The notion of synthetic beef often conjures up images of Soylent Green with the question of what the hell do they put into this stuff. In the movie, "Soylent Green," the stuff they put in it was recycled humans but we have not reached that stage as yet.
The problem with cows is it takes a lot of vegetable food to make one. After the cow is big enough then we eat it so the inevitable question from the ecologists is why didn't you eat what the cow eats and leave the damn cow alone. There are tremendous savings from doing that in terms of growing enough food to keep everyone fed.
"Cattle are very inefficient animals in converting vegetable proteins into animal proteins. We lose actually a lot of food by giving it to animals as an intermediate," one of the team, Mark Post from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, told Dominique Schwartz at ABC News. "At an environmental scale in methane and other greenhouse gases exhaust, it is also for the environment not a very healthy system. I do think that in 20, 30 years from now, we will have a viable industry producing alternative beef."
- Science Alert: Cost of Lab-Grown Burger Patty Drops From $325,000 to $11.36
Note: the original article includes a picture of a burger but we're assuming you have already seen one.
Ed: is this another damn Coming of the Robots story?
Well, they're not just coming, they're already here and the syntho beef is as well. In fact, syntho beef has been around for years but it's still not at all cost-competive even after the astounding reduction in production costs already. A pound of lower fat hamburger at Wal-Mart is seven or eight dollars while the synthobeef is well over twice that but the brainiacs will overcome that aspect.
Note: my price on Wal-Mart burger may be off since I rarely buy meat but that has nothing to do with vegetarianism. That meat and potatoes food protocol just doesn't do it for me.
Using this type of logic, it won't be a matter of 'let them eat cake' but rather 'let them eat burgers' since there will a much better use of resources throughout the domesticated food chain and more people will get fed.
Ed: are you telling me we should all eat products synthesized from soy beans. The Jetsons future won't bring us bubble cars but at least it did bring us Tofu?
Try not to get so extreme or you'll blow a heart valve, Mac. Nothing is either / or about this and the discussion isn't about vegetarianism in general. The Rockhouse interest is strictly in terms of how will there be enough food to feed everyone in the world. Cows have no immediate plans to go extinct and will still be there too.
Ed: this will really make life a mess for the Bundy family since they raise cattle!
Maybe if the Bundy family hadn't been raping federal land to feed their cattle, there might be a little more sympathy.
Ed: the premise is the Bundy family would have never done that to the federal land if the use of resources throughout the food chain gets managed better?
Maybe I'll keep you around, Watson. I won't have to write anything because you're already there.
The problem with cows is it takes a lot of vegetable food to make one. After the cow is big enough then we eat it so the inevitable question from the ecologists is why didn't you eat what the cow eats and leave the damn cow alone. There are tremendous savings from doing that in terms of growing enough food to keep everyone fed.
"Cattle are very inefficient animals in converting vegetable proteins into animal proteins. We lose actually a lot of food by giving it to animals as an intermediate," one of the team, Mark Post from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, told Dominique Schwartz at ABC News. "At an environmental scale in methane and other greenhouse gases exhaust, it is also for the environment not a very healthy system. I do think that in 20, 30 years from now, we will have a viable industry producing alternative beef."
- Science Alert: Cost of Lab-Grown Burger Patty Drops From $325,000 to $11.36
Note: the original article includes a picture of a burger but we're assuming you have already seen one.
Ed: is this another damn Coming of the Robots story?
Well, they're not just coming, they're already here and the syntho beef is as well. In fact, syntho beef has been around for years but it's still not at all cost-competive even after the astounding reduction in production costs already. A pound of lower fat hamburger at Wal-Mart is seven or eight dollars while the synthobeef is well over twice that but the brainiacs will overcome that aspect.
Note: my price on Wal-Mart burger may be off since I rarely buy meat but that has nothing to do with vegetarianism. That meat and potatoes food protocol just doesn't do it for me.
Using this type of logic, it won't be a matter of 'let them eat cake' but rather 'let them eat burgers' since there will a much better use of resources throughout the domesticated food chain and more people will get fed.
Ed: are you telling me we should all eat products synthesized from soy beans. The Jetsons future won't bring us bubble cars but at least it did bring us Tofu?
Try not to get so extreme or you'll blow a heart valve, Mac. Nothing is either / or about this and the discussion isn't about vegetarianism in general. The Rockhouse interest is strictly in terms of how will there be enough food to feed everyone in the world. Cows have no immediate plans to go extinct and will still be there too.
Ed: this will really make life a mess for the Bundy family since they raise cattle!
Maybe if the Bundy family hadn't been raping federal land to feed their cattle, there might be a little more sympathy.
Ed: the premise is the Bundy family would have never done that to the federal land if the use of resources throughout the food chain gets managed better?
Maybe I'll keep you around, Watson. I won't have to write anything because you're already there.
No comments:
Post a Comment