[Samuel L. Jackson] “Because it’s motherfuckin’ meat in a motherfuckin vat!”[/Samuel L. Jackson]
shrug
I eat sausage.
I even know what it’s made of, yet still I eat it.
Anyone who’s ever eaten a dirty-water hotdog really has no business being squicked out by E-Z Meat.
Baloney. Granted, it’s somewhat psychological but damn, my mind just can’t wrap itself around “vat-grown” meat. It’s just, “ew.” Assholes and lips are one thing but a pile of gelatinous laboratory grown flesh in a tub is a whole 'nutha ball of lard.
I forgot to add in the YMMV 
And while we’re at it, balony basically is gelatinous laboratory grown flesh. Okay it originally, at one point in its dim, dark history came from an actual barnyard animal (or one can hope anyway), but when most people see it it’s pink and gelatinous and symmetrical.
At least I know laboratory grown flesh is most likely sterile. I can’t say as much about oh, say, a dirty-water hotdog.
That would certainly be my initial thought about vat-grown meat.
If it were decided that vat-grown meat is kosher, though, I’d try it.
Actually, I think listening to the rabbinic debates on whether vat-grown meat can ever be kosher, or what conditions it has to satisfy to be kosher, would be interesting.
I think that’s inherently impossible. The last time this came up, one of our resident Jewish scholars pointed out the prohibition against eating “the limb of the living”, meat which is cut from a still-living source (and the quivering gelatinous lump would be “living”, even if it’s arguably not an “animal”).
Personally, I have no inherent moral or gustatory objections (though it probably wouldn’t be as tasty as real meat, it couldn’t be much worse than typical fast-food fare), but I have a very hard time seeing how this could possibly be more economical than the way meat is produced now. When all is said and done, a steer is basically just a big slab of beef, itself, with the added benefit that it can feed itself, even from widely-dispersed, low-quality grass, and it doesn’t need any laboratory equipment to maintain it. Vat-meat might find a niche market with those who are willing to pay extra to have no involvement with anything with a face, but it’s not going to be replacing the old-fashioned stuff any time soon.
I think you can put me squarely in the anti-vat group. There is definitely something disturbing about imagining a giant stainless reactor filled with twitching , pulsing pink goo.
Animals taste good just the way they are, I see no reason to monkey with it.
I don’t know if I’d want to eat it but I definitely would want to see it being grown. Does anyone have a link to a picture of the meat in the vat?
Me too. Besides, I’m from Iowa, where just about everybody drives by a cow lot and thinks “dinner.”
Well, for one thing you’d only be paying to provide nutrients to the most desirable cuts of meat (ideally speaking), you wouldn’t have the current situation of having alot of demand for 20-40 pounds of ribeye yet having to also feed a skeletal system, digestive system, skin, hair ect. ect. to acquire it. Space and future environmental impact is also a consideration, beef on the hoof requires alot of space even for feedlots… they put alot of methane into the air and dirty up alot of water, produce alot of waste and people are less and less inclined to live next to factory agricultural production. High densities of animals today require routine use of pesticides and antibiotics… and you still have problems like mad cow and hoof and mouth outbreaks. Most cattle are reproduced via artificial insemination nowadays as well which costs. So you’re paying for waste product, excess land, future environmental regulations, future health and safety regulations, dealing with zoning issues, artificial insemination and declining profit margins with a traditional operation. Vat grown farms could be located in the middle of a city, in an industrial park type of building, be completely sterile and produce uniform products to a high quality control standard with minimal labor force and by it’s nature have far fewer environmental or health and safety concerns. Even with all of that, IF they can really perfect this technology… they might even be able to get away with being a bit more expensive if the quality is very high and consistant.
I think we have a winner in the “Name that vat meat” contest!
I think part of the economical attracton of vat-grown meat would be the space savings. Beeves take a lot of space to raise, and it seems likely that this will be the bottleneck in the future of living protein production. As someone touched on earlier, you don’t have to clear a rainforest to install a vat to grow protein.
Hey, lokij, could I get you to expand on my point that beeves take a lot of room? If only we’d managed to get my post over yours - we’d look like a precision team. 
I’m a little grossed out by it. But it’s not so much the vat-grown part as the meat part. I eat meat, but I’m kind of skeeved just a tad by the whole “this used to be alive” bit.
And I certainly wouldn’t eat a dirty-water hot dog. That idea is definitely worse than vat-grown meat, to me. I grill my hot dogs or cook them in the microwave. The latter is more fun, because sometimes the ends explode.
If I implied it’s possible, it’s because we already know how to culture tissue and I see vat-grown meat as simply a scaling process. I’m always willing to be proven wrong or argued out of an idea.
Anyway, there are some interesting replies so far! I’m glad so many people who are grossed out are taking the time to post here. I was afraid all of us vatties had scared away the reason this thread was made.
Telperien: Do you recognize a difference between ‘alive’ and ‘growing’? Because plants are growing things, even if they don’t qualify as alive compared to an animal.
Beware of Doug: I live in cattle country myself, although I live near free range cattle as opposed to feedlots. I don’t know if vat-grown will ever replace the old way of raising cattle even if it does become widespread. Ideally, it will become a way to make meat in general cheaper globally.
Chronos: Cattle are also living animals, which means they are disease vectors. Pushing antibiotics only goes so far, and it has problems all its own. If there are enough disease scares like the E. coli spinach one we had recently, there could easily be a genuine push to develop some other way to satisfy our desire for meat.
To be truthful, I see it more as a way to reduce real-cow-meat-growing as opposed to totally eliminating it.
I think it would have the most utility in replacing what I think of as filler meat - i.e. fast food burger patties, any meat product from a can (beef stew, Chef Boyardee, various soups and chilis, etc), meat used in the production of things like soups and flavorings, institutional usage (cafeterias, prisons, hospitals, etc), making of products like hot dogs, sausages, prepackaged lunch meats, beef jerky and other assorted snack-type foods, etc. Less for sit-down eating establishments or home cooking. In short, I can see it being used to replace meat in things where the quality of the meat isn’t the focus.
Meat animal husbandry is actually a pretty resource intensive thing - it’s hard on the environment, takes a lot of space, and involves use of a number of harsh chemicals, produces some nasty byproducts. Using Velmeata would cut down on the amount of this that was actually required to meet demands.
I can understand why people are squicked out by the idea though - I’m not personally, but then again, I’m not really squicked by much in the context of culinary choices.
It’s the, er, animality that gets me, I guess, not just the aliveness.
I could be wrong (I know very little about this stuff) but I was under the impression that ground beef is sort of the less desirable parts of cow (not hoof or bone or anything, just sub-prime muscle tissue). So if the demand for good steaks (and leather, for that matter) stays the same, wouldn’t you automatically have enough meat to make sufficient hamburgers with? I think we would need to be able to reproduce “good” steak to make it wise to start growing crap beef in vats. Obviously there are other types of meat that would be excellent vat-grown–I think lobster and crab would be some of the easiest as you want a simple, consistent product without veining, etc.
I was wondering about that too. It’d be fantastic if we could grow seafood.
Could it make other more exotic meats accessible? I can’t get ostrich or emu or rattlesnake or frog or turtle at my local grocery store, but I think I’d like to.
All kinds of interesting possibilities (albeit a bit hypothetical at the moment) exist. Cuts of meat not available from nature, for example: frog steaks.
Or (with a little genetic tinkering) imaginary meats that are entirely unlike anything available from any living animals: dragon cutlets, gryphon chops, Spoo.
Or (if a viable sample for cloning can be found) meats from extinct animals: we can start eating Dodos, Passenger Pigeons and Great Auks again!
Or blends? A steak made of half lobster, half beef?