Strange how the homeless population near the research lab dropped dramatically.
Sergey Brin's 'test-tube burger' cooked, eaten, declared meat-like
The first burger made from cultured beef grown in a laboratory was publicly cooked and eaten in London on Monday, and test subjects have pronounced the result "close to meat." The burger was the brainchild of Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who constructed the artificial patty from 3,000 strips …
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Tuesday 6th August 2013 08:50 GMT Phil O'Sophical
Re: A burger that is almost...
Post and his team mixed the meat strips with egg, breadcrumbs, salt, caramel, and saffron.
To make it a proper scientific test, did they create a second burger with only the above ingredients, plus the red beet colouring, to see if anyone:
a) Noticed the difference
b) Preferred the meat one
?
Damn, I am now hungry, and it's only just gone breakfast time.
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Monday 5th August 2013 20:42 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Cats falling down stairs and other Internet imagery, continued.
Are people getting dumber? Yes they are!
But critics of Post's approach say it would be better to convince people to eat less meat
This isn't meat.
"We have a situation where 1.4 billion people in the world are overweight and obese
Signs of progress and fructose.
and at the same time one billion people worldwide go to bed hungry
Signs of bad distribution, government intervention (going from subsidies in rich countries to export orientation in poor ones) and missing capital-intensive infrastructure (rampant collectivism, banditism, statism and other ills).
Professor Tara Garnett of Oxford University's Food Policy Research Network told the BBC
He should know.
That's just weird and unacceptable
Is it?
The solutions don't just lie with producing more food but changing the systems of supply and access and affordability, so not just more food but better food gets to the people who need it.
Being part of the central planning problem, I see.
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Tuesday 6th August 2013 02:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Cats falling down stairs and other Internet imagery, continued.
But critics of Post's approach say it would be better to convince people to eat less meat
This isn't meat.
They aren't trying to convince you to eat less of this, genius.
"We have a situation where 1.4 billion people in the world are overweight and obese
Signs of progress and fructose.
Ah no, it's a sign of consuming more calories than you burn.
Professor Tara Garnett of Oxford University's Food Policy Research Network told the BBC
He should know.
You should really pay attention. Or are you one of those who don't believe women can be professors ..
The solutions don't just lie with producing more food but changing the systems of supply and access and affordability, so not just more food but better food gets to the people who need it.
Being part of the central planning problem, I see.
Nobody said anything about central planning.
Are people getting dumber? Yes they are!
q.e.d.
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Tuesday 6th August 2013 06:04 GMT oolor
Re: Cats falling down stairs and other Internet imagery, continued.
Ah no, it's a sign of consuming more calories than you burn.
Metabolism is a little more complicated than calories in and out or even macronutrient distributions. And the body does not 'burn' calories. Metabolic rates can vary greatly in response to similar events, even in the same person at different times. The only constant is resting metabolic rate which is linked to lean tissue regardless or age, gender, or fitness level.
You should really pay attention. Or are you one of those who don't believe women can be professors ..
Everyone knows women profess. And profess...
Nobody said anything about central planning.
Right, but nobody has any way to enforce distribution recommendations without resorting to central planning, so considering the original point was somewhere between facetious and satire, this is a funny corner to paint oneself into.
q.e.d.
That was a beautiful proof of the axiom as posited.
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Tuesday 6th August 2013 20:26 GMT Mike Flugennock
Re: Condiments
...Which is exactly why we invented hot chilli sauce (and beer). Enough of either of those and you really won't care whether it tastes like meat. As many a burger van owner will attest.
...and many the owner of a bar'n'grill which serves "buffalo wings" with their pitchers of beer at happy hour.
Dave Barry had a wonderful column some years back in which he defines the term "buffalo wings" as "to be eaten by guys who are drinking beer". He theorizes, based on his own experience -- along with, likely, myself and millions of other guys -- that the "buffalo wings" served at bar'n'grill happy hours are actually the same chicken wings slathered with hot sauce, brought out to beer-drinking guys to be gnawed on for a while, taken back to the kitchen and, instead of being discarded, are put through the dishwasher, re-heated, re-slathered with hot sauce, and brought back out to be served to a different bunch of guys drinking beer.
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Monday 5th August 2013 21:39 GMT That Awful Puppy
Probably just a vegementalist, with this 'quorn' (I'll admit to being ignorant on this matter, living quite blissfully in a country that is a few years behind every health food fad) being the newest and the greatest of what basically amounts to the proverbial carrot garden in a nunnery - i.e. a poor substitute for something they allegedly don't miss at all.
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Monday 5th August 2013 22:10 GMT John Smith 19
They were able to turn micoprotein into Quorn. I think turning beef muscle stem cells into "meat"
will likely to be fairly easy, given the shift is much simpler.
Usual note this is v 0.1 tech.
Odd I've never thought of Maastricht as a world capital for Haut Cuisine before.
So thumbs up for something I first discussed in "The Space Merchants" from the early 1950s.
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Tuesday 6th August 2013 01:10 GMT Hungry Sean
not such a terrible idea
I suspect that the vast majority of beef ends up as ground beef that gets served up at fast food joints or otherwise processed beyond recognition. From the Guardian's coverage of this burger, it sounds like one hope is that the meat could be produced much more efficiently than present farming methods can achieve.
Seems like it'd be appropriate for a lot of the applications of ground beef-- judging by my memories of the last time I ate a "beef taco" at Taco Bell, I think it's a fair possibility this might even improve the quality.
By reducing the need for mass produced beef, I would expect cattle raising to shift its focus back to producing meat that tastes, well, beefy. Everyone gets cheaper, easier access to meat, meat from real cows goes up in quality, and various negative environmental consequences of cattle ranching can have a reduced economic impetus. Win-win-win.
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Tuesday 6th August 2013 02:46 GMT bert_fe
It is not that simple
We have evolved to eat other animals. We expect their meat to be red apart from chicken and lots of other delicious animals such as oysters and lobsters. Pure protein is quite white! It is the contaminants of other molecules that colour it! In an psychopathic ideal world your best meal is one of your own species. A fully balanced diet! Insects and many other species have no such qualms they eat their young and each other even while having sex with gay abandon. I welcome this first step to circumvent billions of years of evolution. Meanwhile I will stick to my primitive blood lust of eating things that bleed when you kill them.
My job back in the 1950's as a young boy was to kill chickens and other animals for the family to eat. We raised these animals and it was hard for me to even do what I did. It was survival not abject cruelty. It was swift and clean, I hope. Bert
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Tuesday 6th August 2013 06:48 GMT oolor
Re: It is not that simple
I would go further and say that the best meat would be the rump of an early adolescent female (much like any farmed or game meat since as the animal gets older the meat gets tougher and in males testosterone also has additional deleterious effects on meat quality). Although the hungry cannibal who is late for dinner may have to do with the cold shoulder. Note the previous is jest minus comments about meat quality, I doubt that eating one's own species is any more nutritious than many of the other vertebrates easier to catch and explain to the tribe/[whatever authorities may ask such inconvenient questions].
Those contaminants are very important for the nutrients contained within, for example the heme iron in hemoglobin and myoglobin is extremely important for humans as plant-based iron sources suffer absorption issues unless taken with vitamin C, this product notably lacks these proteins, and thus the iron which is in my opinion the real issue, less so the taste. The lack of fat also concerns me as it helps many important nutrients absorb.
Regarding the chickens, I learned that lesson early, when I was four, my grandfather had to put down a calf that he an my uncles had said was mine days earlier. I went crazy and threatened to cut my grandfather's and my dad's cousin's throat (he was the village butcher). My aunts calmed me down and explained it to me so by lunch I was eating freshly made veal beside my grandfather. I think too many people are separated from realities like this and are then prone to extreme representations as commonplace and vice-versa.
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Tuesday 6th August 2013 05:25 GMT Mr Lion
Quorn is not a health food fad!
Quorn was invented way back in the day by some malthusian cynics who believed that the world was running out of cheap protein. They had evidently seen Soylent Green, read the Omen and had smoked something enlightening.
Obviously devastated to find that the food kept on failing to run out - so hit on a bonzer wheeze to make it a "health food"...what software marketing people call "the pivot". So unprepared were they for this change in focus that they only moved to using free range eggs in around 2000 - up to then all your vegger mates were eating battery farmed eggs binding together their weirdy cultured fungus proteins...
Quorn is not a health food fad - it's a bona fide science
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Tuesday 6th August 2013 07:08 GMT Amorous Cowherder
So basically it's form of Quorn, ie manufactured food grown in a lab, except one is made from mushrooms and this new thing from an animal "soup". £250,000 for all this when you can get a packet of Linda McCartney's veggie burgers down TESCO for £3?! One born every minute!
To quote Martin Crane from Frasier, "No Frasier food is not to die for, your country and your flag are to die for. This is just food, you eat it, you're not hungry. That's it.".
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Tuesday 6th August 2013 07:24 GMT wowfood
I imagine part of the taste problem is the lack of fats etc. Whenever I've made burgers at home it's always the fatty cuts you use to make burgers. Any lean meats tend to dry out a bit and leave less flavour, while the fat melts a tad and gives it a much better taste.
Man... I want a steak burger.
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Tuesday 6th August 2013 08:29 GMT Stoneshop
"We have a situation where 1.4 billion people in the world are overweight and obese, and at the same time one billion people worldwide go to bed hungry,"
That's 1.4 fattie per, should not only solve the malnourishment problems, but also, as a side effect, reduce use of natural resources such as petrol, textile fibres and large cars
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Tuesday 6th August 2013 14:02 GMT Anomalous Cowshed
What's the point?
Someone recently said on one of these threads, that human beings were hunters and meat eaters, and that these traits would never disappear. However, nowadays, in most cases, in modern countries, the hunting element boils down to picking up a pack of reddish, bloody gunk wrapped in plastic from a chilling cabinet, and throwing it into a supermarket trolley.
Next comes the meat eating. In most cases, this involves ingesting a patty made up of slaughterhouse offal. The taste of the meat there is to a large extent a factor of the sauces that are used, and the method of cooking the product in animal fat or in oil.
Now some scientists want to replace meat from cows with meat grown in a test tube, because given the quantities of meat being eaten globally, that would be a more sustainable solution. It will have a different texture and a different taste from the original. It will take tremendous scientific advances to mass-produce it. Does that not suggest that the very essence of the product will be altered?
Why not overcome the dogma that we need to eat meat at all cost? We might have substitutes like quorn, etc. for the cheap, day-to-day needs, and then real meat, reared and slaughtered in a non-industrial way, for posh people or for the special occasions when Sir or Madam want to reminisce about their days as hunter-gatherers on the great plains America?
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Wednesday 7th August 2013 06:31 GMT Ace Rimmer
"humans already use 70 per cent of worldwide agricultural capacity to provide feed for livestock"
Ok this ISN'T rocket science. Eat the food you grow, cut out the animal bit in the middle.
The only reason for continued eating of meat is "Because I can". There's no biological need for us to eat meat, long term consumption of meat is incredibly bad for you in general, much much worse for the animals, and the energy we expend growing and cultivating livestock and the resources we pour into it (like turning over 70 per cent of our agriculture, which could be feeding US far more healthily) are insane. It's no longer even a moral issue, it's simple, common-fucking sense.
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Friday 9th August 2013 07:35 GMT Ralph B
Up That Game
Well, if burgers are going to cost $380K then the Aaron's Last Wish project will have to increase its budget.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
