Franken-Meat Is Here: Can Chicago Embrace It?
By JoshMogerman in News on Aug 11, 2013 9:00PM
A year ago, we wrote about the race to commercialize "Franken-meat"; flesh grown in a lab for human consumption.
The battle to get there first has hardly been won, but a researcher in the Netherlands moved things a bit closer this week when he served the first test tube beef patty.
People weren’t exactly raving about taste of Mark Post of Maastricht University’s $330,000 burger, but it nonetheless stood as the first in-vitro slider ever consumed.
That “cultured meat” stands anathema to this town’s culture and history.
Even four decades after the Union Stockyards closed, this town is still marked by the place where more than a billion critters were reduced to steaks and chops.
The Chicago River still runs backwards. Bubbly Creek still bubbles from the rotting offal at the bottom of the waterway. Kids are forced to read The Jungle.
We are still known as the “Hog Butcher to the World” even though our half-century run as the world’s biggest meatpacker has long passed, and we still eat a lot of meat here.
Lots and lots of meat.
Heck, hotdogs, gyros and Italian beef aren’t just iconic—they help define this town’s food identity, even if NEXT is serving vegan.
Compare that to the Bay Area, which is developing quite a Franken-flesh focus.
Google’s Sergey Brin underwrote Post’s big announcement and research this week.
A Stanford researcher, Mark Brown, is right behind them. Twitter’s founders have bought into a company trying to deal with chicken meat.
But they are pikers compared to San Francisco’s Rob Reinhart who wants to cut the meat completely (along with the fruits, vegetables, grains and the like) by developing a dry-mix diet called “Soylent” (thankfully, sans both the “green” and the people) more akin to the one-stop-slop they ate in “The Matrix.” .
Name aside, Reinhart’s target of “time poor urbanites” seems undercut by the full-on freakout for cro-nuts. It seems to us that if folks have time to wait in those lines, they probably are not going to be desperate to slurp their dinner, but what do we know?
While Soylent seems a step to far to us, Chicago shouldn’t be quick to reject the Bay Area’s fake meat.
Sergey, his Google glass, and pals at the Cultured Beef Project offer a pretty compelling explanation of why we need their fake meat in the video below.
And the litany of issues with the real meat industry—from drugs, to land-use, to climate impacts—are all too big to fend this stuff off.
It is still an open debate as to when lab lunches will be mass-produced, but make no mistake: it’s coming. And when it gets here, test-tube meat will be in the form of “processed meats” like hamburger and sausages.
Since we are already hearing about rats, horses and pig rectums being slid into the global food supply, then who knows what we are already eating in those dishes anyway.