Friday, June 23, 2006

Chicken Little

In his first novel - The Space Merchants - Frederick Pohl described a world in which everyone was fed from a giant featureless mass of throbbing flesh (tastes like chicken) from which chunks were sliced and packaged for shipping and consumption. The mass of living flesh was sardonically called "Chicken Little."

Now we have our own Chicken Little: the "meat sheet."

A single cell could theoretically produce enough meat to feed the world's population for a year. But the challenge lies in figuring out how to grow it on a large scale. Jason Matheny, a University of Maryland doctoral student and a director of New Harvest, a nonprofit organization that funds research on in vitro meat, believes the easiest way to create edible tissue is to grow "meat sheets," which are layers of animal muscle and fat cells stretched out over large flat sheets made of either edible or removable material. The meat can then be ground up or stacked or rolled to get a thicker cut.

"You'd need a bunch of industrial-size bioreactors," says Matheny. "One to produce the growth media, one to produce cells, and one that produces the meat sheets. The whole operation could be under one roof."

The advantage, he says, is you avoid the inefficiencies and bottlenecks of conventional meat production. No more feed grain production and processing, breeders, hatcheries, grow-out, slaughter or processing facilities.

"To produce the meat we eat now, 75 (percent) to 95 percent of what we feed an animal is lost because of metabolism and inedible structures like skeleton or neurological tissue," says Matheny. "With cultured meat, there's no body to support; you're only building the meat that eventually gets eaten."

6 comments:

C.M. Mayo said...

Well, I guess it's an idea whose time has come... um, bon appetit...

troutsky said...

For true efficiency, nothing beats the Soylent Green approach (ground up old people). Are we Brave enough for this New World?

helmut said...

How about meat sheet wraps? "Now get your meat on the outside and inside!"

MT said...

The right-to-lifers would never accept it--even if we were eating personalized meat sheets that had been cultured from a biopsy of your own muscle. A cell is a life. And if it's a cell from something with whiskers or feathers, you can expect PETA on your ass as well. Anyway, we're only a phylum away from doing this already with Quorn .

Anonymous said...

It should be noted Space Merchants was written in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth, and it's probably fair to say most of the novel's smart assed-ness probably came from him. Not that Pohl wasn't capable or willing, but the sardonic tone is Kornbluth's claim to fame, and few were better at it.

Just saying :)

helmut said...

Thanks, FCC. I omitted Kornbluth out of laziness, unfairly. And my reading of sci-fi is so scattered that I wouldn't have been able to tell whose voice is whose in the book.

Much appreciated.