[ExI] deathless meat

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes
...

>...Hear, hear.  I've sent an email to the prof in charge of the process
asking if he's run the numbers to see what the current $/kg is.  That can be
a numerical measure of how close to reality/close to market this tech is.
By comparison, meat currently retails for about $5-10/kg (more for choice
cuts, but we're competing with the low quality meats here)...

The part I am watching is how much of that 5-10 bucks per kg is processing
cost.  You need proles to round up the cattle, slay the bastards, carve them
up into serving size portions, wrap them in paper and so forth.  But if we
can figure out a way to short circuit some of that, where we connect a cow
or swine to some kind of machine which can somehow extract stem cells from
the bloodstream, then dump the rest back into the cow, then scatter the stem
cells on some kind of matrix submerged in sugar water, then perhaps we could
grow the meat in the desired shape, and from that, perhaps we could get a
machine to wrap it and hand out the finished packages.  We might need few or
perhaps no proles in the loop.  We have a conveyor or something to bring
food and water to the bovine, another to haul away the remains, the beast
pumps stem cells in the blood to the meat factory.

I am not a vegetarian myself.  My wife is, my son is, I am a light meat
eater, but I am all for minimizing suffering of beasts.  That to me is a
goal worthy of eating something less than what I might choose, and perhaps
even paying more for it.  I am cheering wildly for these guys.

spike