Swedish Scientists Create Kill-Free Meat

Isn't this scary enough?

​Last week, reports New Scientist, a group of scientists met in Gotheberg, Sweden, to discuss their progress in synthesizing meat in the lab. Yes, we're talking petri pork.

(You can read the full article on New Scientist's website if you register, or find a summary in the UK Telegraph.)

Mark Post, a scientist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, reported that he's been able to grow one-inch strips of pork in his lab, feeding them horse fetal serum, and estimates that he's only six months away from being able to synthesize sausage.

There's one pressing problem: The meat doesn't sound very good.

Post makes sure his tissue strips receive daily exercise to give them the same constitution as real muscle. He anchors them onto Velcro before stretching the cells away from the surface. Even so, the strips looks anaemic and unappetising. "It's white because there's no blood in it, and very little myoglobin, the iron-bearing protein," he says. "We are looking at ways to build up the myoglobin content to give it colour."

Post doesn't even know how the fake/real pork tastes, since scientists are not allowed to eat meat contaminated with fetal serum. And as for the problem of killing fetuses to feed kill-free meat? An American researcher is working on a bacterial feed for in vitro muscle cells.

Ignoring the question of whether synthesized meat would technically be vegetarian or not, SFoodie, who counts honeycomb tripe and pig ear among our favorite animal bits, can't repress a shudder at the thought of giant factories of pale-pink muscle strips being stretched by mechanical arms and and injected with myoglobin and "flavoring essences" before being fed into the chopper. Is acknowledging humans' predatory natures so hard for us that we'd rather generate vats of pig cells than slaughter a pastured pig? If so, why not eat Boca Burgers? They're not bad, you know, covered over with big squirts of mustard and a mound of pickles.