Why meat from a petri dish is still a long way from the supermarket (not in my lifetime)

On Friday, Reuters ran a story about a Dutch scientist who is attempting to make the first synthetic animal meat, starting with nothing more than stem cells. In it, the reporter focused on some of the grim numbers that make our current trajectory of livestock-based agriculture unsustainable, and suggested that the economics of meat from a tissue culture dish would eventually cause it to win out. But that eventually might be a long way away, as the first burger-sized samples of artificial meat are estimated to cost about a quarter of a million euros.

Can artificial meat's price eventually come down? Absolutely. But there are a lot of technical hurdles that will need to be cleared out of the way first, and some of them might not be all that easy to clear.

Reuters' story doesn't spend much time on the current costs, but goes on at length about a somewhat related issue: the taste. Right now, the artificial meat consists of little more than muscle tissue grown from stem cells. An actual piece of meat is substantially more complex, as the muscle fibers have integrated into a coherent tissue and built up through use. Associated tissues, like blood and fat, also contribute to taste, appearance, and texture.

It might be possible to overcome these hurdles. Stem cells for blood and fat have been identified, and culturing them and getting them to differentiate into mature tissues is probably not much more complex than getting muscle fibers to grow in a dish. But this comes back to cost: getting any cells to grow into mature tissues is ferociously expensive, and adding additional cell types will increase the complexity and cost.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/11/why-meat-from-a-petri-dish-is-still-a-long-way-from-the-supermarket.ars

just sayin'.......

#SongsFromTheFuture

I've been vegetarian for over 20 years so I don't give a shit other than the possibility that the availability of synthetic meat will reduce the torture of animals, environmental devastation, and other impacts of the dairy/pork/bird industry. The main consumers of the so called "meat" probably won't notice the difference - McRibs? McLobster? Both are real, but who knows what the fuck is in them. Gross shit, that.

:puke:

McFood is a sad thing, and I consider all fast food chains to fall into the McFood category. Stuff people with fat at a high price for the crap they're serving but a price that seems like a bargain for those who consume it. I think the same goes for WalMart.

As long as you've got the freedom, why not go for the gusto?