[ExI] deathless meat

[Kelly Anderson]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 2:24 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>
>
> -----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.

Good points Spike. I predict that one of the first places you might
see this kind of thing mass marketed is mixed in with hamburger for
the fast food giants... Of course, it will have to be cheaper than
real hamburger before that will happen, so obviously there has to be
the non-mass use first. So the very first place you'll probably see
this marketed is in health food stores, whether it is actually healthy
or not. Vegans and vegetarians are a large part of that market.

-Kelly