In praise of vat-grown meat

The world's first lab-grown hamburger to come out of Mark Post's lab was taste tested today, and by all accounts it wasn't too bad at all. Some key points from the CBC's story:

• "The first (lab-made) meat products are going to be very exclusive," said Isha Datar, director of New Harvest, an international nonprofit that promotes meat alternatives. "These burgers won't be in Happy Meals before someone rich and famous is eating them."
• Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, announced that he funded the 250,000-euro ($330,000) project, saying he was motivated by a concern for animal welfare.
• Scientists agreed that improving the flavor probably won't be hard.
• The animal rights group PETA has thrown its support behind the lab-meat initiative.

You couldn't find a more perfect combination of private entrepreneurialism, X-Prize-style achievement, social welfare, and status seeking. I love the idea of vat grown meat. Here's a piece I wrote about the prospect of vat-grown meat a year and a half ago when Post announced that his team was getting close to a viable product. It was originally published in the Ottawa Citizen:

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Meat without the murder

Monday, February 27, 2012

It's getting increasingly hard to find anything good to say about meat. It is expensive, swallowing huge tracts of land and tons of grain. It has a large carbon footprint. Finally, industrial meat production is hard on the animals, even before they're slaughtered. The operational slogan of PETA, the animal rights organization known for its radical politics and attention-grabbing stunts is "meat is murder." But you don't need to grapple with metaphysics of personhood to concede that for most people, eating animals involves a certain amount of deliberate denial about the circumstances under which meat is produced and how the animals are treated.

As things stand, we are largely divorced from the animal origins of our food - what we see in the supermarket are not animal parts, but flat white slabs of chicken, dark cubes of beef, rounded discs of lamb with convenient bone handles. The extreme end of this distancing is a proposal that was presented recently by André Ford, a student in the architecture department Royal College of Art in London. He has designed a sort of vertical biomechanical latticework into which lobotomized chickens could be plugged, with food, water and air delivered by a network of tubes, with excrement removed in the same manner.

If that sounds disturbingly like the Matrix for chickens, that's pretty much what Ford is proposing. But while this project is more shock art than industrial architecture, Ford makes an important philosophical point: "It is time we stopped using the term 'animal' when referring to the precursor of the meat that ends up on our plates. Animals are things we keep in our homes and watch on David Attenborough programs. 'Animals' bred for consumption are crops and agricultural products like any other."

If that strikes you as repulsive, perhaps that is because it forces us to confront the bad faith that permeates our debate over industrial meat production and consumption: If chickens are not "animals" (in the David Attenborough sense) then there is no real objection to something like Ford's proposal. But if they are animals, then perhaps we should stop eating them. At the very least, their capacity for fear, pain, and suffering is morally relevant to how we treat them.

But what if there was a technology that did away with all of these drawbacks, cutting through the moral bad faith while giving us a constant supply of low-cost, environmentally sustainable, and suffering-free meat products? That is, if we could grow meat in a vat, would there be any reasonable objection to eating it?

It's still a hypothetical question, but it won't be for long. At the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Vancouver last week, professor Mark Post of Maastricht University announced that his team is getting closer to a workable process for lab-grown meat. Their first successes were with pork, and by the end of this year they hope to to replicate the process with beef, giving them a product "that looks, feels and hopefully tastes like meat." Another scientist working on meat in a vat is Vladimir Mironov of the Medical University of South Carolina. Mironov envisions "football fieldsized buildings filled with large bioreactors, or bioreactors the size of a coffee machine in grocery stores" to produce this meat. "It will be functional, natural, designed food," he said. "How do you want it to taste? You want a little bit of fat, you want pork, you want lamb? We design exactly what you want. We can design texture."

The idea of custom-designed meat products opens up a whole new realm for interesting (and relatively harmless) experimentation and competition. You can imagine celebrity chefs designing their own special lines of meat textures and tastes; a well-designed "blend" could be sold for meatballs, or stews, or meat pies. Imagine the delights of a steak that was a mixture of lamb and venison, or - even better - polar bear and panda.

At the same time, invitro meat will suffer from all the drawbacks of everything else that is produced cheaply and for mass consumption - it will be "inauthentic." And so it will inevitably drive a more pernicious form of authenticity-mongering among people who will only eat meat grown "on the hoof." At the extreme, you can imagine private or invitation-only restaurants and supper-clubs opening up where certified on-the-hoof meat is provided to the privileged elite. The fact that it might be illegal would only add to the experience.

There is the ick factor, of course. Meat in a vat just sounds gross, even before you read that the Maastricht group's process requires stem cells from cows and calf serum as inputs. But we humans have a strong tendency to confuse esthetic reactions with moral judgments, and if you want to see something that is genuinely objectionable, as opposed to merely repellent, take a visit to your local abattoir.

Mironov's lab was shut down this month by the university over what it described as "human resources" issues. PETA has lobbied for him to continue his work, and is funding his research even though the U.S. government will not. This is telling, because PETA understands that the goal is not to micro-manage consumer preferences, it is to prevent harm to animals and to the environment. And if all of that is taken out of the equation, there's really not a lot to object to when it comes to eating meat.

Hipster chickens coming home to roost

(Image via) 

“It’s the stupid foodies. We’re just sick to death of it…. People don’t know what they’re doing." Chicken Run Rescue owner Mary Britton Clouse.

Some things are so predictable they are indistinguishable from a natural law. Night follows day, Leafs don't win the Cup, summertime construction on the streets of Montreal. And so it is with the rise in unwanted chickens being dropped off at animal shelters across North America.

It all began early in the previous decade, when forty years of cool-hunting was quickly supplanted by authenticity seeking, and food replaced fashion and music as the primary basis for urban one-upmanship. Organic turned to local became artisanal morphed into a full-blown back-to-the-19th-century self-sufficiency movement. Take a big helping of modern foodieism, fold in locavore-driven moralising, add a double dash of hipster status-seeking, and you got the urban chicken-farming movement. 

And now that the fad is getting a bit tired (the cool kids have moved on to shooting), the chickens are being abandoned by their owners. Chickens, it turns out, are a lot of work. They're also not cheap to own and operate. They are pretty mean animals. They stink and they are gross. And they can live for ten years or so, long long after they've stopped laying eggs. 

A lot of formerly eager chicken owners, having finally done the math, are dropping them off at the local humane society or animal rescue centre. (Why not just eat them, you ask? Good question.)

Anyway, it isn't like this wasn't completely predictable. In fact, the executive director of the Ottawa Humane Society made all of the obvious points three years ago the the fad first came to the nation's capital, in an interview with CBC Radio. It's a fad, he said. It's expensive. It's hard, and it's gross. He predicted that the chickens would be coming his way soon enough, and said "frankly, we don't need the work". 

You could argue, as my colleague David Reevely did at the time, that this is somewhat akin to the fire department objecting to new housing subdivisions: it is more of an argument for changing the funding model of the Humane Society than it is an argument for banning urban chickens. After all, he argued, we should expect the vast majority of urban chicken owners to be just as responsible as the vast majority of cat and dog owners. Why punish the many for the sins of the few?

Except the problem, as I see it, is that urban chickens are nothing like cat and dog ownership. Cats and dogs are domestic pets, while chickens are domesticated livestock. There is a large secondary market for abandoned cats and dogs, while the secondary market for urban chickens is likely to be non-existent (unless the market is the local food bank). But most importantly, unlike the urban chicken craze, cat and dog ownership is not a transient fad that will be supplanted by something even more authentic within a few years. 

Nor does it help matters to concede, as Barbara Cartwright, the CEO of the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies does, that "people who attempt to raise backyard chickens are driven by good intentions — to be more environmentally conscious, humane and to eat healthier." The road to Perverse Outcomeville is paved with these intentions, and it does no good to praise good intentions while ignoring the actual consequences. 

So let's just state it plainly: Urban chicken farming is no more environmentally conscious, no healthier, no cheaper, and no more economically worthwhile than regular chicken farming. And now that urban chickens are being abandoned by their owners like hamsters by five year-olds with ADD, the one selling point of the movement -- that it is more humane than factory farming -- is gone. 

Once we get clear on this truth: that it is consequences that matter, not intentions, we can turn our attention to the more broader problem of people wanting to bring animal husbandry back into our cities. There were sound reasons why we pushed this part of our economy out of the downtowns -- reasons based in public health, animal welfare, and simple economics -- and before we take our city centres back to the 19th century, we should at least make sure our decisions are based on something other than hipster fads wedded to dopey nostalgia. 

The church of organic

A number of people forwarded me an article by Stephanie Strom that was published in the New York Times over the weekend, about the ongoing battle between organic purists and the increasingly powerful forces of Big Organic. The main character in the story is a man named Michael J. Potter, the head of the independent organic foods producer and wholesaler Eden Foods. 

The spectre of Big Organic has been haunting the industry for most of the past decade, at least since Walmart started selling truckloads of the stuff eight years ago. The rise of industrial-scale organic is what spurred the locavore movement, just as the mass-marketing of local was the impetus for the artisanal craze. 

And so there's not much new to the story -- it's pretty much the boilerplate co-optation fable, where the energetic, ambitious, DIY upstarts have their scene taken over by corporate interests, who then sell a mass-marketed version to the masses, with all the value-laden authenticity bleached out of it. In this case, the word "organic" merely takes the place of "punk". Think of Eden Foods as Henry Rollins, while Wholesome & Hearty is more like Blink 182. 

At the core of the dispute here is the setting of standards for what constitutes organic food. The big food corporations like Heinz and Kellog have come to dominate the board that approves non-organic ingredients and additives and other inputs: "At first, the list was largely made up of things like baking soda, which is nonorganic but essential to making things like organic bread. Today, more than 250 nonorganic substances are on the list, up from 77 in 2002."

What is interesting about the debate as it plays out in this article is that the question of whether these various "synthetics" should be allowed or not is entirely political.  That is, Strom goes the entire article without ever confronting what should be the central issue, which is whether any of the controversial ingredients or inputs are healthy, or good for the environment, or contribute to the taste of the product. It's clearly seen as irrelevant to the debate: the term "sustainability" is never used in the article, which is sort of like writing about the Occupy movement withouth once using the term "inequality".

Instead, the argument over what is properly "organic" is over whether some ingredient meets some mythological standard of purity, fine-graining the ideology in the manner that was perfected by Marxists, and before them, the deeply religious. Indeed, substitute "kosher" for "organic" in this article and you get a fairly healthy sense of how the debate is playing out. The difference of course is that for orthopraxic religions like Judaism, the following of the rules for their own sake is the entire point. The rules surrounding organic are -- in theory anyway -- directed at a more practical end, like environmental sustainability or better health outcomes. 

That's why the last line of the piece is so perfect:

“People keep telling me that all the work we’re doing with organic farming and agriculture and processing, some of that could be deemed charitable work,” Michael Potter says. “Maybe we should start a church.”

I submit that he already has.

"Let me remind Mr. Potter that Adolf Hitler was ever so affectionate to his pet dog"

A month or so ago I wrote a column about the metaphysics of meat-eating and wondering how we, as a society, might react to the prospect of lab-grown meat products. I received a letter from an unhappy reader today:

Saving food from the refrigerator

Copyright jihyun ryou

Today most fridges are filled with stuff that would last just as long and probably would taste a lot better if it was never lost in the back of the fridge. They are expensive air conditioned parking lots for what Shay Salomon called "compost and condiments."

That's pretty much my fridge. Is there another way? In an article on TreeHugger that stops juuuust short of declaring war on refrigeration, Lloyd Alter promos the work of the Korean artist  Jihyun Ryou, who has some pretty cool, minimalist designs for devices aimed at replacing the role of the refrigerator. The key is to understand what food is, how it works, and the changes it undergoes as it ages. 

Yes, lines like ""we hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology, the refrigerator" grate; what's wrong with handing responsibility for things we care about off to technology? And it's also a bit annoying that it is only at the end that we are reminded that these designs "are artworks, not consumer products." That's part of a long-standing pattern in authenticity-mongering, of rejecting not just the technological, but the mass-produced or commonplace of any sort. It is generally obnoxious that the opposite of a crude technology has to be some haute-artisanal objet d'art.

But still. It's pretty cool.

Thanks to Jeffrey Mackie for the link.  

The McDonald's cheeseburger (story) that won't die

In the olden days, parents would tell stories of cannibalistic witches or pedophilic wolves in order to frighten their children into behaving. In our food-obsessed times, we torment them with tales of frankenfoods, meals from the undead: Cola drinks that will dissolve molars overnight; Chewing gum that will sit undigested for decades in your stomach; Twinkies that will be around when the Sun goes supernova.

Then there's the McDonald's cheeseburger, which is the Friday the 13th of fast-food frighteners: It simply won't die. According to popular legend, McDonald's cheeseburgers don't rot, go mouldy, or otherwise modulate through the usual stages of organic decay. And the reason, it is said, is that the McDonald's cheeseburger is not Real Food. Instead, it is a cheeseburger-shaped agglomeration of salts, preservatives, and other additives which are not of this earth, and not suitable for human consumption. 

The story has been around for ages. Morgan Spurlock used the undead hamburger as a prop in his 2004 movie SuperSize Me. In 2008, Karen Hanrahan blogged about how she uses a 14-year-old hamburger as a device for frightening parents away from fast food, and Artist Sally Davies photographed one every day for six months or so. And now, a Windsor, Ontario  nutritionist named Melanie Hesketh is getting attention for -- surprise -- using a non-decomposing McDonald's cheeseburger as a fright wig with which to terrify her kids:

Mould, maggots, fungi, bacteria — all have avoided the tempting meal that sits in plain view.

“Obviously it makes me wonder why we choose to eat food like this when even bacteria won’t eat it,” said Ms. Hesketh.

The meat patty has shrunk a bit, but it still looks edible and, with a faint but lingering greasy, leathery odour, she said it “still smells slightly like a burger . . . it hasn’t changed much.”

The article, by Windsor Star reporter Doug Schmidt, goes on to speculate about the salt content of the burger being the source of its longevity, and quotes at some length a chiropractor named Michelle Prince -- because chiropractors are well-known for their scientific judgment. “I think most people who see this are swayed,” said Ms. Prince. 

Well that settles it then, doesn't it?

Not quite. Last year, J. Kenji López-Alt -- the editor of the food website Serious Eats -- decided to actually test the whole cheeseburgers-last-forever-because-they-aren't-real hypthothesis, by looking at how home-made burgers of similar dimensions fared under similar conditions:

Well, well, well. Turns out that not only did the regular McDonald's burgers not rot, but the home-ground burgers did not rot either. Samples one through five had shrunk a bit (especially the beef patties), but they showed no signs of decomposition. What does this mean? It means that there's nothing that strange about a McDonald's burger not rotting. Any burger of the same shape will act the same way. The real question is, why?

Indeed, why? To find out, I'll leave you, dear reader, to do what Spurlock, Hanrahan, Davies, Hesketh, Prince, and Doug Schmidt did not do, and that is to read to the end of the piece. The answer might surprise you. But I promise, it's nothing to be frightened of.  

Gary Shteyngart on the jewish deli of the past and the authenticity hoax

Gary Shteyngart visits a Toronto deli:

The authentic Jewish deli, according to Gary Shteyngart, should be "greasy," inspiring "both excitement and revulsion." Caplansky's Delicatessen, where he's sitting at a corner table, devouring a breakfast omelette with salami, tomato and tongue, "is very smooth 'cause it's new." But he's not complaining: "There's all that Chagalllike mythologization of the past. It wasn't a great past. There's a reason why we're not living there now."

The end of artisanal and the rise of paleo-cuisine

The paleo-cuisine shtick has been brewing for a while, but with organic discredited, local passé, and artisanal just another word for "mass produced", authenticity hunters are increasingly flocking to the pre-modern past.

Berlin's new restaurant, "Sauvage", advertises a 'Real Food Revolution - Paleolithic cuisine!'. Forget bread, sugar, butter -- just fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, and herbs, with a bit of raw meat thrown in for fun. According to Sauvage's Boris Leite-Poç:

Many people think the Paleolithic diet is just some hipster trend, but it's a worldwide phenomenon, with an online community that spans the globe. The trend is probably strongest in the United States, where people who have had enough of the fast food way of life and generations of illness have taken it up.

 Right, it has nothing to do with some hipster trend and everything to do with health. The modern world, as everyone knows, poisons us from cradle to crave. That is why life expectency today is so short compared to pre-historic times. 

Carol Alt: "Raw saved my life"

Supermodel and hockey wife Carol Alt was in my office at the Ottawa Citizen today. She talked about how moving to a raw diet rescued her looks, skin, and hair and solved lots of other health issues.

Against Farmers' Markets

Via @withoutayard, a short, sharp, (and self-aware) takedown by Jay Rayner of the pretensions of the farmers' market:

We believe that, in spending ludicrous sums on this wonderful food, we are making a stand against The Man. We are turning our faces against the supermarkets, promoting true British agriculture, supporting a way of life that is in danger of being lost. There is a technical term for all this: bollocks.

More.