Artificial Meat

Hmmm… guess we’re going to have a meat-flavored Turing test now? SPAM will, of course, play the role of ELIZA.

What with “fish”, “beef”, “lamb” etc, a shortage of quotation marks is definitely on the cards.

No one else ate a tofurkey on Thursday?

Any mention of artificial brains?

Just eat the CPU.

I hereby cast my ick vote: vat-grown meat is much less viscerally gross – to me – than the way meat is factory farmed. (Quite apart from any ethical issues, there’s just no way it could be grosser than what we’ve already got.) I don’t know whether Kass has ever weighed in on the factory farming/meat processing issue. But surely if there’s wisdom in repugnance, then reading Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” – to say nothing of Peter Singer’s books – would be conducive to repugnance …

What does Kass have to say about Peter Singer’s stuff? Anyone happen to know?

I’m disappointed with PETA; I expected them to say that taking cells from a live pig is unacceptable.

This nutritious “broth” is derived from the blood products of animal foetuses, although the intention is to come up with a synthetic solution.

Go with your gut

“I’m guessing that Dr. Kass will find this even more repugnant than the public licking of an ice cream cone.”

Kass’s objections to SCNT (no, it really is definitely not “cloning”) boil down to it giving him a bad visceral reaction. At last, a developement for which a visceral reaction is actually relevant! Well, really gustatory, rather than visceral, but at least in the ballpark.

A premature announcement

Growing myocytes in a sustainable culture actually has about as little to do with producing cultured meat, as SCNT has with anything like “cloning”. The meat you eat (if you do eat meat) is made up of a lot more cell types than just myocytes, and those cells arranged in a particular structure to form the organs that are muscles. Even if you got all of that right, even if, in other words, you were able to manage organogenesis, there’s still the matter of putting the muscle through its paces, actually using it, to get to the end-product that we are used to eating.

In fact, we don’t really know the details of the embryology involved, but in all probability, you can’t even separate form and function, you can’t even get the form and structure of a muscle unless it starts functioning as a muscle early in organogenesis. Part of that developement we know something about from clinical observation, in that the muscle needs its controlling nerve sending it signals just to keep its structure viable. We speak of a motor unit, the muscle bundle and the nerve ending that goes with it, not just to send it orders, but with this trophic function as well. The muscle atrophies if the nerve dies, and this probably means that the nerve connection has to be there and functioning, sending signals to the developing muscle, to get it to form and develope in the first place. And, of course, the nerve needs input from a central nervous system, and so on, and so on, with the knee bone connected to the thigh bone, etc., etc.

Culturing myocytes isn’t even a small first step to one day being able to do the organogenesis you would have to do to get actual meat, any more than SCNT is even a first step towards “clones” (Whatever they might be. “Clones” aren’t even science fiction, they’re pure fantasy, so fill in the blank as you will.). We’ve been culturing eukaryote, including human, cell lines for some time now, and adding pig myocytes to the list brings us not a whit closer to the organogenesis of muscles. Sure, we’ve shown that you can replace the trophic function of a regular blood supply with a suitable broth, but for the individual cells only. To grow an organ, you need actual vasculature, again, not just to supply nutrients and oxygen, but as part of the direction of growth and developement that gets the organ to grow into an organ of many different cell types arranged a certain way, and not some random mass of random tissue. Growing individual myocytes in a nutrient broth has about as much relationship to growing the muscle organ you would need to grow to make cultured meat — much less cultured meat anyone would like to eat — as my being able to pop the CD of Nathan Milstein playing the Bach Sonatas and Partitas into the CD player has to my being able to play the violin myself — much less play the Chaconne like Milstein.

Not really.

Take the blandest meat imagineable, and several people have proposed the chicken breast, or the most jumbled and mixed all together, chicken nugget, and you still have something with a very involved microstructure. These cultured myocytes are a liquid.

Polh and Williamson had this forecast in The Space Merchants, with ‘Chicken Little” , a monstrous piece of chicken breast meat being fed yeast derivatives..
Scum-skimming wasn’t hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America.
From The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl (w/CM Kornbluth).
Published by St. Martin’s Press in 1952

You would still need to train the myocytes to grow in with the other connective tissue cell types in a way that at least approximates the actual muscle arrangement. We aren’t even in a position yet to specify what those “other connective tissue cell types” actually are, beyond that general formulation, so we don’t even know what to do in that respect, much less how to do it. At the end of the day, you would have to grow the muscle the same way Mom Nature does, in its embryonic anlage. And part of that anlage would be the vasculature, so the trick of using broth to grow the myocytes isn’t even a steppingstone, or first step. It’s a dead end.

Culturing cells, even a mixture of cells (and we don’t even know what mixture to use), in a broth doesn’t get us any closer to organogenesis. It has nothing to do with what that possible technology would look like, if we ever do manage to replicate with a technology what Nature does in that respect .

Culturing myocytes isn’t even a small first step to one day being able to do the organogenesis you would have to do to get actual meat, any more than SCNT is even a first step towards “clones” (Whatever they might be. “Clones” aren’t even science fiction, they’re pure fantasy, so fill in the blank as you will.)

OK, we get it, you have decided to use a completely different definition of “clone” from the rest of the English-speaking world. Good for you, I suppose.

What Salient said. It’s all about the marketing- Real Muscle Cells (TM) as the source of protein in those concoctions will be advertised up the wazoo, and the message will work perfectly on the intended audience.

#19 – yep, chicken nuggets remark being a favourite CT pastime – irony hide-and-seek.

ajay,

You’re absolutely right in charging me with the crime of neologism. But I have to plead self-defense. The rest of the English-speaking world assaulted me first with a word that they all think represents something, which something they all believe they comprehend, which actually doesn’t refer to anything coherent, much less real. I had to try to murder this word to defend myself from incoherence. Failure on both counts, probably.

But Glen, many hotdogs (of the typical cheap kind you find in US) don’t get any of their flavor from the included meat as it is, for consistency reasons. They can already exactly reproduce the flavor and interior texture (but not casings) with soy, so why would they expect to have trouble with this stuff? As noted, it’s an awfully long way from there to a steak.

But why would they care? The processed food market is a huge and growing percentage of US intake. Even if they can’t “get” everything quite right, there’s plenty that ought to work out fine, particularly if it’s cheap enough.

I’m still surprised no one (here, at least) has raised the really knotty issue: is vat-grown pork kosher (or halal, for that matter)? Can Orthodox Jews mix vat-grown meat with vat-grown milk? I mean for vegetarians, this kind of question is easy: killing animals is pretty obviously different from not killing animals (it’s not like PETA thinks it’s okay to kill animals if you don’t eat them). It’s the kosher and halal rules that actually focus on what you eat, and thus ought to produce some really interesting debate.

(of course, Glen Tomkins’ debunking applies to this as much as to the rest of the thread. But since I don’t understand the science involved, I prefer to accept all the most outlandish claims, so as to produce fruitful discussion; I’m sure this sort of deliberate ignorance isn’t at all irritating, in any way, for people who, like GT, actually have some understanding of the subject.)

“No they can’t. I like the pretend hot dogs but they’re not the same.”

I’m sure there is a lot of variation. But I have witnessed a blind taste test (ok, hardly scientific, we were having a backyard grill) where most of a dozen people couldn’t tell two brands apart without the skins. Long enough ago I can’t remember the exact brands.

I find it sad that this discussion comes down to a few bad jokes, puns and scientific wrangling.
What is being offered in vat grown meat is to real food as ad copy is to literature.
It is not wrong to make this stuff, only to eat it. It will not have the nutritional value that the meat from correctly raised (for instance grass fed) animals has.
On a culinary level, it is just as bad. It will put replace farmers with corporate engineers.
It is not fat or sugar that is the problem with the American diet, but rather processed food!
This would be the pinnacle of processed food and it will make our lives that much sadder.

“Thus ficken…”

Probably best not to use that branding in Germany

Not to mention the issues with fake duck…

“Sure, the chemistry wizards of the food product industry could probably use these cultured, immature myocytes in one of their artificial concoctions, but why would they?”

Marketing was my thought, yes. It’s pretty speculative how that would play out though. Given a reasonably cheap process, you can bet that someone will start dreaming about legislation disallowing (some) product differentiation, as has happened in other areas (eg GM foods). How practical all that is I don’t know, but there’s a hell of a lot of money on the table.

Has no one read Oryx & Crake?

You’d probably have more luck getting animals to regenerate limbs, which you could cut off ad inf. As long as we’re reffing obscure SF, think of Cordwainer Smith’s “A Planet Named Shayol.”
But they’ll have to work on the species. Nobody wants to eat lizard tails, and there isn’t much market (outside Asian markets) for frog legs in the U.S.

I heard Kass give a commencement speech a couple of years ago

Does that mean you went to the U of C? When I was in college there (mid 90s) Kass had a surprisingly large undergrad following, not at all limited to folks on the right.

Does that mean you went to the U of C?

No. My son was graduating from St. John’s in Annapolis, which I found out was a nest of neocons only after he signed on. Kass used to teach there. When I heard who the speaker was I said “Well, that’s surprising. Not.”

47: Besides Shayol, Smith of course also gave us sheep the size of Zeppelins functioning as drug factories.

We don’t have any pickled pigs feet. People keep eating the ham before the foot can grow.

Kass was formerly a tutor at St. John’s, so his invitation to be commencement speaker was more that than that he is a neocon. SJC is, indeed, to some degree a “nest of neocons”, but that’s a product of the history of the Great Books movement in American academia and that Strauss had an association with SJC. Several contemporary tutors were students of Strauss’s. One, for example, was Wolfowitz’s dorm roommate at Cornell and, with him, became entranced by Strauss.

Nevertheless, this neocon history and association has exactly zero influence on an SJC education and approximately zero students would be able to describe neocon philosophy, or Straussian philosophy, knowingly or even unknowingly. Because, of course, as a rule the tutors have minimal participation in class and very rarely inject their own interpretations of the readings. At Chicago, Strauss could indoctrinate his students; while at SJC (during his very short tenure there), he could not.

In general, although SJC students tend toward the apolitical, the student body has been liberal and not conservative. It’s my impression that this has been changing for the last fifteen years, or so—I think this is because its prestige has increased and more parents (and students) are choosing the school for what they think it culturally/politically represents rather than out of intellectual/educational idealism, which is what drew people in my generation and before to the school. Nevertheless, while I think there’s a growing contingent of culturally and politically conservative students at St. John’s, I think they’re still the minority. One of my favorite media quotes about SJC comes from an 80s National Review article which praised the school’s academic program yet puzzled over the fact that the student body is very liberal.

The neocon, Straussian, and cultural chauvinistic subcultures within the St. John’s community have been the objects of my personal crusade as a johnnie—in my opinion, they are detriments to the ideals of the school and the community. But they exist. The fact that the Santa Fe campus has the Eastern Studies MA proves that these viewpoints don’t represent the ideology of the school. On the other hand, the establishment of the Eastern Studies program was very hotly contested and is still resented by the people who hold those views.

Kass is an embarrassment, in my opinion.

roac: Mine was going to be about whether eating cultured human flesh would be cannibalism.

The Parking Lot Is Full did it. (Well, sort of. But it’s pretty clear that the next step after human-flesh burgers is your-own-human-flesh burgers.)