Saturday, September 13, 2008

Stem-Cell Fast Food

Here is an article from Popular Mechanics please read my comments afterwards.
www.popularmechanics.com/science/research
Stem-Cell Fast Food: From NASA to Nourish
Who needs animals? It's only a matter of time before lab-grown meat turns into the oink-less BLT.
By Ian Christe
Published in the March 2007 issue Popular Mechanics.

It sounds like a sci-fi nightmare: giant sheets of grayish meat grown on factory racks for human consumption. But it's for real. Using pig stem cells, scientists have been growing lab meat for years, and it could be hitting deli counters sooner than you think.

Early attempts produced less-than-enticing results. Then, in 2001, scientists at New York's Touro College won funding from NASA to improve in vitro farming. Hoping to serve something, well, beefier than kelp on moon bases and Mars colonies, the scientists successfully grew goldfish muscle in a nutrient broth. And, in 2003, a group of hungry artists from the University of Western Australia grew kidney bean-size steaks from biopsied frogs and prenatal sheep cells. Cooked in herbs and flambéed for eight brave dinner guests, the slimy frog steaks came attached to small strips of fabric — the growth scaffolding. Half the tasters spit out their historic dinner. (Perhaps more significant, half didn't.)

Today, scientists funded by companies such as Stegeman, a Dutch sausage giant, are fine-tuning the process. It takes just two weeks to turn pig stem cells, or myoblasts, into muscle fibers. "It's a scalable process," says Jason Matheny of New Harvest, a meat substitute research group. "It would take the same amount of time to make a kilogram or a ton of meat." One technical challenge: Muscle tissue that has never been flexed is a gooey mass, unlike the grained texture of meat from an animal that once lived. The solution is to stretch the tissue mechanically, growing cells on a scaffold that expands and contracts. This would allow factories to tone the flaccid flesh with a controlled workout.

Lab-grown meat isn't an easy sell, but there could be benefits. Designer meat would theoretically be free of hormones, antibiotics, and the threat of mad cow disease or bird flu. Omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins could be blasted into the mixture (see illustration above) or dispersed through veins. Revolting? You bet, but have you ever visited a sausage factory? Currently costing around $100,000 per kilogram, a choice cut of lab meat makes Kobe beef seem like a bargain. But meat-processing companies hope to start selling affordable factory-grown pork in under a decade. Bon appétit.

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The short article from Poplar Mechanics fits in with the concept of artificial food or what we at the Weed Garden like to refer to as man-made Manna. It also fits in with my concept of High Tech Self-Sufficiency, HTSS. There are numerous advantages of creating synthetic meats in the method that is described in the popular mechanics article. I would like to mention some nonspecifically mentioned in the article. One, the method could be scaled down for small communities, families, or for individual use to help create high Tech self-sufficiency. Two, it would be a radical way to help reduce cruelty to animals in factory farming. Three, it would be a tremendous way to help feed people in areas of the world where the environment is agriculturally challenged. Four, in times of natural disasters, poor harvest etc. it would be an effective way to make food available where it is needed.
What needs to be done now is to promote the concept of this type and other types of synthetic foods. The economic advantages are so clear it's really not worth debating. What must be done is to fight the neo-Luddites and those biological fundamentalist who would just yell that it is weird. First and foremost, we must promote the concept in emergency situations and in areas that are having trouble feeding their population. Second, I think I would offer an olive branch to animal rights activist who would seriously like to be a part of a method that could perhaps put an end to cruel treatment of animals on farms and in slaughter houses. Third, the same olive branch could be offered to back to nature enthusiast to promote self-sufficient farming. Again here is a method that could produce food in a more direct way with less pesticides and chemicals. Here is a way that makes self-sufficient farming economically feasible. Anyways I would appreciate feedback on this article.



www.popularmechanics.com/science/research

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