[ExI] deathless meat

[Adrian Tymes]

2011/9/1 spike <spike66 at att.net>:
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> Let’s hope they can work out this plan:
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> http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2011/09/01/slaughter-free-stem-cell-meat-sausage-coming-soon/?test=latestnews
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> The article goes off on a tangent about how the meat from stem cells doesn’t
> taste good, but they ignore the enormous breakthrough it would be.

"It's still in development."

That said - that there is an effort seriously looking into this is itself a
breakthrough.  Now they need to work on cost.  Food is incredibly cheap, in
the developed world, by historic standards, mainly because a lot of people have
put a lot of effort into improving the infrastructure for making and
delivering food.
The critical metric for a new food technology is $ per unit mass; the
particulars
of the technology, such as "no animals died to make this meat", give you a
multiplier off the competitive product that people will accept, but
that seems to
be less than 10 either way even for extreme benefits/problems.

In other words, this gets more interesting once they can sell this meat at a
profit (including shipping costs to a typical supermarket) for much less than
$50/lb.  If they can get it under (or even near) $5/lb. (which will take some
scaling up), that will threaten traditional meat production methods, which will
invoke politics; watch for astroturfing and groundless (no pun intended)
regulation at that time.

  Imagine
> for instance we manage to get the stem cells to convert simple sugars, which
> can be manufactured relatively cheaply perhaps even without using plants,
> and turn it into complex proteins.  That sounds a lot like what they have
> done here.  If so, I think we can find a way around the problem of its not
> tasting right without blood diffusing the tissue.  As far as I know, we
> currently do not use the blood from farm beasts when they are slain.
> Perhaps we could collect that stuff and figure out how to get the stem cells
> to absorb it.  I don’t know if it is used now however.  Have we any
> slaughterhouse hipsters?  (Now there’s a name for a heavy metal band.)
>
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> spike
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