Coming Soon: Frankenstein's Vegetarian Chicken Shack

Off-topic
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Frau Blücher!

The link

PETA Offers $1 Million Reward to First to Make In Vitro Meat
In Vitro Meat

Scientists around the world are researching or seeking the funds to research ways to produce meat in the laboratory—without killing any animals. In vitro meat production would use animal stem cells that would be placed in a medium to grow and reproduce. The result would mimic flesh and could be cooked and eaten. Some promising steps have been made toward this technology, but we’re still several years away from having in vitro meat be available to the general public.

PETA is now stepping in and offering a $1 million reward to the first scientist to produce and bring to market in vitro meat.

Why is PETA supporting this new technology? More than 40 billion chickens, fish, pigs, and cows are killed every year for food in the United States in horrific ways. Chickens are drugged to grow so large they often become crippled, mother pigs are confined to metal cages so small they can’t move, and fish are hacked apart while still conscious—all to feed America’s meat addiction. In vitro meat would spare animals from this suffering. In addition, in vitro meat would dramatically reduce the devastating effects the meat industry has on the environment.

Of course, humans don’t need to eat meat at all—vegetarians are less likely to get heart disease, diabetes, or various types of cancer or become obese than meat-eaters are—and a terrific array of vegetarian mock meats already exist. But as many people continue to refuse to kick their meat addictions, PETA is willing to help them gain access to flesh that doesn’t cause suffering and death.

Contest Details
Faux Fried Chicken

PETA is offering a $1 million prize to the contest participant able to make the first in vitro chicken meat and sell it to the public by June 30, 2012. The contestant must do both of the following:

• Produce an in vitro chicken-meat product that has a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh to non-meat-eaters and meat-eaters alike.
• Manufacture the approved product in large enough quantities to be sold commercially, and successfully sell it at a competitive price in at least 10 states.

Judging of taste and texture will be performed by a panel of 10 PETA judges, who will sample the in vitro chicken prepared using a fried “chicken” recipe from VegCooking.com. The in vitro chicken must get a score of at least 80 when evaluated in order to win the prize.

Click here to read the complete contest rules, or e-mail VegInfo@peta.org to enter.

In the meantime, check out VegCooking.com for delicious, healthy mock-meat recommendations and thousands of tasty, animal-friendly recipes.

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Interesting. This sounds far less whacko than most of what PETA gets press for.

One question:
Where do you get the stem cells?

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im sure you get them the same way you do from human… growing embryos… just wait we’ll get people protesting animal abortion here any day now. I just found this out today. A lost of stem sell are harvested from the umbilical cord when a baby is born. You can actually pay the hospital to keep it after a birth so it may help the child through a disease in its future

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As a vegetarian all I can say is…

wow…

sheesh…

I’ll have to think about this.

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Interesting.

My umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck when I was born.

When (if) it happens, ill be sure to try some.

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Ironic…

PETA Causes Death

Why can’t us human carnivores kill our own food? Thousands of other animal species kill their own food… why doesn’t PETA go after them?

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Ok I’ve got one

If creating faux meat in a laboratory removes the ethics of that meat, then would you be able to eat human meat created in the same way?

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I’d have to say no. In the first place cannibalism is, well, cannibalism and it’s yucky. If somebody cloned your mother would you have sex with the clone? I should think not.

But isn’t the fact that cows on big farms were fed beef what brought on mad cow disease? Cannibalism is, as a practice, unhealthy.

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Signature material!

Peter M

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to be honest i would love too

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This concept is actually quite awesome. As a long time vegetarian I can say I would eat this meat as soon as it becomes marketable.

As there is no genetical engineering going on, there should be no question of ethics. It is simply growing protein in a lab. It is not new technology by any means. The only difference between this and similar processes that have been around for quite some time, is that the tissue being grown will resemble that of chicken, or beef, or whatever desired.

I find it funny that PETA is only offering 1 Million Dollars for this, as most scientific grants are much much bigger. I guess it could have something to do with how easy (in theory) is will be. Of course its not just going to who can make it first, but who can make and have it marketable on a large scale, within the time frame.

What is pretty cool about this concept is that they will be able to decide the fat-nutrition ratio the faux meat contains. Not to mention the much much cleaner environment in which it will be grown compared to the factory farms that are now supplying meat.

Like any new technology, when this product hits the markets will be quite pricey, although with the rising cost of oil and the use it plays in current farming, It should be at a very competitive price in a reasonable time frame.

All and all I would say this is good for both vegetarian and meat eaters alike, better than meat, meat. Without the more than despicable nature of the current meat market.

I am all for it, and think its great.

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Actually, over time there have been groups practicing cannibalism extolling it’s health benefits. The artist Diego Rivera (husband of Frida Kahlo) was one such man. It supposedly makes you very healthy and strong.

Scientifically, there is nothing inherently wrong with cannibalism, and there is some evidence towards people being the most healthy meat for us. Mad Cow disease was brought on by Cows being fed infected SHEEP. Mad cow in Sheep is called “scrappy” or SSE (Sheep Spongiform Encephalitis). It jumped species to cows when the cows were fed infected brain tissues and became BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis).

There is a case where HSE (Human Spongiform Encephalitis or Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease) was passed from generation to generation and was endemic in the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea because they had a tradition of eating the brains of their deceased relatives. They called the disease Kuru, and since the prion affects the brain it kept being passed down. The disease was wiped out when they were convinced to stop eating brains.

The argument here is that eating BRAINS and spinal tissue is bad, since that is where the SSE/BSE/HSE prion is located. Normal tissue is fine. The problem was that butchers would blend all the brain issue in with the normal scrap meat when making feed for cows, contaminating all the tissue. This is why eating cows with BSE is dangerous as well because if the spine or head is cracked the prion can leak out onto normal meat.

Anyways, the lesson here is that when it comes to eating meat, eating any animal with “mad cow” is a bad idea and that cannibalism does not cause disease by itself.

As for PETA making fake meat - I wonder what the anti-GMO veggie crowd is going to think. It MIGHT make meat eaters eat real meat, BUT OMG GMO SCIENCE IS THE DEVIL!! They’re going to have some soul searching to do.

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If you define genetic engineering as manipulating the genome, I would argue that this will require extensive amounts of it. They aren’t just slapping chicken cells on a petri dish, they trying to make living slabs of meat - that’s not coded for in their current DNA. Even if gene splicing is not involved, the manipulation of the expression of certain genes over others chemically will certainly be necessary. This will be as much or more GMO than anything else on the market.

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How should Vegetarians see In-Vitro Meat?

Hmm, it is not my place to pretend I really know what I am talking about, but I have not come across anything that mentions DNA altering. I was simply mentioning something I had heard first hand form a scientist currently working on this project. I would love to know more tho.

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I haven’t seen exactly how they are doing it, I’m just assuming. At the very least there will definitely be hormones involved, contrary to what that article says. I know a bit about the science behind it having a B.S. in Microbiology, but I haven’t look directly at what they are doing here. But I’m sure it’s way more complicated than articles posted by the ALF would have you believe.

But, really, it depends on what you mean by “altering.” Is altering DNA only when you change the genome or is it when you control genetic expression using hormones? I can promise that, at the very least, the latter will be happening.

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Still an interesting topic to me

This amorphous blob of meat, it will have to react to the growth environment, void cellular waste, ward off microbial hitchhikers; does this mean evolution is a possibility?

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Isn’t reproduction required for evolution to take place? Is it evolution if genetic improvements are made in the lab?

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Now man plays God… unfortunately he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing. Will the super-mad-cow virus be created and kill us all? Story at 11.

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I think evolution could occur on the cellular level, dividing 1 to 2, 2 to 4, 4 to 8; the lab is still an environment for adaptation, even if it is controlled. Of course, Maestro is right, fake meat that has none of the requisite organs of a full fledged animal could be an ideal situation for opportunistic bacteria.

Watch your back Neo-Tokyo:
The plot line in Akira was similar, runaway evolution in lower life form.

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