I've been following the artificial-meat issue with interest. It offers ways of eating meatlike foods without eating lots of animal fat and ways of requiring less farmland and other such resources.
A common form is vegetarian "gardenburgers", like Gardein, made from soybeans, wheat, peas, etc. Makers of such foods are getting better: Beyond Meat: Fake chicken that tastes so real it will freak you out.
There's also a vat-grown fungus fake meat, Quorn. It's the soil fungus Fusarium venenatum grown in a vat with glucose and various minerals. Its growers then harvest its mycelium, its "body", a mass of strands, and process it further.
But the most notable sort is animal tissue grown in Petri dishes and the like, in-vitro meat: BBC News - World's first lab-grown burger is eaten in London
I think that it has some severe problems, like nutrition and growth factors. That experimental in vitro meat was grown with fetal bovine serum, which has plenty of both. However, that's rather massively cheating.
In-vitro meat requires a full complement of molecular building blocks: amino acids, vitamins, fatty acids, ... that's why various species' blood serum is often used in lab work (Cell cultureWP , Growth mediumWP ). One needs complete organism flesh or something similar. Nutritional requirements are rather similar across the animal kingdom, to the extent that I could discover research on this question, like The Quantitative Nutritional Requirements of Drosophila Melanogaster.
Muscle tissue also needs growth factors to make it grow, though those could be made by inserting the appropriate genes into bacteria, sort of like how human insulin is nowadays often made.
There's the further problem that much of meat's flavor comes from blood and fat, and one has to somehow get those flavors into it.
Returning to keeping vat meat well-fed, one would have to mash up algae to get low on the food chain. Or else lithotrophic bacteria like methanogens.
Some fungi are much easier to nourish, because they can make nearly all of their biological molecules, approaching what plants and lithotrophic bacteria can do. The Quorn company uses hydrolyzed cornstarch to nourish its vat fungi, but cellulose digestion could be a good alternative, and that technology is approaching commercial viability.
So growing animal flesh as vat meat is much more difficult than what many people seem to think.
A common form is vegetarian "gardenburgers", like Gardein, made from soybeans, wheat, peas, etc. Makers of such foods are getting better: Beyond Meat: Fake chicken that tastes so real it will freak you out.
There's also a vat-grown fungus fake meat, Quorn. It's the soil fungus Fusarium venenatum grown in a vat with glucose and various minerals. Its growers then harvest its mycelium, its "body", a mass of strands, and process it further.
But the most notable sort is animal tissue grown in Petri dishes and the like, in-vitro meat: BBC News - World's first lab-grown burger is eaten in London
I think that it has some severe problems, like nutrition and growth factors. That experimental in vitro meat was grown with fetal bovine serum, which has plenty of both. However, that's rather massively cheating.
In-vitro meat requires a full complement of molecular building blocks: amino acids, vitamins, fatty acids, ... that's why various species' blood serum is often used in lab work (Cell cultureWP , Growth mediumWP ). One needs complete organism flesh or something similar. Nutritional requirements are rather similar across the animal kingdom, to the extent that I could discover research on this question, like The Quantitative Nutritional Requirements of Drosophila Melanogaster.
Muscle tissue also needs growth factors to make it grow, though those could be made by inserting the appropriate genes into bacteria, sort of like how human insulin is nowadays often made.
There's the further problem that much of meat's flavor comes from blood and fat, and one has to somehow get those flavors into it.
Returning to keeping vat meat well-fed, one would have to mash up algae to get low on the food chain. Or else lithotrophic bacteria like methanogens.
Some fungi are much easier to nourish, because they can make nearly all of their biological molecules, approaching what plants and lithotrophic bacteria can do. The Quorn company uses hydrolyzed cornstarch to nourish its vat fungi, but cellulose digestion could be a good alternative, and that technology is approaching commercial viability.
So growing animal flesh as vat meat is much more difficult than what many people seem to think.
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