The title says most of what i have to say
I’m much more excited about this than the fake meats from plants, and I’m excited to give it a try. For starters, both companies will only distribute their vat-grown chicken through restaurants.
The news today stated that the cultured chicken would, at present, be more expensive than traditional chicken. Even so, those in search of novelty and those who have ethical concerns with meat are potential customers.
Perhaps in the future they can scale up and bring the price in line with traditional chicken.
I’m also curious about texture and taste of this.
It’s not approved by me.
New tech is always expensive. The second LED lightbulb I bought cost $100. (And burned out quickly.) I’m also curious about the flavor and texture. But speaking as someone who loves meat and has ethical concerns about where it comes from, I am certainly going to check this out if I can.
Unless it’s cultured dark meat on the cultured bone, no thanks.
I’m afraid my likings in chicken are too atavistic to sate with with vat-grown chikin.
Sadly, it looks like lab-grown pork would still not be kosher.
Not that I care for myself, but I’d love to be able to serve bacon if my sister comes over.
I imagine they will start with boneless lean white meat. And it will be bland, and perhaps have a weird texture. But I hope for more variety in the future.
Steakoid, here we come!
So am I.
Meat from pasture-raised chicken has better flavor in part because the chickens used the muscle. How is vat-grown meat going to get any exercise?
When tissue culture beef/chicken/pork/veal is the same price as their real counterparts, I’m on board.
Author Eric Turtledove suggests that a ruminant pig might be, however.
I don’t recall, from the link, whether the genetically engineered pigs also had cloven hooves - which as far as I can recall, is also a requirement for an animal to be kosher.
I expect that, if the texture cannot be replicated any other way, there will be muscle-exercise machines to tone the meat up. Alessandro Volta found out long ago that muscles can be activated by electricity; this discovery could come in useful to obtain the necessary flavour one day. But maybe not yet.
Sadly, the market prefers “tender” over “tasty”, and my guess is they won’t do that, even if they can.
You may be right; especially since so many people have by now been conditioned to expect their meat to be tasteless, with all the flavor in the breading or sauce.
And to insist on ‘tender’ even when that means ‘flabby’.
Not a new phenomenon (which you never claimed it was). My grandparents used to keep chickens in the beforetimes. As soon as electricity came to town and they could get refrigerated supermarket chicken they did and Grandaddy said “that yard chicken’s just too tough.”
Gotta admit, I don’t want tough meat. And, of course, people have different opinions on what tasty is.
I do rather object to the idea that people who prefer tender meat have been “conditioned” but the people who prefer the free-range are not “conditioned” as though they are somehow more authentic or less influenced.
I think lots of people really prefer tender meat, and always have. There’s a reason tenderloin, which is one of the least flavorful cuts of beef, gets top dollar.
I pay extra to get tougher and tastier chicken (it’s also more humanely produced) but i think I’m an outlier.
(i also think a lot of "low&slow, melts-in-your-mouth meat is unpleasant to eat, because i don’t want my meat to melt. And I’m pretty sure that’s a minority opinion.)
I think there’s an often overlooked factor in what I’d consider to be overly-tender meat: dental problems.
Certainly in the past people had a lot more dental issues, at least since refined sugar became accessible to the masses (prior to that, it was the domain of kings and nobility … who seemed to have a fondness for things like pate…).
Even today, though, I’m more than a bit amazed at the number of my coworkers, some of whom are half my age, who have rotting teeth, visible gum disease, missing teeth, etc. All of that has to make chewing anything unpleasant, or even downright impossible.
So I can definitely see a market niche for “melt-in-your-mouth” levels of tenderness in meat. Or anything else.
One step closer to my dream of endangered animal steaks.
Did our ancestors kill all the mammoths because they were delicious, or just because they were really big and trampled the crops and uprooted the fruit trees?