In a strange echo of some of the other meat-related threads floating around here lately…
(But what about material usage?)
Ugh! I hate coomed beef!
Could a mod please fix the typo in the title? I hate cooming beef. 
They didn’t mention that the burger cost a couple of million dollars.
The article doesn’t mention hormones and antibiotics. I’m all for vat grown chow in principle, but I want to know what it was swimming in before I eat it.
I wonder whether there are any more scholarly articles out there detailing what they did to make the beef?
Is that kosher? More importantly, is it vegan?
“coom” changed to “cook.”
Thank you!
Those are really good questions.
IANAR, but from what I know, if there are no “unkosher” ingredients involved in growing the meat, and if the original stem cells come from a kosher meat sample, there is no reason the resulting grown meat would not be kosher.
The last time the topic of vat-grown meat came up (at the time, a hypothetical), some posters pointed out that it might violate the limb-of-the-living prohibition, and therefore be even more unkosher than ordinary tref.
Well, I presume that the original stem cells would be taken from a dead animal.
I’m not sure that’s a good assumption. Can’t they take a tiny tissue sample from the living? What if you can get the stem cells from a blood sample? (I don’t know whether they float around in the blood.) Also, wouldn’t the stem cells themselves have to be living in order to be bred?
When I said I presume so, I mean I presume that in order to make the “vat-grown” meat kosher, the original stem cells would have to be taken from a dead animal. The cells are living, but they are not a living animal, so the limb-of-the-living would not apply.
Is it even possible to get living cells from a dead animal?
Edit: Now I’m confused about organ donors.
Sure. Every cell does not die at the moment that the animal does. Death, for a multicellular animal, is the moment when all the cells stop working together in a coordinated way. Individual cells can live on for quite a while after, especially if they are removed and cultured in the right conditions. If they are left in place they will eventually die from lack of food and oxygen, which, in vertebrates, are brought to them by the blood while the animal as a whole is alive.
Ah, now I understand.
One might also consider the lump of biomass growing in the vat to itself be a living animal, though, in which case slicing off a lump of that biomass while leaving the rest of it growing in the vat would be a problem. Though I suppose you could also just decant all of it at once and “kill” it properly before cutting it up and serving.
The kosher question would also depend on the precise wording of the slaughter provisions in the Torah. If, for instance, the Law says that meat must come from an animal slaughtered in a particular way, then vat meat would not be kosher, but if it says that it must not come from an animal slaughtered in any way other than the prescribed way, then it might be.
A != (!(!A))? I do not understand.