Robotic Bartenders?

July 25, 2008

I was going to write this week about Nobel Laureate Al Gore and his bold challenge in a recent speech that the U.S. should endeavor to generate 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2018. But I’ve decided to postpone that weighty discussion and instead examine another visionary proposal: robotic bartenders.

Unlikely as it may seem, there is a six degrees of separation connection between the two ideas. In addition to being the winner of the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election and a climate change crusader, Gore’s resume also includes occasional guest appearances as a talking-head-in-a-jar on the animated series Futurama — whose cast of characters also includes Bender, a hard-drinking automaton that has been known to close down a few 31st-century gin joints.

But I digress. If a robot can paint and weld in automobile plants, fly combat missions in Afghanistan and even vacuum the carpet in your living room, why shouldn’t it be able to mix at least a passable vodka martini?

Test Tube Burgers?

April 25, 2008

I’ll be honest. One of the big reasons that I’m a former vegetarian is that, despite my nagging guilt about eating something with a disturbingly cute face and my concerns about the serious environmental problems caused by raising massive numbers of animals for food, I finally just got sick of a steady diet of tofu burgers. You can slather them in mustard, mayonnaise and/or barbecue sauce, top them with a big juicy slice of vine-ripened tomato, and wash them down with a sip of Fosters’ new environmentally-friendly lager, whose brewing process uses a microbial fuel-cell process to generate energy from the byproducts. But despite all that taste bud obfuscation, when it comes down to it, you’re still chewing on bean curd.

But at last, there may be a near-future solution for those of us who are reluctant carnivores. Instead of raising and slaughtering animals for their flesh, what if the muscle cells that make up meat were cultured and grown in big vats in laboratory-factories?

The idea has been around for quite a while. Back in the late 1980s, the late academic and futurist  Michael Hooker went around giving speeches in which he predicted that in vitro meat would be a staple of the 21st century. The actual science to support the notion came along a decade or so later, when Touro College bioengineer Morris Benjaminson and colleagues successfully took chunks of muscle tissue from a goldfish, immersed them in a vat of nutrient-rich liquid, and succeeded in growing miniature fish fillets. As this 2002 New Scientist article details, the Benjaminson and his research team actually went a bit further to test the artificial food’s palatability:

To get some idea whether the new muscle tissue would make acceptable food, they washed it and gave it a quick dip in olive oil flavoured with lemon, garlic and pepper. Then they fried it and showed it to colleagues from other departments. "We wanted to make sure it'd pass for something you could buy in the supermarket," he says. The results look promising, on the surface at least. "They said it looked like fish and smelled like fish, but they didn't go as far as tasting it," says Benjaminson.

Benjaminson envisioned in vitro meat as a potential food source for NASA astronauts on lengthy space voyages, but animal rights activists quickly glommed onto the concept as well. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has offered a $1 million reward to the first scientist who can develop a palatable synthetic meat and sell it to the public by 2012. As part of the contest, PETA proposes holding a taste test, using a cruelty-free fried chicken recipe. 

Others are proposing in vitro meat as the solution for feeding the world’s burgeoning population without further straining the environment. Norway recently hosted the first-ever In Vitro Meat Symposium, at which researchers released a European study projecting that synthetic meat could be produced for a little more than $5,000 a ton, a cost that would make it competitive with meat from animals. Along these lines, Dutch researchers are forging ahead with efforts to grow ersatz pork chops (here’s a Reuters article on that).

In this country, New Harvest, a nonprofit research organization, is working to fund research and development of meat substitutes. (Here’s New Harvest’s FAQ on in vitro meat.) New Harvest co-founder and director, Jason Matheny, thinks that manufactured meat could be in supermarkets within a decade. In an email, he argues that it will be vastly better for us, in a variety of ways:

Cultured meat has the potential to be healthier, safer, less polluting, and more humane than conventional meat. Fat content can be more easily controlled. The incidence of foodborne disease can be significantly reduced, thanks to strict quality control rules that are impossible to introduce in modern animal farms, slaughterhouses, or meat packing plants. Inedible animal structures (bones, respiratory system, digestive system, skin, and the nervous system) need not be grown. As a result, cultured meat production should be more efficient than conventional meat production in its use of energy, land, and water; and it should produce less waste. Since meat production is responsible for even more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector, it's critical that we develop a more efficient alternative.

Perhaps the biggest question: How eager will we all be to pick up a package of synthetic ground sirloin patties and throw them on the grill? Are we willing to eat something that was nurtured in a nutrient-rich solution, rather than on pasture grass? Are we willing to embrace and consume something unnatural, for the sake of the planet? Or does the very idea of synthetic food conjure up unappetizing memories of the late Charlton Heston revealing the actual ingredients of Soylent Green? Express your opinion below.

Should Humans Use Cloned Animals for Food?

January 11, 2008

You vegans out there probably don’t give a hill of beans about the Washington Post’s recent revelation that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is about to say that it’s OK for humans to eat meat and use dairy products from cloned animals. But the omnivorous masses, the ones who pick one fast-food joint over another because the patties are supposedly fresh rather than frozen, may get a little uneasy at the prospect of chomping into a double burger with cheese produced by somatic cell transfer, rather than the old fashioned way.

Scientists started cloning animals back in 1996, when Dolly the sheep was produced in Scotland. But for years, U.S. regulators were cautious about allowing clones to become part of the U.S. food supply. However, based a 2002 National Academy of Sciences report and additional findings from researchers in the U.S. and Japan in 2005, the FDA issued a draft risk assessment in 2006 that meat and milk from clones of adult cattle, pigs and goats, and their offspring are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals. But consumer and health activists remain unconvinced. In December 2007, the U.S. Senate passed an amendment to the 2007 farm bill by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., that would require more government study of clones’ safety, but it’s unclear whether that restriction will make it into the final bill. If it doesn’t, the FDA’s approval would mean that meat and milk from the offspring of clones — and eventually, as the cost of the technology drops, from clones themselves — could start appearing in supermarkets and on restaurant menus sometime in the near future.

Proponents of animal cloning see the brouhaha as an unnecessary one. "Thousands of data points, hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles and two reviews by the National Academies have all said the same thing," Mark Walton, president of ViaGen, an Austin, Texas-based animal cloning company, told the Post. "There is nothing left to review." David Faber, president of TransOva, an Iowa-based cloning outfit, insisted to the Des Moines Register that “there is no food safety issue with clones.” The Los Angeles Times actually went so far as to sponsor a taste test at an upscale L.A. eatery, in which six diners were asked to tell the difference between cloned and conventional beef. (They couldn’t.)

The rationale behind cloning cattle is that animals with the best genetic makeup to produce tasty meat or milk could be duplicated again and again. In theory, that ultimately would make the finest quality sirloin burgers or porterhouse steaks available cheaply to everyone.

Scientific American points out that the cattle industry has long employed a process called budding, in which the undifferentiated cells in a fertilized cow egg are separated, so that they grow into hundreds of artificially induced siblings (“natural clones,” as the magazine calls them).

None of this seems to have persuaded the public; a recent Pew poll found that six out of 10 Americans regarded the notion of eating cloned beef as, well, kind of icky. Consumers Union points out that many clones suffer from severe deformities, and those that survive often have weak immune systems and require large doses of antibiotics to survive. “At the very least, raising clones will necessitate greater use of antibiotics on food animals, worsening the existing problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can infect and sicken humans,” CU testified on behalf of proposed California legislation that would require special labeling identifying food that came from clones.

The Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in its public comments on the FDA’s draft risk assessment:

Animal cloning remains a technology in its early stages that still produces primarily debilitated and physiologically impaired animals. Regarding the relatively few animals that survive to adulthood and appear to be normal, there are sufficient differences between clones and non-clones to conclude that they are not normal, or at least not normal enough to conclude that subtle changes do not pose health risks. Although the possibility of such effects is not great, because milk and meat are so widely consumed in the United States, these deserve to be addressed experimentally in well-defined consumption and safety studies done in all species and breeds headed for the market on animals at the ages they are likely to be consumed.

So are you ready for a T-bone clone, or does the idea of “Frankenfood” gross you out? Express your opinion below.