contagiousmemes
meat revolution: the third way?
The Norwegian Food Research Institute (Oslo) hosted the first In Vitro Meat Symposium in April this year. Apparently the first meats to hit the market will be burgers, sausages, chicken and nuggets..
The scenario goes like this:
research in stem cells brought to the extraction of specific body cells, like muscle stem cells from cows, pigs and sheep to be cultured in a nutrient rich broth until the clusters of muscles are large enough to harvest.
Perhaps too simplistic, but the point is no animal body to support, hence no methane and nitrous dioxide from rearing livestock, which accounts for 18% of man-made greenhouse emissions. Furthermore this has also strong implications with the raising of the global demand for meat and diary products.
Will in vitro meat ever take off as an alternative to field livestock?
Certainly the lifelong legacy we experience with livestock won't be wiped out easily and it doesn't have to. But a change in perspective is needed. An other mindset shift to be added to the long list that sustainability requires for it to be practiced and ultimately chosen as a new way of living.
This issue goes beyond sustainability, because it's subverting some of the fundamental steps of humankind, that began with hunting and eventually breeding, grazing and finally slaughtering. What this means, if they make it to the market, is that your steak, fillet or sausage will come from a lab, but the cells that build up the muscles would be taken from a genuine cow grazing in the fields ( though using genuine to refer to the cow we are used to links the in vitro one to a perhaps negative image, but this goes beyond my purpouse here).
At this point I went shallow but pragmatic and thought... and what about the taste?
"Some scientists think it could be used to create novel foods that won't be quite meat, but won't quite be anything else either", which means they don't know.
It might be that marketers will make it sound appealing like juicy beef and consumers will come up with new folksonomies to define a good in vitro steak? or a v-steak perhaps?
The researchers say the nutritional qualities will be the same as conventional meat. But as you'll see the webpage is in progress.
To be honest, I'd rather keep going with my 90% vegetarian diet. Let me open a short digression here.
Alike my friend albe, I don't preach vegetarianism. Indeed I'm not even a pure vegetarian, as I eat fish. But in doing so I try to make an informed choice. Fishmeal production is the most carbon intensive stage of fishfarming, hence you should go for farmed herbivorous species like tilapia, bream and carp. Wild seafood is almost a bad deal to me, because of the fuel dependent fishing fleets and the practice of overfishing.
Sometimes I indulge in farmed scottish salmon, which is not so envirofriendly, but is not as bad as shrimp farm aquaculture.
Caring about your food carbon footprint is not easy, it requires research which often provides loads of contradictory numbers and vague rules of thumb like the fact that going veggie and organic doesn't always mean lower emissions: 'food miles' account usually less than actual production (how and where). So buying UK tomatoes if you are in the UK is no better guarantee that the ones from Spain are worse in terms of CO2.
My opinion on in vitro is nevertheless positive, I believe that this could be an incredible opportunity to avoid the environmental costs of rearing and killing livestock to produce meat. In the end we might even be able to restablish that missing link between the food on our tables and the cow in the field.
"I would be happy to eat in vitro meat and have steaks as a treat for special occasions" said my flatmate Chris. And I agree with him.
meat revolution: the third way?
The Norwegian Food Research Institute (Oslo) hosted the first In Vitro Meat Symposium in April this year. Apparently the first meats to hit the market will be burgers, sausages, chicken and nuggets..
The scenario goes like this:
research in stem cells brought to the extraction of specific body cells, like muscle stem cells from cows, pigs and sheep to be cultured in a nutrient rich broth until the clusters of muscles are large enough to harvest.
Perhaps too simplistic, but the point is no animal body to support, hence no methane and nitrous dioxide from rearing livestock, which accounts for 18% of man-made greenhouse emissions. Furthermore this has also strong implications with the raising of the global demand for meat and diary products.
Will in vitro meat ever take off as an alternative to field livestock?
Certainly the lifelong legacy we experience with livestock won't be wiped out easily and it doesn't have to. But a change in perspective is needed. An other mindset shift to be added to the long list that sustainability requires for it to be practiced and ultimately chosen as a new way of living.
This issue goes beyond sustainability, because it's subverting some of the fundamental steps of humankind, that began with hunting and eventually breeding, grazing and finally slaughtering. What this means, if they make it to the market, is that your steak, fillet or sausage will come from a lab, but the cells that build up the muscles would be taken from a genuine cow grazing in the fields ( though using genuine to refer to the cow we are used to links the in vitro one to a perhaps negative image, but this goes beyond my purpouse here).
At this point I went shallow but pragmatic and thought... and what about the taste?
"Some scientists think it could be used to create novel foods that won't be quite meat, but won't quite be anything else either", which means they don't know.
It might be that marketers will make it sound appealing like juicy beef and consumers will come up with new folksonomies to define a good in vitro steak? or a v-steak perhaps?
The researchers say the nutritional qualities will be the same as conventional meat. But as you'll see the webpage is in progress.
To be honest, I'd rather keep going with my 90% vegetarian diet. Let me open a short digression here.
Alike my friend albe, I don't preach vegetarianism. Indeed I'm not even a pure vegetarian, as I eat fish. But in doing so I try to make an informed choice. Fishmeal production is the most carbon intensive stage of fishfarming, hence you should go for farmed herbivorous species like tilapia, bream and carp. Wild seafood is almost a bad deal to me, because of the fuel dependent fishing fleets and the practice of overfishing.
Sometimes I indulge in farmed scottish salmon, which is not so envirofriendly, but is not as bad as shrimp farm aquaculture.
Caring about your food carbon footprint is not easy, it requires research which often provides loads of contradictory numbers and vague rules of thumb like the fact that going veggie and organic doesn't always mean lower emissions: 'food miles' account usually less than actual production (how and where). So buying UK tomatoes if you are in the UK is no better guarantee that the ones from Spain are worse in terms of CO2.
My opinion on in vitro is nevertheless positive, I believe that this could be an incredible opportunity to avoid the environmental costs of rearing and killing livestock to produce meat. In the end we might even be able to restablish that missing link between the food on our tables and the cow in the field.
"I would be happy to eat in vitro meat and have steaks as a treat for special occasions" said my flatmate Chris. And I agree with him.