Which all sounds fine until you die and are reborn as a vat-grown sausage. 
Why would anyone want to eat meat-on-a-stick, be they vegetarian or not?
If you wouldn’t eat meat out of a vat would any of you eat meat out of a Star Trekesque replicator?
Depends on how it tastes. If it tasted good, I’d have no problem chowing down on some vat-grown, “long pork” BBQ.
At least vat grown meat would take some of the piss out of self-righteous, PETA-type vegetarians. All they’d be left with is tepid (mostly exaggerated) “health” objections to eating the meat and it’s hard to wring much moral superiority out of that.
Vat-grown meat would be great for the environment, by the way, not to mention for animals. Tree-hugging, hippie, granola crunchers should welcome this technology. Turning up the nose and saying “eww” is immature and short-sighted and counter to their long term goals. The meat is perfectly safe. It’s not gross or harmful. I don’t even think it has fat in it.
I’m not a vegetarian. I’ve never entertained the idea of being vegetarian. I love meat, and I don’t care if an animal died so I could eat it.
The idea of vat-grown meat just sounds gross to me, and if I were a vegetarian, I wouldn’t eat it out of the general gross factor.
Diogenes the Cynic - You know the PETA types will always find something to bitch about. Where did those scientists get the DNA to grow vat stuff? That’s right, they STOLE it from poor, defenseless animals! Without their permission! :rolleyes:
But let’s not get me started on a PETA rant.
~Tasha
The other other white meat.
What do you have against corn dogs?
I think that many vegetarians are far healthier than their omnivorous counterparts, but vegetarian does not always equal healthy or less processed in my experience. I’ve had several friends who were vegetarian and overweight because, while they didn’t eat meat, they ate cheese. A lot of cheese - in mac n’ cheese, other pasta dishes, friend mozzarella sticks, etc. And chips and ice cream and so on.
There are many, many processed foods that could be considered vegetarian.
And as a former vegetarian and someone who rarely eats meat to this day, I’d be suspicious of meat grown on a stick. I now have these horrible images of meat seeds, meat flower buds and blossoming meat. We really need that vomiting smiley.
Sexual appliances should not be consumed.
So much for the edible panty industry.
Wouldn’t the “veat” (vat meat) need some kind of fat in order to provide the marbling that gives steaks their distinctive flavor? Vegetable shortening doesn’t have the same taste or consistency as animal fat so they would need to come up with some artificial alternative.
While the introduction of pseudomeat would be help the environment to some degree, its impact would be negligible for quite a while. Suppose that the entire North American cattle industry was replaced by Veat ™ (that would never happen because the beef council is strong and many people would object to eating Frankensteers). That would not impact the South American cattle industry that mows down rain forests to provide grazing land. Nor would it do anything for third world countries that would not be able to afford the technology. They will continue to use whatever food sources they have, including cattle and the environment be damned. Besides, it we can’t get bags of grain to starving countries because of political squabbling, thievery and greed, do you really think we could get artificial meat to some place like Darfur?
Anyway, I thought we already had a meat substitute. It’s called a dildo.
I would gladly eat vat grown meat. I think it would be better for the environment, better for the animals, and a step towards that utopian technociety we learned about in The Sleeper. (Incidently, if you travel through time, could you pick me up an orgasmotron?)
Meat on a stick is people. Spread the word.
I’ve been a proponent of vat-grown meat for a long time on the SDMB. (Look at my sig, second link, and do a search for ‘vat-grown meat’ on the SDMB.) I honestly do not really understand people who say they wouldn’t eat vat-grown meat. I’m not being snarky or condescending or, I think, dense. I’m simply confused. So, would one or more of those opposed to the idea explain their opposition in this thread, please? I would very much appreciate it.
As I understand it, you can grow any kind of cells you want in a vat. Skeletal muscle or fat or cardiac muscle or smooth muscle, it doesn’t matter. So the people selling vat-grown meat would presumably grow fat by the same method and mix it into the finished product in the desired ratio. I don’t think very many companies would buy meat that had 0% fat.
I personally want to eat meat grown from my own cells.
That’s a very good question. Vat-grown meat factories would presumably run on the same energy sources as car factories or any other industrial concern of their size. Hopefully, by the time this is commonplace we’ll have moved a larger percentage of our industry to green energy sources. At the very least, vat-grown meat will reduce the amount of methane put into the air by domesticated ruminants (in addition to saving the rainforest from being turned into crappy grazing land and so on).
Sake can lead to crazy times indeed. I hadn’t heard of that brand before, though.
You don’t say!
-FrL-
I’m not going to pretend my feelings about the subject are rational. I’m sure vat-grown meat probably is a pretty good idea from a purely logical perspective, but that doesn’t change the fact that my immediate, visceral reaction is “Yuck.” I think it’s got something to do with the artificiality of the process, plus the fact that disembodied muscle is a little freaky, just like, say, disembodied eyeballs. (And yes, I know all meat-producing animals are disembodied by the time the butcher gets through with them, but that’s just … different, somehow.)
Not a vegetarian, BTW, although I do try to eat locally-grown, not-heavily-processed food most of the time.
I think this argument may actually work against meat-eaters. Most cows aren’t out foraging naturally grown grass on land that couldn’t be used for something else. Their food is planted and harvested for them. How much acreage must be used to feed one cow? How many people are fed off of that one cow? How many people could be fed if you planted people-food instead of cow-food? Lots of energy is wasted turning cow-food into cow, so it might be more efficient to bypass the cow and just eat the plants.
So that’s wear the coating comes from!
I think the biggest problem with vat growm meat is going to be texture. Without the bone to provide structure, and give the muscle cells a direction to grow its just going to be randomly arranged. It will probably be very soft and fall apart easily. That is why I call it meat on a stick. By growing it on a stick, you have the potential to give structure to it. Otherwise, I think the first use for vat grown meat is going to be as a broth.
I wouldn’t have any moral issue with eating human flesh that is grown in a vat, but I think health-wise such a thing would be very unwise.