Fake meat: would it make you try 'dog'?

[Rogie]

An interesting and wide-ranging discussion on the main forum started off about the terrible fate awaiting stray dogs in Thailand and went on to consider many other instances of cruelty to animals in particular those bred for their meat, together with the pitfalls of factory farming such as overuse of antibiotics.

http://www.gaythailand.com/forums/topic/8918-smugglers-drive-thailands-grim-trade-in-dog-meat/

Some people are persuaded to stop eating meat once they are made aware of how some animals are cruelly mistreated, but many meat-eaters turn a blind eye to horrific scenes of animal cruelty, perhaps thinking - like me - such cases are the exception rather than the rule. So what would make me stop eating meat? As I mentioned in a post in the thread referred to above "If anything would stop me eating chicken, beef or pork it'd be because I didn't trust what I was eating was actually safe to eat, or was proven to have been produced using the worst kind of factory-farming practices". As there's always an element of doubt about most things involved in the food industry - (can we ever really trust every aspect of the food chain?) - I'd always like to think I am on the lookout for alternative ways of doing things, so if somebody came up with a meat substitute that was indistinguishable from traditionally produced meat would I be interested? Yes, definitely. If it cooked easily and tasted good, then why not?

So, how near are we to being able to eat such food?

A report by the excellent science journalist Michael Hanlon is headed:

Fake meat: is science fiction on the verge of becoming fact?

The race to make fake meat just got interesting. Two scientists on opposite sides of the world both claim to be on the verge of serving up the first lab-grown hamburger – and saving the planet in the process. The new reality is so close, you can almost taste it

First, a bit of what I would at one time have termed propaganda, but is irrefutably true:
 

Eating meat is bad for the environment, of that there is no doubt. And the moral arguments against killing animals are compelling. Humans currently slaughter about 1,600 mammals and birds every second for food – that is half a trillion lives a year, plus trillions more fish, crustaceans and molluscs. The total biomass of all the world's livestock is almost exactly twice that of humanity itself. And while crops that feed people cover just 4% of the Earth's usable surface (land that is not covered by ice or water, or is bare rock), animal pastureland accounts for a full 30%. Our meat, in other words, weighs twice as much as we do and takes seven times as much land to grow.

And we are going to have to feed a lot more people in the coming decades. The world's population stands at a little over 7bn; by 2060 this will have risen to perhaps 9.5bn, and that is a fairly optimistic scenario. Not only are there more and more of us, but we are eating more and more meat. Demand for it is expected to double by 2050. The market in chicken, pig, cattle and sheep flesh is worth about $1trn a year. By mid-century this will more than double, perhaps triple at today's prices, as the cost of land rises.

 

Like any good 'race', there are two rival camps!
 

Professor Patrick Brown could easily be taken for a deranged visionary. He is intense, driven and unfazed by critics and rivals. This 57-year-old ultra-lean, sandal-wearing, marathon-running vegan wants to stop the world eating meat. Not through persuasion or coercion, but by offering us carnivores something better for the same price or less.

The fake meat business has been around for decades, of course, but it has never really taken off. That is because the products out there, usually based on some sort of reconstituted soy or fungal gloop, taste as disgusting as they look. They are usually expensive as well.

But the meat-fakers say they are on the verge of a breakthrough, that there is a real possibility that a new era of fake meat – nutritious, cheap and indistinguishable from the real thing, made either of synthesised animal tissue or derived from plant material – may be upon us.

 

 

So, what is Brown doing? His approach "is to manipulate plant material to create a meat-facsimile". Hanlon got to try some but as he had to sign a confidentiality agreement this is as far as he can go:
 

I am not allowed to say what I tried, nor which chef helped create it, and certainly not what it tasted like. But I can say this: I would have had no idea it wasn't "real". Quorn this is not.

 

And what about his rival?

 

The other approach is to grow actual meat in a factory, animal muscle tissue sans the animal itself, and this is being pioneered in Europe.

"What are we going to call it? Well, we thought long and hard, and came to the conclusion we should simply call it meat," says Dr Mark Post, an affable 54-year-old Dutchman. When we meet at the University of Maastricht, there is no NDA to sign, no secrecy and a lot of self-doubt. Like Brown, Post is motivated by concern for the environment, but the two scientists could not be more different. For a start, the Dutchman is a meat-loving amateur chef. Then there is his admission: "This may not succeed… My family think I am crazy."

 

 

So how do you grow meat in a vat?

 

As a recipe, it is unusual, hard to follow and at first glance somewhat unappetising. But if its creator is right, in a few decades our descendants will be puzzled – indeed horrified – that we ever did it any other way.

First, you take a cow, pig or indeed just about any animal. Up to now, this animal will have led a charmed life, with several acres of grazing at its disposal, the finest winter feed and no abuse.

Then you kill it. The creation of in-vitro meat does require the slaughter of animals, but the point is that, in theory, a single specimen could provide the seed material for hundreds of tonnes of meat. Only a tiny fraction of the farm animals alive today would be needed to supply the entire human race.

The next stage is to extract a sliver of muscle tissue and transfer this blob of red matter to a petri dish. Then you use a mixture of chemistry and manual manipulation to tease apart the cells on the dish. What you are looking for are skeletal muscle satellite cells – stem cells – all-purpose repair modules that are there to create new tissue in case of damage. It is satellite cells in your muscles that swing into action should you injure yourself in the gym or have a nasty fall – dividing, then dividing again in rapid succession to create new muscle.

When you have a few thousand of these satellite cells, you place them in a warm broth, consisting of a mixture of 100 or so synthetic nutrients together with serum extracted from cow foetuses. Then you wait for nature to take its course.

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jun/22/fake-meat-scientific-breakthroughs-research

Science fiction or eventual science fact? One thing is for sure, even if fake meat could be perfected it would face a huge uphill struggle to get off the ground and onto supermarket shelves. The global meat industry is very powerful and won't want to see people like Brown or Post succeed.

Who knows? Maybe in years to come the market for dog meat will be catered for by 'meat' grown in a lab. That would surely be good news for many of Thailand's soi dogs.

[bkkguy]

why bother with "fake" meat when your Isarn boyfriend and most of Asia and Africa already have the solution, and the west - or at least the UN - is finally catching on!

 

Edible insects - Future prospects for food and feed security

 

bkkguy

[TotallyOz]

I think I would enjoy eating fake meat about as much as I do sucking a dick that has silicone inserted in it. (NOT at all)

 

Show me the Beef! and, let it be real and large.

[Rogie]

The Dutchman referred to in the OP hit the headlines this week:

 

First lab-grown hamburger gets full marks for 'mouth feel'

 

A little pale, lacking in juiciness and seasoning, but close your eyes and the synthetic hamburger was 'definitely meat'

 

All it took was a little butter and sunflower oil and, in less than 10 minutes, the world's most expensive burger, grown from muscle stem cells in a lab, was ready to eat.

 

"I was expecting the texture to be more soft," said Hanni Rützler of the FutureFood Studio, who researches food trends and was the first to get a taste of the synthetic beef hamburger at a lavish event in London on Monday that bore more resemblance to a TV set than a scientific press conference.

 

The lack of fat was noticeable, she added, which meant a lack of juiciness in the centre of the burger. If she had closed her eyes, however, she would have thought the cultured beef was definitely meat rather than a vegetable-based substitute.

 

 

Mark Post, the scientist behind the burger, which took three months to make, said the ambition was to improve the efficiency of the cell-growing process and also to improve flavour by adding fat cells. He wants to create thicker "cuts" of meat such as steaks, though his would require more tissue engineering expertise, namely the ability to grow channels - a bit like blood vessels - that can feed the centre of the growing steak with nutrients and water. Similar technology had already been shown to work for medical applications, said Post.

 

The €250,000 cost of making the burger was paid by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who said he got into the idea for animal welfare reasons. In a film to mark the taste test of the burger, he said that people had an erroneous image of modern meat production, imagining "pristine farms" with just a few animals in them. "When you see how these cows are treated, it's certainly something I'm not comfortable with."

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/05/world-first-synthetic-hamburger-mouth-feel

[t0oL1]

Cat is too dry and greasy?

[Rogie]

Show me the Beef! and, let it be real and large.

 

Yipee, he's your man!

 

He wants to create thicker "cuts" of meat such as steaks,

 

[Rogie]

Cat is too dry and greasy?

 

Yes, it's possible. We only have the say-so of these bods that this thing is a beefburger taste-a-like. Who is to say . . . they may have slipped a bit of cat in there? 

[NIrishGuy]

Cat is too dry and greasy?

 

Funny, I always thought that pussy was more of a too damp and smelly sort of off put - I mean we are talking about the same thing here - right ? !   :-)

[ChristianPFC]

There was a funny advert in Vienna (my translation): Tofu tastes best if you replace it by juice meat immediately before eating.

 

I remember watching a dystopic sci-fi movie where it turned out that at the end that the standard food is made of human meat (Soilent Green).

[Rogie]

I remember the name of that film but I've never seen it. I'll look out for it. It has some excellent actors, eg. Edward G Robinson's last film. 

 

Rather like when Geo Orwell wrote 1984 (even though we are told it was originally planned to call it 1948), which in the late 40's must have seemed far far into the future, so must 2022 have seemed when Soylent Green was released in 1973.

 

Now it's only 9 years away!

 

The awful fact remains, however, that by 2022 it probably will be quite possible to manufacture 'manburgers'.

 

"Richard Fleischer directed this nightmarish science fiction vision of an over-populated world, based on the novel by Harry Harrison. In 2022, New York City is a town bursting at the seams with a 40-million-plus population. Food is in short supply, and most of the population's food source comes from synthetics manufactured in local factories -- the dinner selections being a choice between Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow, or Soylent Green. When William Simonson (Joseph Cotten), an upper-echelon executive in the Soylent Company, is found murdered, police detective Thorn (Charlton Heston) is sent in to investigate the case. Helping him out researching the case is Thorn's old friend Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson, in his final film role). As they investigate the environs of a succession of mad-from-hunger New Yorkers and the luxuriously rich digs of the lucky few, Thorn uncovers the terrible truth about the real ingredients of Soylent Green. "

 

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/soylent_green/

[Rogie]

Some encouraging news to set the tails wagging.

Government officials from the countries of Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam have pledged to end the inhumane, commercial trade in dogs for meat.

Government officials agreed to work to end the trade at a recent meeting in Hanoi with animal welfare coalition Asia Canine Protection Alliance. Concerned about the spread of rabies, officials said they would enact a moratorium on the commercial transport of dogs from one country to another for the next five years. In that time, authorities will measure the impact of a moratorium on rabies transmission in the region. In Thailand, where the trade is illegal, authorities agreed to improve the enforcement of existing regulations.

"We cannot change culture or habit, but we should stop the smuggling of dogs. This meeting was important to urge government agencies to see the problems caused by the dog meat trade and discuss a platform to stop the spread of rabies," said Pornpitak Panlar, an official of the Department of Disease Control, Ministry of Public Health.

The alliance estimated that the trade is responsible for slaughtering an estimated 5 million dogs for human consumption per year. Thailand, Cambodia and Laos supply dogs for the trade into Vietnam, where they are slaughtered and consumed.

Dog meat production has evolved from small-scale household businesses to a multi-million dollar industry of illicit dog traders causing pain and suffering to the dogs involved and posing health risks to humans. The trade in dogs for meat involves movement of dogs of unknown disease and vaccination status, impeding rabies elimination efforts in the region.
 

 

 

 

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/national/GMS-countries-pledge-to-end-dog-meat-eating-30213985.html