Artificial food coming soon.

[RGClark]

$330,000 Burger Made Of Test Tube Meat, Expected In October.
By IBTimes Staff Reporter: Subscribe to IBTimes's RSS feed
March 13, 2012 11:10 AM EDT
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/313423/20120313/330000-burger-test-tube-meat-petri-dish.htm

Scientist Cooks Up a Meatless Product for Meat Lovers.
Jeremy Hsu, InnovationNewsDaily Senior Writer
19 February 2012 05:35 PM ET
http://www.innovationnewsdaily.com/890-scientist-cooks-meatless-product-meat-lovers.html

Lab Meat Would Sidestep ‘Grossly Inefficient’ Livestock Industry.
Molika Ashford, InnovationNewsDaily Contributing Writer
21 March 2011 02:42 PM ET
"Though human life has changed much over a few hundred thousand years, the drive to kill and eat other animals lingers on from our earliest days.
But with technology transforming so many other aspects of daily life, will feedlots and slaughterhouses someday go the way of stone tools and cave dwellings? They may if scientists succeed in their experiments in culturing meat — muscle tissue grown in a laboratory dish. Supporters of the experiments see cultured meat as a way to end environmental degradation, not to mention addressing ethical qualms about eating animals."
http://www.innovationnewsdaily.com/137-lab-grown-meat.html


Related to this is that it is possible for humans to survive on just the chemical forms of the proteins, amino acids, etc. making up our food:

Synthetic Food.
"If you thought food pills were bad, at least you never had to deal with the horror of purely synthetic food. As part of a space experiment in 1965, twenty four men volunteered to be fed nothing but a food made from pure chemicals for nineteen weeks. I should say that that twenty four men started, but only fifteen finished. No, the other nine didn't starve to death. The experiment proved quite successful from a medical point of view and everyone who finished was perfectly healthy. It had more to do with the fact that the "food" wasn't even as solid a meal as a pill."
"It was syrup. Looked like weak corn syrup. Tasted like weak corn syrup."
http://davidszondy.com/future/Living/synthetic_food.htm


Bob Clark

 

[Urwumpe]

What makes this food more synthetic than the stuff you can already buy in supermarkets? You can already buy cheese without any cheese in it. And diet meat that is 90% water.

 

[ED_4]

Artificial food. Sounds like an oxymoron from today's standpoint. :lol:

 

[MattBaker]

That will become a huge issue in 20 years. To produce beef you need unbelievable amounts of water, plant food for the cows, water them, and drive/fly the product to a factory and to your supermarket.
The term for that is called "virtual water", water that you don't use in your household, but that is used to produce the products that you buy everyday.
To stay at the beef, if you buy 1 kg at your supermarket/butcher the amount of water that was already spent just to be able to sell you your steak is 15,000 litres of water, depending on the country of origin.
Now, we are in a time were you need a lot of food and the agriculture is also in deserts, think of the Aral Sea or how LA gets it water. So we're exploiting a lot of water from the natural environment and damage planet earth, just to be able to eat our steak or wear clothes made out of cotton (cotton is the problem in the area of the Aral Sea).

So, if this artificial food is as healthy as a normal steak, tastes like a real cow and it could be produced for prices that are affordable for everyone it could help us save our environment. But as we see with genetically modified food, we are very sceptical of new kinds of food and in the current society it would not be possible to sell something like that.

 

[FADEC]

I think that roughly 90% of what you find in a supermarket today either is artificial or contains artificial substances which make you believe that you are eating/drinking natural food. Sweets for example are mostly nothing more than sugar mixed with artificial flavours. Same for yoghurt. The amount of yoghurt we consume would not even be available if there would be real fruits in each yoghurt. Simply because we don't have that much fruits available. Even the multivitamin juice which I drink contains something that you won't find in fruits normally: a considerable amount of Vitmain B12. And you can be sure it's synthetic B12, just as most of the other vitamin supplements. Even if it is NFC juice because NFC juice is heated to make it cure (which kills lots of vitamins). Nothing beats real fruits and vegetables.

However, it's not principally unhealthy food or disgusting only because it is artificial. The truth is that neither healthy nor unhealthy food does exist. Whether something is healthy or not depends on how much and how frequently you eat a certain food.

The history of artificial food actually is thousands of years old. Cooking meat already is artificial in a way. We process food and make it cure for thousands of years.

 

[NovaSilisko]

I for one welcome our new fakesteak overlords.

 

[this is an old account]

(removed)

 

[NovaSilisko]

Yeah, if we can figure out a way to produce edible, healthy, protein-rich meat just from a cell sample, some grafts, and some chemicals...

Take that, world hunger!
Take that, astronaut hunger!

 

[Keatah]

McDonald's has been selling artificial food for decades already! This is nothing new.

 

[Pipcard]

[citation needed]

 

[Keatah]

Citation needed?? Ever eat McDonalds for a year straight? Day in and day out. That's more than enough proof right there.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Soylent Green is people.

 

[Pipcard]

Citation needed?? Ever eat McDonalds for a year straight? Day in and day out. That's more than enough proof right there.

Of course I know McD's is unhealthy, and I don't eat there too much. (but when I do I mostly eat McChicken sandwiches)

However, the whole "natural is automatically good; artificial is automatically bad" thing is an example of the "appeal to nature" fallacy.

Or, the idea that "if it's unhealthy, it's artificial" is also wrong.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

I'll freely admit that there are several advantages to food going through one process or another (pasturized milk for example). But I am confident the vension in my freezer has zero amount of pink slime in it. [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime"]Boneless lean beef trimmings - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

Cheese food vs real cheese, I can taste the difference. Butter instead of margarine (in moderation).
Apple moonshine brandy instead Jack Dan... oh wait.

Wild turkey over Butterball. And Emu burgers rule (no fat, but needs ketchup).

I'm not sure how I'd feel knowing that I'm eating a steak grown from a petri dish. But will they have prime rib, New Yirk strip, veal cutlets? Or are we looking for a steak in the future that has lost all flavor differential?

 

[NovaSilisko]

I'm not sure how I'd feel knowing that I'm eating a steak grown from a petri dish. But will they have prime rib, New Yirk strip, veal cutlets? Or are we looking for a steak in the future that has lost all flavor differential?

That depends on where the flavor comes from - method of cooking? Genes of the animal? What it ate? If it's the last one, then yes, it will lose flavour differentiation.

 

[ED_4]

Anybody here remember the funky looking colored food that the original Star Trek had? Well it's looking more real now. :blink::stirpot:

 

[jedidia]

If it's the last one, then yes, it will lose flavour differentiation.

Ala, a lot of meat flavor indeed depends on the diet of the animal. And the kind of animal of course.

I'm not disinclined to try vat-meat at all, if it tastes somewhat like meat. Doesn't even have to be a precise reproduction for me (it's like using a POD for your guitar. It doesn't sound anything like the amplifiers it allegedly simulates, but it still sounds good), if it solves some problems it might be worth it.

However, I'm somewhat doubtful that it actually will solve significant problems. Animals aren't just used for meat. We simply need a certain amount of animals to cover other things than just eating them.

Also, I always hear about how inefficient animals are as a food source, but I haven't yet heard about the energy-efficiency of Vat Meat. Not a single report about how much resources you actually need to grow a kg of edible meat. A large part of that will probably be electricity. The world is currently desperatly looking for ways to produce more electricity from renewable resources. Animal meat is produced mostly by renewable resources, switching that to currently still non-renewable electric power seems kind of backwards at the moment. This might or might not be a problem depending on how much power is effectively required, of course, but not having seen any data about it I kind of expect a catch. There ain't no such thing as free lunch (quite literally in this case) after all.

 

[Artlav]

There is so many overweight people in the western world, and that's not for the love of eating, but for the love of chewing. Many people like to chew things, feel the taste and texture of food, not just being full and not feeling hunger.
If artificial one can't deliver that, it would be a hard battle to get it adopted.

Won't really do anything to the world hunger, unless it's cheaper than the running costs of keeping a cow and a set of pigs.

 

[FADEC]

As for McDonalds food: it is as heatlhy and as unhealty at the same time just as any other food in the world. You'll be perfectly fine if you eat a burger and fries from McDonalds occasionally. Just as with any other food. But you won't be perfectly fine after a period of time if you eat something at all meal. No matter what. Because you get too much of what is in your meal, and you don't get anything else which you don't eat instead. Combined with physical inactivity it likely will be a slow suicide. This is not related to any special food but to behaviour.

Healthy food does not exist. We think that for example roughage are generally healthy (because we are being told by advertising and doctors). Granary bread is often called to be healthy. But it can become a nightmare. If I eat granary bread I will get acid reflux quite soon, followed by heavy flatulence and a diarrhea sometimes. Having asked a doctor who is also nutritionist: this is actually more common than one might think. Fruits also can become unhealthy. Especially if you have a smoothie maker. Fruit acid on a regular basis can cause nice damages to your gastric mucosa and teeth.

I could keep going with several other examples. The problem is that nutrition and digestion is a rather individual matter, which makes it impossible to talk about and recommend healthy or unhealthy food in general. A lot of diseases are caused by eating the "wrong" stuff, which is often not noticed.

And there we are at overweight as well: it's not caused by food in the first place. It's caused by behaviour, i.e. eating monotonous or too much combined with a lack of physical activity. But even physical activity is not a cure-all. My grandpa became 84 years old without any special physical activity in his life (maybe WWII was enough physical activity...) while he always was slim. He didn't even consciously care about his nutrition. For example, for breakfast he ate either cake or brown bread with jam. Nothing else. No lunchmeat, no fruits, no milk or something else. My grandma is 86 years old now and she is fine. 7 Children, no physical activity either and always the same breakfast.

 

[ED_4]

As for McDonalds food: it is as heatlhy and as unhealty at the same time just as any other food in the world. You'll be perfectly fine if you eat a burger and fries from McDonalds occasionally. Just as with any other food. But you won't be perfectly fine after a period of time if you eat something at all meal. No matter what. Because you get too much of what is in your meal, and you don't get anything else which you don't eat instead. Combined with physical inactivity it likely will be a slow suicide. This is not related to any special food but to behaviour.

Healthy food does not exist. We think that for example roughage are generally healthy (because we are being told by advertising and doctors). Granary bread is often called to be healthy. But it can become a nightmare. If I eat granary bread I will get acid reflux quite soon, followed by heavy flatulence and a diarrhea sometimes. Having asked a doctor who is also nutritionist: this is actually more common than one might think. Fruits also can become unhealthy. Especially if you have a smoothie maker. Fruit acid on a regular basis can cause nice damages to your gastric mucosa and teeth.

I could keep going with several other examples. The problem is that nutrition and digestion is a rather individual matter, which makes it impossible to talk about and recommend healthy or unhealthy food in general. A lot of diseases are caused by eating the "wrong" stuff, which is often not noticed.

And there we are at overweight as well: it's not caused by food in the first place. It's caused by behaviour, i.e. eating monotonous or too much combined with a lack of physical activity. But even physical activity is not a cure-all. My grandpa became 84 years old without any special physical activity in his life (maybe WWII was enough physical activity...) while he always was slim. He didn't even consciously care about his nutrition. For example, for breakfast he ate either cake or brown bread with jam. Nothing else. No lunchmeat, no fruits, no milk or something else. My grandma is 86 years old now and she is fine. 7 Children, no physical activity either and always the same breakfast.

My mom got to be a ripe old 90 before she passed away. But she tries to eat as equally as well in all areas of the food groups. At least not stick to just one thing.:thumbup: