Laboratory meat

From time to time, I see articles on the promise of "cultured meat" -- or meat grown in a laboratory from stem cells.  Here is the latest, about a little non-profit called New Harvest:

"Matheny's meat starts in a lab, where scientists extract stem cells from animal muscles. The cells are placed in a nutrient bath to develop and then on plastic scaffolding that allows them to form into strips as they multiply. Mark Post, a professor of tissue engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, may be close to realizing New Harvest's vision. Post's lab is producing 2 mm thick strips that are almost an inch long and a quarter-inch wide. Pack enough together, and you've got a meal."

They're still having some issues though:

"One problem is flavor. Post hasn't tasted his own handiwork because he says he's averse to eating his experiments. But he's been told by those who have that it doesn't taste like the real thing."

No shit.  Look, I'm all for scientific and technological progress that will help 6+ billion people live on this planet.  And the first halting steps of discovery are always easy to ridicule.  But I am enormously skeptical that this type of effort is going to produce anything resembling real food.

• Even grass-fed cattle and factory farm cattle have different nutritional profiles.  Same genetic programming + different food intake = different gene expression.  No wonder lab protein doesn't taste like meat.  
• Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food details the 150-year history of trying to manufacture breast milk with formula.  And it's 150 years of hubris in which we've done everything we could to avoid learning how complex real food actually is.
• These scientists fall prey to nutritionism, or reducing complex food to its constituent parts.  They're just trying to grow muscle protein, plain and simple.  But what about fat?  And all the other amazing vitamins and nutrients found in meat and seafood?  (Oh, the research grant didn't cover fat so we didn't grow it.)
• Look at some of the other "meat substitutes" that they're hailing.   Mostly soy products.  Mostly bad for you.  And being grown using fossil fuels in vast monocultures.  Take a look at  on New Harvest's homepage for their vision of the future.  Vegetarian Utopia:

• Even if you get people to go veg, it's not exactly helping to create a better, alternative food system for the vast majority of people who are never going to give up meat...or even switch to meat substitutes.  The meat-eaters will think it's gross, and the vegetarians and vegans who care are going to be too grossed out by lab meat.

Here's a taste of New Harvest's views on meat:

"Despite its popularity, meat — both in its production and in its consumption — has a number of adverse effects on human health, environmental quality, and animal welfare. These include: diseases associated with the over-consumption of animal fats; meat-borne pathogens and contaminants; antibiotic-resistant bacteria due to the routine use of antibiotics in livestock; inefficient use of resources in cycling grains and water through animals to produce protein; soil, air, and water pollution from farm animal wastes; and inhumane treatment of farm animals. As meat consumption continues to increase, worldwide, these problems are now a global concern."

The environmental and ethical problems are all issues with factory farming, not meat consumption, per se.  Regarding health, I wonder if they saw the recent findings on red meat.

New Harvest's solution to factory farming is to remove the farm and leave the factory.  Blueprints below:

(Thanks to Pablo for the pointer.)