Lab meat "delicious"

I’m holding out for the BBQ Bieber Burger.

The problem with it is that each burger costs something in the ballpark of $350,000 to produce. And that price tag probably isn’t even including the research and labor costs of a bunch of PhDs to hand make the thing. It’s down to the rather expensive growth medium used for cultivating tissue: fetal bovine serum, which, as the name suggests, is extracted from cow fetuses. So it’s not the cruelty-free meat that PETA etc were hoping for, nor is there any way to make it any cheaper right now. The upshot is that it’s not appearing in stores any time soon.

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To no-one’s surprise (or at least, nobody who knows me), this doesn’t gross me out at all. I look forward to trying it if it ever becomes accessible to the common folk.

But then, I’ll eat M&Ms found on the floor of the back seat of other people’s cars. YMMV.

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Why not go whole hog, like in Transmetropolitan, & serve human flesh . . .

The first lab-grown meat that was reported in the press a few years ago was grown using nutrients that were basically meat broth, so they didn’t solve the vegetarian problem. It’d be nice to know if that was different for this burger.

This is EXACTLY what is needed to make the 12-course tinned meal palatable to my vegetarian wife, in bunker days to come!

This is, most definitely, the future of meat. In 100 years time it will be unheard of to eat an actual animal.

Boggles my mind that anyone considers this “gross” compared to the realities of acquiring meat from a living animal. No factory farm? No animals force fed hormones and industry by-products and antibiotics? No bloody, shit filled slaughter house? No e-coli and mad-cow disease? Sign me up!

Once they can get the growth serum out of the equation–which I believe is just a matter of time with the synthetics they’re working on–
this is the future. Can’t happen soon enough for me.

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But why bother making artificial meat? Why not just go all Asimov and grow yeast and algae based foods instead?

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Give this stuff to a professional chef and they’ll find a way to make it palatable. If it’s too lean, cook it like Bison. If it’s unnaturally lean, cook it like a portabello mushroom.

Although I wonder why they don’t just genetically tweak mushrooms to taste more like steak.

Doesn’t matter to me, long as it still tastes like dead flesh.

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Meat is Murder.

Tasty, tasty, murder.

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Bollocks. Murder is by definition illegal, this is just tasty tasty killing.

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Probably a good reason the actually ‘Meat’ growing is not shown. At 360G’s a pop, Branson’s Virgin airlines will be first too serve this up.

$350 000 and it doesn’t even come with cheese?

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In that respect it’s no different from the meat being grown in labs and eaten 15 years ago. (Tissue Culture and Art Project, etc.) It’s still using the fetal bovine serum, which is a large part of why it’s so expensive. The breakthroughs here seem to involve things like giving the meat texture, and some advances towards growing fat tissue (i.e. nothing that really makes this any closer to a practical process, really). There are a number of people who have been working on coming up with alternative growth mediums that would be cheaper and/or vegetarian for decades now, but it’s not happening (yet). Given the sort of price point they need to hit to make it feasible for food, it may never happen.

Well in Thory its vegan as no animals were harmed or killed to make it, they will sell it at Mcdon alds and BK soon as a vegan alternative the lack of fat tho means it will be quite dry… maybe add some soy oil to it or something

No! Ogg say MEDIUM! This ruined now!

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Because they’re not delicious, delicious meat.

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No animals were harmed? Don’t you see the genetic supremacist humans ruthlessly exploiting the DNA of hapless cows? Think of the introns!