Cloned food! We're dooooooooooooooooomed

[Outis the Unready]

Panic ensues as the USFDA says that cloned meat, which we effectively can't make yet, is safe to eat.

AH! We're doomed!

(should we tell people that most of their specialty fruit and veggies are clones?)

[ivor]

The FDA can clone my ass, then kiss it.    I'll even mark the spot so it doesn't take all day. 

[Outis the Unready]

The cloned food we're most likely to invent will be tissue culture food. Then crazy vegans can complain that nonvegans are evil for taking .1cc of cow flesh out of a cow to feed a million starving people!!!!

EVIL! We're doomed!

(Shhh. Yes, you and I know that without our intervention, cows would all die, but shhhhh.)

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Panic ensues as the USFDA says that cloned meat, which we effectively can't make yet, is safe to eat.

AH! We're doomed!

(should we tell people that most of their specialty fruit and veggies are clones?)

LOL! Humans have been cloning plants since they figured out how to grow them (cuttings are clones. Grafts are clones.    )

There are a huge number of SciFi stories about cloned meat-protein.  And vat-grown meat and such.

My favorite was by Ray Bradbury, and was really, REALLY short.  In the future-society, ALL foodstuffs were artificially grown in machines, using a DNA template, from the raw chemicals (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, with tiny amounts of trace elements).  The story was of one food-maker suing another food-maker over their hugely popular new meat-product (totally artificial, remember).  It seems that the template-DNA came from humans ...

[Griffin NoName]

Hikacking thread briefly, but it's the same sort of madness, there's an almighty row going on in the UK between the food inspectors and the food manufacturers. The food inspectors are insisting that traffic light indicators are put on food packages - red = dangerous orange = bit bad green = good relating to salt and fat content. The manufacturers are refusing, saying that no one will eat the foods with red indicators. Doh!

[Outis the Unready]

If you want to make people really crazy, tell them that irradiation would end the massive ecoli and lysteria outbreaks.

Then inform them that almost all food either goes through xray machines at a processing plant or when it is shipped.

Only refer to this as "irradiation" (which it is.)

Then say, if we're irradiating anyway, we might as well pump it up and save lives.

That will make certain people go nuts.

Actually, they may be too distracted by worrying about the cloned food we can't make.

With vat meat, with asimov, it was yeast products. If they didn't make wicked co2, we'd be doing it already.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I still don't get what the big deal with cloned cows/chicken/pigs/etc is.

Now, transgenic foods are a completely different thing that should be looked into more carefully, but a plain clone of a regular cow? meh

Perhaps this will mean that some nice steaks will be cheaper. 

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

If you want to make people really crazy, tell them that irradiation would end the massive ecoli and lysteria outbreaks.

Then inform them that almost all food either goes through xray machines at a processing plant or when it is shipped.

Only refer to this as "irradiation" (which it is.)

Then say, if we're irradiating anyway, we might as well pump it up and save lives.

That will make certain people go nuts.

Actually, they may be too distracted by worrying about the cloned food we can't make.

With vat meat, with asimov, it was yeast products. If they didn't make wicked co2, we'd be doing it already.

Oh, I much prefer the term "radiation".  <heh>

Years ago, my buddy was in the Army as a chemical officer. He was also responsible for regular drills with the CBR equipment, which included chemical drills, biological drills (basically like the chem ones) and radiation drills.  For the rad drills, obviously it wouldn't do to expose troops to radiation, so they used simulators.  These were little radio transmitters as a "radioactive source" and modified "Geiger counters" which were really radio receivers.  It worked VERY well, as the inverse-square law applies to electromagnetic radiation (radio waves) just as well as nuclear radiation.

(here's why I told this story) During a drill, another officer asked my buddy, "Are you using radiation for those drills?"

My buddy, honestly answered, "Yes. Yes we are" as he was thinking, of the radio-transmitters emission of electromagnetic radiation.  After a minute, he clarified what he meant, but for that minute, the other officer looked like he was going to panic ... the dreaded "R" word ...

Nearly as bad as the dreaded "N" as in Nuclear.   

But, you really want to shake up one of those anti-nuke zealots?  Have them point their radiation-detector at their home smoke-detector. (It usually contains a tiny bit of Californium.  Which has a 1/2 life of 10 years or so, which means that smoke-detectors more than 10 years old should be discarded...)

[Griffin NoName]

You mean it's not safe to eat smoke-detectors that are more than 10 years old ?

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

You mean it's not safe to eat smoke-detectors that are more than 10 years old ?

No, after 10 years, they only detect 1/2 as much smoke...


_____________________________________

When I mentioned this to my buddy, he laughed-- cloning animals is EXPENSIVE! And, letting them make baby animals is SO EASY.

For example, Dolly was the one successful cloned ovum out of literally 100's of failed ones.  And each one was very expensive to do.

He was also lamenting the animal-rights zealots making such a big to-do over the issue.  My comment was, "let'em rant all they want.  It's a project that will likely never come to pass in our lifetimes, and this lets the zealots tilt after a meaningless windmill."

[Griffin NoName]

You mean it's not safe to eat smoke-detectors that are more than 10 years old ?

No, after 10 years, they only detect 1/2 as much smoke...

[ivor]

I think the reason they want to clone is so economic.  Obviously they would own the genes they are cloning.  Then they will sue people who have similar genes in other products.  They don't even have to win the suit, they just have to bankrupt them.  I believe it's just another way for corporations to take over food production.

Corporations are using similar tactics with crops.  The genetically engineered crops end up contaminating neighboring fields and the owner gets sued into bankruptcy.

[Outis the Unready]

That's exactly it, it will never be cheaper to clone animals compared to breeding them.

However, if we could grow vat meat, using simple tissue culture techinques, it would vastly increse the consumer need for biodiversity as the types and varieties of meat would become fashionable. (here, have a caribou patty...prefer zebra? shark? people?)

To give you an idea, we would probably use a combination of vat grown mouse meat and whale or cod oil  for your average cat food....about 80% protein, 19% fat and 1% grain. 

My cats would love it.

Whole sale tissue culture meats would open up a whole new group of options....could you imagine, for example, if we could replicate blubber cells from whales, and make them grow at the speeds some of the lines we use for cancer cells do? No more foreign oil.

Oh wait, all the lab techs are in China or on loan from China with a few exceptions...what am I thinking!

That being said, we already can clone simple eggs fairly easily. If we had the technology for food grade cloning, we'd all be eating the dirt cheap caviar.

But it sure is fun to watch the windmill tipping!

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

That's exactly it, it will never be cheaper to clone animals compared to breeding them.

However, if we could grow vat meat, using simple tissue culture techinques, it would vastly increse the consumer need for biodiversity as the types and varieties of meat would become fashionable. (here, have a caribou patty...prefer zebra? shark? people?)

To give you an idea, we would probably use a combination of vat grown mouse meat and whale or cod oil  for your average cat food....about 80% protein, 19% fat and 1% grain. 

My cats would love it.

Whole sale tissue culture meats would open up a whole new group of options....could you imagine, for example, if we could replicate blubber cells from whales, and make them grow at the speeds some of the lines we use for cancer cells do? No more foreign oil.

Oh wait, all the lab techs are in China or on loan from China with a few exceptions...what am I thinking!

That being said, we already can clone simple eggs fairly easily. If we had the technology for food grade cloning, we'd all be eating the dirt cheap caviar.

But it sure is fun to watch the windmill tipping!

I agree with the vat-meat stuff, but cloning whole animals, even if there ARE financial incentives, is still 'way too expensive.*

The current technologies that would permit vat-protein are being used right now, however. A bio-dissolving mesh is used to grow human collagen, over which human skin in then grown. In this way, surgeons can fashion replacement ears, noses and other ascetic body-parts lost due to accident or disease.

Their next step, is growing whole organs-- they are starting out with a modest goal: the human bladder (actually pretty complex, but UBER-simple when compared to other organs).

As far as I know, no one has experimented with growing muscle tissue (meat) yet.  (Except of course, the now famous chicken-heart experiment. It was grown for several years, beating in a petri dish by some university or other-- couldn't find a link to it.)

As for growing other tissues, like blubber-- you'd need to duplicate the very complex digestive systems of the animal you're trying to grow tissue from.  Perhaps a series of artificial organs, in some sort of machine would work.  Likely, they'd start out with harvested ones ... which would, of course, lead to a whole 'nother series of protests about "animal abuse"

The problems of vat-grown tissues are quite complex- and we've only just began to scratch the surface of that technology.

Collagen tissue is pretty simple stuff.  Skin is not that much more complex.  Muscle is another step "up the chain".  And, so far as I know, ALL the collagen growth experiments use donated colligen-cells from cadavers to get the system started.



_________________________________
_{* Especially compared to the way cows are bread these days-- a single sample from a prize bull is divided and divided again.  The cows are given hormones to stimulate them into a sort of "super-heat".  A technician injects directly with a blunt syringe the small sample of bull-seed.  The cow becomes pregnant. No muss, no fuss, no risk of broken animal-legs. (but not much fun for the animals involved, either...*sigh*)} 

[ivor]

You could live on vat grown meat but is there a huge market for it? I suppose there is in some sort of Soylent Green universe.  I like the texture and variety of real meat.  I don't want some sort of synth-sausage on my grill.