I’m in San Francisco, at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon not made of meat in the traditional sense but of plants mixed with “cultivated” pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barns got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitamins—essentially replicating the conditions in her body. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal’s fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami.
I’ve been struggling to describe the experience, because cultivated meat short-circuits my brain—my mouth thinks I’m eating a real pork meatball, but my brain knows that it’s fundamentally different and that Dawn (pictured above) didn’t have to die for it. This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s Diet Meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so too are cultivated meatballs. They simply taste a bit less meaty, at least to my tongue. Which is understandable, as the only animal product in this food is the bioreactor-grown fat.
Kinda… creepy. Just the way this article is presented, I mean.
It almost sounds like “Now we can finally eat Max the dog and know exactly what he tastes like without really eating him! Isn’t that right Max?” lol
But if this is just a weird way of saying “we have synthetic pork now” then kudos I guess
Give me celebrity human flesh. I want to know what steve Buschemi tastes of
Give me Musk and Bezos so I know what to expect when the revolution comes.
Seems like half-assed lab grown meat. I’ll wait till they figure out the real deal.
Simpsons did it
But for real, I am super interested in the concept of cultivated meat. I’m no vegan, but if less animals need to be mistreated and murdered for my steak, I’m not going to complain.
I mean I think in this case Norse mythology beat the Simpsons to this at least a few centuries before with Heidrun
The idea that a company can grow meat by just adding a few carbs and vitamins to a flask of cells is ridiculous. These synthetic meats are all fed fetal bovine serum. Fetal bovine serum (FBS) is made by drawing blood from bovine fetuses via cardiac puncture at government-approved slaughterhouses. The collected blood is allowed to clot, then centrifuged to separate the serum from the red blood cells. The raw serum is then frozen and undergoes further processing, including sterile filtration, to become suitable for use in cell culture.
Any steak made this way would have to cost thousands of dollars.
The idea that a company can grow meat by just adding a few carbs and vitamins to a flask of cells is ridiculous.
Right now it is. The attention these projects are getting is intended to pique the interest of people who can help fund research into making the process more efficient and affordable.
If the animal has been given the best possible life it could have right to the moment of death would you still have misgivings about meat?
I barely have misgivings about meat as it is. But yes, an animal that is raised on quality feed, and given space to grow before being harvested is always going to be preferable to the industrial levels of farming that capitalism requires to meet demands.
Makes sense I enjoy meat as well but I try to stay away from factory farmed meats and mostly get meat from family farms or hunting but that’s not a luxury that everyone’s able to do.
It blows me away that some towns or cities only have a walmart for their grocery store.
Most animals behave pretty clearly as if they don’t want to die, and humans have been really bad, historically, at deciding correctly who is person enough to mind being enslaved/genocided/colonialized.
Warfare would look quite different if the winner had to eat the loser.
Bosmer lore in a nutshell.
Yes, it is still murder and their life was not full. I don’t care how pampered the animal was its life was still cut short and its purpose was solely as a commodity for human consumption.
Sure it’s murder but meat is delicious and I care for my animals before I slaughter them and use everything I can.
This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s Diet Meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so too are cultivated meatballs.
I hope that wasn’t meant to be a pitch for it. Diet Coke tastes like ass.
They simply taste a bit less meaty
See that’s the disconnect - diet Coke doesn’t taste like Coke that’s less Coke-y, it tastes like Coke that had the sugar replaced with a scoop of Grandpa’s ashes and a dash of betadine.
If we’ve made the meat equivalent to diet Coke, the best course of action is to just skip that nastiness and cook up some tofu or paneer or something.
If we’ve made the meat that’s just a little less meaty, okay cool, I’ll give it a shot.
…but those two are NOT the same thing.
Kinda agree, I might try the bacon if it’s not prohibitively expensive. But an ethical source of pork fat would be pretty nice for any culinary focused vegetarian. But I actually liked the impossible stuff I hear people talk a lot of shit about, so I’m obviously no super tasting expert.
Tasting expert can only tell you what they taste, not if it’s any good because that is entirely up to the individual. Some (arguably quite a lot) people love diet coke, does that make OPs statement wrong? I’d say no because that individual doesn’t like diet coke, but that doesn’t speak for everyone.
Never said they were wrong, but they are essentially saying if we don’t get it perfect, then why try at all? That I disagree with. I’m with them on not liking diet Coke, but I like that it exists for whoever does like it.
Every Diet Coke drinker I’ve ever known has been a fat person who thinks they are addressing their weight problem by drinking Diet Coke, and doing literally nothing else.
In their defense, drinks are some of the worst offenders for excess calories, which is what drives weight gain.
Diet Coke isn’t medicine or anything, but if you’re drinking it when you would normally be drinking a normal Coke, then you just saved yourself a couple hundred calories.
Obviously not going to make up for a 3k calorie per day diet w/ no exercise, but it is a step in the right direction.
If you can make ethical bacon, you can also make ethical long bacon
Possibly even more ethical since humans are capable of consenting
I’ve been waiting for this for years. I can’t wait to eat the first celebrity that donates some cells for a tie-in promo with Taco Bell. That shit is going to be so mid and our nightmare cyberpunk future is incomplete without it. XD
I would definitely donate some of my fat to taste myself
Jeffrey Dahmer is interested
One day they’ll breed an animal that makes it clear it wants to be eaten.
the Cow was the Dish of the Day at Milliways, which arrived when Zaphod Beeblebrox (accompanied by Arthur, Ford, and Trillian) requested to ‘meet the meat’. It was described as a large dairy animal, a “large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type.” It was said to have large watery eyes, as well as small horns and what might have been an ingratiating smile on its lips. The creature seems peaceful and at ease, and at one point is described to have “mooed.”
The creature offers Zaphod and his party his shoulder, braised in a white wine sauce, then goes on to offer other parts of its body, having worked hard to fatten itself up through force-feeding itself for months. Eventually, after Arthur and Trillian have expressed their shock and Ford has expressed his disinterest, Zaphod requests four rare steaks and the Dish of the Day goes off to shoot himself, telling Arthur not to worry, as he says “I’ll be very humane.”[1]
Indeed what I was referencing.
Okja kind of has similar themes about a fictional animal bred for food.
So a show like that. Pig was basically wolverine and was prideful it was going to save humanity through its suffering. However, its meat was disgusting so no one wanted to eat turning the poor thing evil cursing humanity for rejecting his salvation.
One of the more emotional roller coasters experiences I seen for villian 🤣.
Beyond Lies the Wub
I’m just gonna stick to beans
I can’t tell from the article or Mission Barn’s page whether they need a new sample for every batch, or just needed one sample to seed their bioreactors. I’m not sure (as someone who avoids meat for ethical and environmental reasons) if there’s a big difference.
I’m actually happy with Beyond burgers/sausages when I do want meat taste, but nice to have more options. (Mozzarella and Parmesan are what I’d look for next, though Rebel Cheese is doing a good job with some more cheese-platter varieties.)
It may not be an every batch thing but you would need more samples at least eventually. Cells have division limits. While these are somewhat bypassed in these types of setups you do run into issues for longer term.
Uh, no.
They did not grow meat by adding carbs and vitamins, they grew the the pork tissue by feeding it fetal serum from a pig or cow.
The amount of utter bullshit around synthetic meat is just marketing to ignorant hippies.
You have a source for the bullshit you’re spouting?
I run a biomedical lab that does all kinds of tissue culture from cell lines to stem cells. Nothing grows without fetal serum, it’s not like growing plants hydroponically. There are countless bullshit techs claiming to have a serum-free medium, it’s all a con. There are countless soluble factors required to get cells to divide. Research labs spend $300 a litre for FBS, if there was a subsitute that actually worked it would save biomedical reasearch millions and any company would get rich. Can’t grow cells on bullshit.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666765722001508
I can throw random science articles too.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004222020958
No! Not animals not dying!
Dear God no!!
Or we could you know, leave the fucking animals alone.
Did Dawn explicitly say “I would like to donate my fat”? No? Then it wasn’t a fucking donation. Pretty gross to characterize the story in this way.
That’s ridiculous. You know that’s ridiculous right?
People gonna eat meat. They can eat dead animals or they can eat this stuff. You choose which you prefer
What’s ridiculous is humans unconsensually raping and pillaging living beings for all they are worth just because you think your taste buds and minutes of pleasure outweigh a living breathing being with the capacity to experience. Sorry that my moral compass is more attuned than yours.
You forget the third option, leave animals the fuck alone and eat plants ffs.
Yeah but meat in salad makes the whole thing even more delicious.
Excellent, more ultra processed material that our bodies have never encountered before and don’t know what to do with, what could go wrong with eating it in with other things that we aren’t supposed to be eating?
I do think there’s reason to scrutinize a new food manufacturing process. From morphine to microplastics to sugar, we’ve got plenty of prior art thinking we were on top of the health implications.
But, if we are trading some human health risk for known environmental catastrophe & animal lives, I think shifting responsibility into our court is a good step.
Trust me; my body has encountered pig fat and knows just what to do with it.
It’s exactly the same material.
Anything the body doesn’t know what to do with, it excretes.
Well, except for microplastics I guess. Those stick around forever.
Not a commentary on this particular product, but I don’t believe it’s quite so simple
Or, if someone doesn’t have the enzymes to digest it, it sits in their stomach and rots, which is fun.
It’s even more fun if you’re actually allergic to the proteins in meat, but I digress.
What you’re describing is called gastroparesis, and it’s a serious medical condition, not something that generally happens to people as a response to certain food.
