Would you eat in vitro meat even if were proven to be 100% safe?

Loren Booda

How about in vitro vegetables?

Ryan_m_b

That's easy; all you need is a glass plant pot, soil and seeds. Voilà!

netgypsy

I LOVE this forum. Finally a group of people who enjoy a discussion about most anything.

In vitro veggies would grow just the part you eat, no stems, no root unless you eat the roots, and so on and I vote for this because I feel horribly guilty uprooting a carrot or yanking beans from the stalk.

I feel guilty every time I eat meet because the raising of, shipping of and slaughter of animals is not humane. I watched my grandmother slit the throat of a live chicken and it ran around and bled out in front of us. Not pretty. So I'm all for in vitro meat. What we eat now is really a crap shoot compared to European meats. They trace the animal from conception to consumption. If you get sick they know exactly what animal, what farm, what parents and what diet. You get sick on a fast food burger in the US and it probably came from 50 different place.

Yes I also know several fat vegetarians and they live on desserts. And they had a B12 deficiency too. (NOT fun - we had a family member who greatly reduced meat consumption due to a health problem and who didn't absorb well anyway and he lost all the feeling in his hands and feet from low B12 and folic acid. It did come back though)

No I don't like fake meat either although the chefs on "the Chew" tasted several and were unable to tell which was the real thing so I guess the ones out now are better than the ones I tried a number of years ago.

But in vitro meat is not fake and nothing is 100% safe - we all die sometime for some reason whether it be bad burger or bad driving. Bring it on. Glad they can finally do it.

Ryan_m_b

Plants and animals are very different. The methods used in in vitro tissue production aren't transferable to plants. Furthermore it isn't needed, if we really wanted to grow plants with just the parts we want to eat, higher nutrition, controlled environment etc we could just grow hydroponic GM crops.
Unfortunately we're not there yet. The first "burger" is scheduled for this year and will cost over £250,000. There is a long way to go after that to get close to mass production and the obstacles we're facing are non-trivial.

netgypsy

I'm aware that the technique to grow "just the interior" of an orange is not the same as that used to grow muscle. That doesn't mean it isn't possible.

By being there yet I meant the technology is there but obviously has to be first tweaked, then mass produced to get the price down. And probably subsidized for a while. But it's very exciting.

Reminds me of some book I read a million years ago where artificial wombs were available so women didn't have to go through pregnancy. Wonder how long that will take???

Ryan_m_b

I'm not saying it isn't possible to grow plants in a bioreactor but there really is no need. It would be more expensive and inefficient than simple hydroponics or even grown from the Earth.
It isn't just a question of being "tweaked", this is a massive new area of science to develop. One of the biggest challenges I see is developing techniques for growth medium that don't rely on factors derived from animals such as fetal bovine serum (a very important factor in cell culture). And that's on top of the obvious huge problems of controlling cell behaviour to such an accurate extent and growing large tissues without support organs and systems e.g. growing tissues with blood vessels to get over the limit imposed by oxygen diffusion.
We're nowhere near lol. Not only would we have to grow a full uterus in a bioreactor (and today we're only managing simple tissues) but we would have to replicate the bodily functions of a pregnant female e.g. hormones and other endocrines, cell transfer (see maternal microchimerism), supply of blood and other factors etc etc etc. On top of that we've got the huge ethical problems to overcome; who is ever going to give consent to grow the first human in a tank? Who is going to run the risk of being the person or group to allow a potential creation of life that may result in birth defects or other disorders?

Like I said before in vitro tissue synthesis is an emerging field but it is not on the verge of a keystone-event breakthrough. It is going to take a long time and incremental progress and the hurdles we face are non-trivial. It's an exciting field don't get me wrong (indeed regenerative medicine is the field that I just finished a masters in and intent to pursue) but we shouldn't get too ahead of ourselves.

netgypsy

That's what they said about computers too. I remember those first calculators. Sooo amazing back then. And look at what they can do now and what they're on the brink of being able to do. Matrix revisited hahaha

lisab

*wonders when they will start making bread with no crust*

netgypsy

What if we wrapped the dough in bacon ( of course invitro bacon) before cooking it???? Would that prevent a crust from forming? Have to try that. Gotta get some bread flour. The problem is to have a covering that will stretch as the bread rises. Hmmm - maybe wrap the dough in a pizza crust. It's super stretchy. Gotta try that to. THE NEXT GREAT INVENTION - CRUSTLESS BREAD. Another idea - make one of those foil covers like they have for popcorn you make on the stove. Those are so funny.

Evo

Oooh, bacon wrapped bread.

Jimmy Snyder

Move to Japan. The Japanese don't like crust on their bread so the market trims it off before selling it. They also sell the trimmings very cheap. I would buy bags of them whenever I got the chance. I made sandwiches with the heels and bread pudding with the crusts.