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[Bauglir]

To get proper lab-grown meat, you need to replicate all these structures: A pump instead of a heart, chemical processing instead of a stomach, dialysis instead of a liver, hormones instead of glands, antibiotics and sterility instead of an immune system, etc etc.

No you don't.

Yeah, you do. Ideally, you wind up with a sheet of muscle, adipose, and connective tissues suspended in a nutrient bath, subjected to regular electrical stimulation, I think. But everything in that list, with the arguable exception of the heart, is basically necessary. You do need something to keep the fluid circulating, but you probably don't need a pump (and we'd probably omit blood vessels and bones outside of meat specially grown for these). You do need to supply nutrition, remove waste, direct growth, and avoid contamination. The hope is that we can do this more efficiently than an engine optimized for breeding, and given enough time we probably can.

[Helgoland]

You'll need to protect the meat from infection, you'll need to keep the inner parts of the muscle you're growing supplied with nutrients, you'll need to somehow seperate the waste from the blood, you need to induce growth... So yeah, as far as I can tell you do. I'm not in any way educated on the matter, though - if you've got further information, please tell.

Maybe we should focus on ground meat before tackling the steak problem...

NINJAEDIT: Yeah, what Bauglir said, though I believe it is easier to modify the vehicle we already have instead of practically starting from scratch.

[Sheb]

Well, of course you do.

BTW, meat from animals is only inefficient if you feed them grain. Grass-fed beef is great because it use a feedstock that has little value otherwise. For a lot of ecosystems, steppes and pampas, raising livestock is the only way the land can contribute sustainably to our food supply. Livestock husbandry can even contribute to the ecosystem's health (look for stuff like Brown revolution or holistic management on google for examples).


Of course, this kind of husbandry cannot contribute the massive amount of meat westerner currently eat.

[Helgoland]

Brown revolution

It may be a tangent, but it's an interesting one.

[Sheb]

Funny you should quote this: I actually worked in that ranch last summer. But yeah, exactly my point.

[alway]

you'll need to keep the inner parts of the muscle you're growing supplied with nutrients

There is no inner parts; it's just a thin layer of tissue. All the separate materials are combined afterwards to create the final product.

It all comes down to what is absolutely necessary for creating meat. You don't need a complex mixture or anything like that; just stem cells to grow the tissue along with an incubator chamber with proper conditions to differentiate into the tissue you need; something like a half dozen chemicals and hormones; which are easy and cheap to mass produce. Which is all beside the point, because they are doing it already. That's how they made the burger in the first place, so that's already done.

Overall, muscles are probably one of the most simple to create, simply because they are so ancient in terms of evolution. They first evolved when animals consisted of sponge-like creatures, and as a result, have basic requirements which are fairly simple. There have probably been some evolutionary changes since they first emerged, but if it works, evolution won't tend to make it more complicated and prone to fail without good reason.

[Descan]

Not to mention that methane from cows is a pretty large greenhouse gas producer. >--->

[kaijyuu]

That's a misunderstanding of the carbon cycle; they don't produce any carbon that the grass they eat didn't just take out of the atmosphere. I dunno how much carbon the grass would put back into the air once it dies and rots, but I don't think it's much less than it does after being eaten by a cow (EDIT: They actually do cause far less damage when rotting rather than eaten; see my next post in this thread).


The greenhouse gas "producers" we should be worried about are the ones that take carbon that have been long removed from the main carbon cycle and put it back in the atmosphere. This is pretty much just limited to fossil fuels and volcanoes.

[Bauglir]

To be fair, methane is worse than carbon dioxide for that. By weight, that is. By atmospheric composition, yeah, it's not that significant by my recollection. Still, wouldn't hurt.

[Descan]

You're forgetting that grain-fed cows get their grain from fields that have artificial fertilizers, created from fossil fuels.

Plus, methane has a different cycle than carbon. Carbon can be captured again by plants, methane isn't so easily captured.

[kaijyuu]

To be fair, methane is worse than carbon dioxide for that.

Yeah, the wife educated me on just that. Apparently livestock produce enough methane to be statistically significant when it comes to greenhouse gasses.


So yes, cows are a problem.

[10ebbor10]

Plus, methane has a different cycle than carbon. Carbon can be captured again by plants, methane isn't so easily captured.

Then again, Methane is just CH4. Within a small decade most of it is broken apart by incoming solar radiation, and turned into Co² and water.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The problem isn't necessarily getting rid of the methane in the atmosphere, it's that we produce enough of it to have a supply in the atmosphere constantly. And that supply does much more damage than the CO2 (per molecule, that is).

[MonkeyHead]

To be fair, methane is worse than carbon dioxide for that.

Yeah, the wife educated me on just that. Apparently livestock produce enough methane to be statistically significant when it comes to greenhouse gasses.


So yes, cows are a problem.

So does rice farming, which apparently is kind of a big thing in some parts of Asia.

[Gentlefish]

The reason the meat was bad and dry was because it was pure meat. No fatty content in it.