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Suggested ingredients
Stem cells from cow cultured into strips of meat
Beetroot juice and saffron for colouring
1 onion, chopped
1 free-range egg yolk
Salt, pepper and breadcrumbs
25g chopped coriander


Stem cells preparation method
Take some stems cells from a cow
Put them in a large dish and add nutrients and growth promoting chemicals. Now leave to multiply
Three weeks later there will be more than a million stem cells. Put these into smaller dishes to fuse into small strips of muscle, a centimetre or so long and a few millimetres thick
Collect these strips into small pellets and freeze until there are enough to form a burger
Defrost the pellets and put together just before cooking

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23529841


Can you hear Sam Elliot saying:
Stem Cell Burger, its whats for dinner

"Tastes almost like a burger!"

The first lab-grown beef hamburger was cooked and eaten in London on Monday. “We proved it’s possible,” said scientist Mark Post, who created the cultured minced meat in his lab at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. He said his hope is to come up with a new and environmentally friendly way to feed the world.

Schonwald said the product tasted like “an animal protein cake.”

Hmm, what animal, I wonder?

The type of stem cells that Post used, called satellite cells, are responsible for muscle regeneration after injury.
The cells were placed in petri dishes in a nutrient mixture that helps them proliferate. There they grew into thin, 0.02-inch strands of muscle fiber — about 20,000 were used to create the burger presented in London.

Yummy !

Post said that creating the meat was just a first step; he would expect to see cultured meats in supermarkets in 10 to 20 years. At first, according to experts, it might be a luxury item, maybe in the form of such exotic treats as snow leopard burgers or rhino sausages, because it would not be much more difficult to make them than to produce beef or pork.

Wait, is this an Onion article ? It's been hard to find a good snow leopard burger ever since Sambo's closed.

“There is no future in conventional food production. The future is in in-vitro meat,” said Ingrid Newkirk, president and co-founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the animal rights group, who popped open some champagne to celebrate Post’s success.

Well, there you go. I guess it will also be a PC way to dabble in cannibalism if one is so inclined.

JD wrote about this 8 freaking years ago: Peak Oil Debunked: 105. VAT-GROWN MEAT. This was between "106. THE GREENING OF HATE" and "104. MORE ON LUNAR SPACE POWER (LSP) AND INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THE MOON." So WHO'S LAUGHING NOW, EH?

Well, there you go. I guess it will also be a PC way to dabble in cannibalism if one is so inclined.

Spam supposedly tastes like human, or "long pork" as its aficionados term it. This was reputedly why Spam was/is such a hit in Hawaii. Without doubt there's a Snopes page on this one, which I first heard in junior freaking high I think.

Pohl seems to have taken a long term interest in the subject of future food: from his novel Gateway (1977):

All the TV shows have morale-builder commercials telling us how important our work is, how the whole world depends on us for food. It's all true. They don't have to keep reminding us. If we didn't do what we do there would be hunger in Texas and kwashiorkor among the babies in Oregon. We all know that. We contribute five trillion calories a day to the world's diet, half the protein ration for about a fifth of the global population. It all comes out of the yeasts and bacteria we grow off the Wyoming shale oil, along with parts of Utah and Colorado. The world needs that food. But so far it has cost us most of Wyoming, half of Appalachia, a big chunk of the Athabasca tar sands region. . . and what are we going to do with all those people when the last drop of hydrocarbon is converted to yeast?

It's not my problem, but I still think of it.

Incidentally there's another new thread about synthetic meat. Nom nom nom as the kids say.

In a state of overshoot we are now starting to mold technology and responses toward "solutions" that confront constraints and maintain "equilibrium" while managing a population and consumption society that is far exceeding carrying capacity.

Understanding this should explain why a sentient species like a human is not like yeast when dealing with overshoot. And that we therefore will find with Kudzu Ape a state of resilience within overshoot that will extend far beyond any classical model we find when studying the bloom and die-offs of other species.

The outcome is eventually the same but human ingenuity will greatly delay the consequences. Futility can have a long time horizon. The consequences of this is that we draw down the remaining sinks and resources way beyond what happens when other species go into overshoot.

There is a fairly good analogy to understand this if we look at our policies of fire suppression in national forests. For decades we "solve" forest fires by suppressing the normal fires that would occur thus allowing the dead wood to build up to the point that when the fire finally does occur its heat and destructive power is far more devastating.

This is what makes the overshoot story of Kudzu Ape so very very insidious.

And why any rational person who understands these dynamics should be looking for events that short circuit the long draw down of resources that will happen as we come up with fake meat and all the other crazy schemes.

As mentioned before nature does not follow a narrative where a Robin Hood pathogen will come along in the nick of time and do us in thus taking back resources from Kudzu Ape and redistributing them to the rest of the species as well as surviving humans. Those are fantasy thoughts of desperate environmentalists.

Some of these proposed wacky energy technology ideas or food production ideas will eventually take hold. We tend to dismiss them in a manner far too cavalier because we recognize from what desperate and misguided a mindset they come from. But desperation in overshoot is a mother of invention. As we will see.

So, short circuiting this process is a very interesting topic that borders on a deep cultural tabu. To willfully weaken resilience to ultimately save our necks.

I wonder if there are think tanks amongst the elite who contemplate these matters? As we disparage the loss of the middle class? One billionaire consumes far less than a thousand millionaires that consumes far less than 10,000 middle class each with $100k to buy stuff with.

How's that for throwing out a stinky conspiracy fart into this thread?

In the 1930's there was a laboratory in Europe that became famous for keeping chicken organs alive independently of a chicken with a heart/lung time machine. The researchers claimed that they could carve off pieces of chicken liver and because liver naturally regenerates itself the one in the tank would grow back to full size. Winston Churchill is said to have been very excited about the prospect because it would mean that the Royal Navy could always have fresh meat for their crews no matter how long the fleet was at sea.

A whole slew of Sci-Fi was written based on this process being perfected from the late 1930's onward. Looky there it took less than 100 years to make a breakthrough!

Tanada wrote: Looky there it took less than 100 years to make a breakthrough!

As I just mentioned, in overshoot desperation will be the mother of invention.
Some believe this to be our salvation, others to our demise. That is a polarity that will increasingly define politics, ideology, religion, friendships, in terms of ones belief on actions that must be taken.

Stem cell burgers to keep 7 billion fed. On the fore mentioned polarity on whose side would your grandfathers fall?

This question is to illustrate that each generation redefines what is perceived as good or not... This leads to a culture molded by overshoot as in inventing stem cell burgers rather than a culture that mitigates.

We invent a stem cell burger and believe we are leading ourselves into a brave new world not realizing that we are all being led by externalities. Just ask your grandfathers.

Stem cell burgers... shouldn't this be in the Soylent Green thread?

pstarr wrote:Why not just harvest tumors.

"Save your loved ones. Eat their tumor. And it tastes so yummy also "

I know a source of excess biomass that would be a great feedstock to grow those tumors on.

IBON!

Errr... how can there be a market for TechnoMeat when I just got through eating a simple 14oz sirloin steak that cost me $2.50??

Granted, I'm pretty good in the grocery store, and have plenty of pantry and freezer space to take good advantage of sales, but still.

From my perspective it's pretty crazy, grazing is the lowest-tech ag there is, no fossil fuels or tools required, just some way to contain your animals. Intensive grazing mimics nature, it's just a herd passing over a patch of grass then moving on to another patch.

But food is a business and the point of business is to make a profit. Grain fed beef is faster and more profitable because "concentrates" are just that, concentrated energy that makes the beeves grow faster – and time is money!

But at some point if SCB is more profitable it will be sold as protein, no doubt in my mind. That might result from higher grain prices due to GW, "renewable fuels" demand or just less finicky eaters wanting something other than tofu.

But hey, I inject genetically modified E. Coli effluvia daily in order to stay alive so what the heck.

I can definitely hear Sam Elliot say:

"Neighbor, it's what's for dinner."

Isn't your neighbor suppose to look like a thin green wafer though?

http://www.sciencealert.com/lab-grown-b ... -000-to-12

Back in 2013, ‘test-tube’ hamburgers hit headlines across the Internet, and not just because scientists had managed to more-or-less replicate meat in the lab. It was a commendable feat, especially because it offered a potential solution to the increasingly unsustainable practice of cattle farming, but then we heard about the price tag. Who’s up for a $325K burger made from cultured muscle tissue cells? Anyone? Last chance? You sure?

But just two years on, and scientists have announced a drastic cut in the cost of producing one of these patties, saying the price tag is now just a little more than $11 per burger, or $80 per kilogram of the meat. And the best part? The technique requires just a just a small piece of muscle to produce 10,000 kilos of lab meat.

More at the link, it's getting much cheaper to grow lab beef.