Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Would You Eat Vat Meat?

The public television show YOUR WEEK asked people whether they would eat "Frankenmeat":



I don't completely understand why meat grown in a tube is grosser than meat cut from the bones of a dead animal. If the texture is the same, why not eat it?

Or perhaps they realize the deadly danger of cultured flesh. Just listen to "The Chicken Heart", a 1937 radio play:
I tell you that mass of flesh was a chicken heart...the tissue of which for some reason is undergoing constant, rapid, accelerating growth. With every passing hour its growth is doubling. Do you know what that means? If it is now one block in size, within thirty hours that cannibal flesh will have increased in size to one square block to the thirtieth power. VOICE RISES. In thirty hours every inch of this whole city will be crushed under that moving flesh. Within sixty hours it will have covered the entire state. Within two weeks the entire United States. You ask for the National Guard. I say call out the entire army. Blast this thing off the earth.
Aaaaaaaah! Not the cannibal flesh!! Listen to the story.

Related post: Cultured Meat
(video via Wired Science)

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2 comments:

  1. For me, I just don't trust vat meat. I feel safer and more attracted to meat from a real animal. I don't know why. Maybe it's paranoia, or maybe because I refuse to join in on the animal rights rampage on the meat industry. Regardless, I want real meat, from real animals. Maybe that makes me horrible, but the way I see it...if my ancestors 10,000 years ago could eat it, then so can I.
    And I can almost guarantee that vat meat won't taste the same as real meat...real meat eaters will be able to tell the difference. I can tell the difference between corn fed and free range (I like both, but I favor the standard corn fed because it tends to be easier to chew). Plus...it's meat...grown...in a lab or some place...*shiver*

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  2. Yeah, I don't personally see the point in growing meat in vitro unless it either tastes better or is significantly cheaper than animal-grown meat. And at the moment in vitro-cultured meat isn't really "animal free" because the most effective growth culture medium contains serum.

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