An Urban's Rural View

Hand it to Dutch scientist Mark Post. He not only created a "hamburger" in a laboratory. He got the media to give him the benefit of the doubt when he cooked and consumed the cultured meat.

According to the New York Times, one of his two fellow tasters said "the bite feels like a conventional hamburger" but the meat tasted like "an animal protein cake." If that sounds like a euphemism for "yuck," the journalistic accounts of the London tasting I read were too polite to say so.

Post even won plaudits from animal-rights advocate Peter Singer. "I haven't eaten meat for 40 years," he wrote in the Guardian, "but if in-vitro meat becomes commercially available, I will be pleased to try it." (He said his vegetarianism isn't an end in itself but a means to reducing suffering.)

Characters in science-fiction novels have long eaten laboratory-cultured meat, but until recently scientists who wanted to create it in real life had a hard time finding funding. Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, paid the $325,000 that made Post's two-year project possible. Post said Brin "shares the same concerns about the sustainability of meat production and animal welfare."

At last report cattlemen aren't quaking in fear at the competitive threat from in-vitro beef. For as impressive as it is to take stem cells from a cow's shoulder muscle, multiply them in a nutrient solution and fry up the result before a crowd of reporters, it's not the same as making meat that anyone is going to regularly eat.

There's a limit to the market for hamburger at $30 a pound, which is what Post thinks his would cost if production can be commercially scaled. The market's especially limited when the meat tastes like "an animal protein cake." To break through the "yuck" barrier meat makers will have to engineer in a critical ingredient of the real item: fat.

Society is so obsessed with fat's faults that we tend to forget its benefits. Fat is a source of vitamins and fatty acids needed for health. It provides more energy than carbohydrates or protein. It leaves people feeling full, reducing the tendency to overeat. It enables the body to store surplus energy.

On top of all that, it makes food taste good.

To make up for the lack of it, Post's demonstration protein cake was cooked in what the Times called "copious amounts of butter." Post admitted the lack of fat was a problem: "We're working on that."

If and when he succeeds, it will be interesting to see whether Post's fellow Europeans will eat the stuff. If they won't touch genetically-engineered food, imagine what they'll think of nutritionally-multiplied stem cells.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urban.lehner@telventdtn.com

(CZ)

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