My sentiments exactly.
You know way too much about where meat comes from to be a true New Yorker. Line up for indoctrination, citizen.
For the o.p., hell yes. Having worked on farms with cattle, hogs, and chickens, I don’t have any sentimentality about where meat comes from (well, maybe just a little for pigs, which are actually pretty cute little buggers when they’re under fifty pounds) but the economic and ecological cost of supporting animal husbandry is just prohibitive. As long as it actually has the taste and texture of meat (and given that you are cultivating it, it should be possible to introduce the necessary chemoreceptive factors for taste) I’m all for it. I’ll still take a elk rib or quail breast once in a while, though.
Stranger
I don’t find killing animals ‘disgusting’. Nor do I find the idea of vat-grown meat nasty, and I would eat it.
However I think it would be bound to be inferior in taste, texture, etc to real muscle that had bee used for moving…
I don’t understand why people are so weird about the fact that food is from nature and hence messy and involving lots of poop, bugs and bacteria. Sun and rain grow the grass, cows eat the grass, they piss and shit in the field to enrich the soil, we kill the cow and eat it, and use the field they fertilized so perfectly to grow a vegetable crop for a year or two. It’s the circle of life (similar to a prairie ecosystem) and it’s a beautiful thing.
Of course we’ve circumvented it with our modern industrial agriculture. But it still exists on a small scale, I’ve seen it in action and eaten well from it.
Sure, love to try some vat-grown sausage…
But they have to come up with something better than “Vat-grown”. It is about the worst name I can think of for this stuff, it sounds highly unappealing.
Who coined that term in the first place? It sounds like something its competition (The Meat/Cattle Board) would try to pin on it. This is a product that will need some delicate marketing, it needs a thorough makeover.
I’m pretty sure it came from Sci-Fi. At the very least, Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of electric sheep” had Vat-grown eyeballs. (later Blade Runner)
(my mind is hazy, I read it a good 30 years ago.)
Another thing about VG proteins is other more exotic things like alligator, frog, turtle, snake, Spotted Owl, Bald Eagle, etc. could become economical to stock in regular stores.
I think a median, introductory, practical, and profitable employment of cultivated meat would be a natural sausage casing seeding plant. Natural Sausage Casings have a corral on the market with supply and demand, there is only so much natural casing, and it is cost prohibitive to use it in a mass market situation. But as anyone who has had a natural casing hot dog or sausage can attest, they have a superior texture.
A very simple and quick growing intestinal cell millimeters thick could propogate quickly and easily around a series of cylinders in a vat. Maybe grow it in minutes or hours, rather than days.
Sure. I mean, VG meat is just pre-cooked meat loaf. And I like meat loaf.
But why do Spam and Soylent Green keep running through my head?
Sure. No matter how bad it is, I have almost certainly eaten worse.
And of course as lateral business and a perhaps more lucrative employment of the technology is the “natural skin condom”. A revolutionary prophylactic strictly for his and her pleasure. Protects against pregnancy, but doesn’t prevent disease. Comes in “contact cases” full of saline. Real skin.
Sausage and fucking… that’s where the money is at.
Just smear lots of Jell-O on the floor, set the sofa on fire, and you should be fine.
Nope. I don’t really have anything against vat-grown meat and in fact, it seems like an ecologically responsible idea. However, I doubt they would ever get the right texture for the meat and forget about marbling for steaks. Just think about the different cuts of meat we eat and the different textures they have based on where it is on the body. Rump roast definitely has a different texture than a nice rib eye. Texture isn’t as big an issue for hot dogs, but anyone who has ever had a soggy, flaccid dog and then compared it to an all-beef hot dog with a crisp casing and some recoil to the bite knows that even for hot dogs, good texture goes a long way in making a great wiener.
Maybe science can one day solve that issue, but I doubt they would be able to do it in a way that would be very energy efficient. I wouldn’t say never though. The day that I can’t tell a vat-formed rib eye from a naturally produced one is the day I’ll happily eat vat produced meat. I just don’t expect it to ever happen.
Meat is tasty, and assuming tastiness, yeah, sure. But here is the problem. How are you going to grow tasty meat more efficiently than mother nature? Or untasty for that matter. I think that it would use up a lot of energy and more resources than slaughtering Bambi or raising and slaughtering Foghorn Leghorn.
It could easily use much less, depending on technique. The natural method is extremely inefficient; it takes a lot of plant matter to make a pound of meat.
Am I the only one imagining the thread title being read by Will Ferrell as Harry Caray?
I would eat vat grown meat if it was aesthetically pleasing to my eye and palate, but only if they balance things out by offering genetically engineered animals that taste like vegetables.
As long as it was safely produced—i.e., didn’t give me cancer from eating it, or something—then sure, vat me up.
But what kind of meat are we talking about? Like “meat slurry,” or “complete musculature sets being grown in tubes?”
You know what, forget the technical minutiae for the moment…what kinds of vat meat can I get? Maybe cruelty-free Elephant? Or Thylacine? Or…human?
If the last one’s an option, how much would it set me back to get a sample of my own—what? What’s everyone looking at me for? Like you all wouldn’t at least be CURIOUS.
And long pig.
And to answer the OP, I would have no issues eating it. If it were nearly identical in taste and consistency to normal meat, as well as cheaper, i would even not have any issues not having normal cow/pig meat anymore. If it were not the same, in a good but different way, then i imagine i would enjoy real meat on occasion as well.
Even if we had vat grown meats, we would still have some access to fresh animal carcass, especially deer and such, since there is no way the hunting of certain animals could stop.
On second thought, I’d rather tweak the DNA of livestock, hogs and poultry to produce tasty food combinations in each individual. The marketing tag line could be something along the line, a complete meal, all in one animal! This would save considerable dishwashing expense and prep time—time I could better spend crossbow hunting for exotic game. I envision poultry tasting like chicken stew and dumplings; pigs, like pork, beans and sauerkraut; baby cows, like Veal Scaloppini sautéed with shiitake mushrooms and roasted shallots.
I’d also like them to create miniature cattle, about half a pound each. You could let them graze in your backyard and whenever you wanted a super fresh hamburger, simply simply put one in your meat grinder, then flip the extruded patty on a hot grill. Yes, I believe genetic engineering will really turn the food industry upside down in the near future.
But, to address the OP on a more serious note, the deal breaker for me if not adequately addressed (and most likely the toughest engineering hurdle to master with precision) involves mimicking the texture and mouth-feel of real meat—specifically, the self basting interplay between muscle fibers and adipose while cooking. If they can create a proper and flavorful marbling of the meat, then I’m on board.