeds" for growing the meat - within the foetal serum?