My kitchen is the heart of my home. My friends all like to hang out in there instead of in my more spacious living room.
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My kitchen is the heart of my home. My friends all like to hang out in there instead of in my more spacious living room.
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Will we ever be able to create non-meat meat? Probably. Silicon Valley is having a go, using advanced technology to produce fake meat.
I'm no vegetarian or vegan. Sometimes I eat meat, sometimes a little fish. Perhaps that makes me a flexitarian.
When it comes to food, my choices are based on my personal taste, but also on my conscience, so if in some small way my choices can help prevent pollution, I'm all for it.
The concept of environmentally-friendly eating is fairly new. After a long period of fairly guilt-free food bingeing, we've started to realise the way we consume food has a deep and profound impact on the environment. This is especially true of modern, high-intensity farming methods, which use a lot of resources to deliver the final product.
We've reached a new understanding of how the resources we use to generate our food are not infinite.
Soy beans and products derived from it are now well-established in our everyday diet. Tofu is now generally accepted as a good substitute for meat, but for meat eaters it just doesn't have those characteristics they love.
The holy grail is a non-meat product that looks, feels and tastes just like meat.
Some high-tech companies in Silicon Valley are having a go. The basic problem they all face lies in the question: what makes meat taste like meat? Part of the answer, it seems, can be found in a protein called heme. “It is responsible for the characteristic taste and aroma of meat, it catalyses all the flavours when meat is cooked. Heme is abundant in animal muscle – and it's a basic building block of life in all organisms, including plants."
Impossible Food can now use this protein to give a vegetable-based burger the appearance and taste of a real meat patty. This may seem futuristic, but if you live in LA you can now order a meat-like takeaway burger that was produced by them.
Beyond Meat, on the other hand, is developing a growing list of meat-like products based on soy and pea protein. Meanwhile, Hampton Creek founder Josh Tetrick (link) is planning to create a whole range of high-tech, plant-based products that use fewer resources, cost less and are both healthier and tastier that traditional meat products.
Memphis Meat, a startup backed by none other than Bill Gates and Richard Branson, aim to develop “a way to produce real meat from animal cells, without the need to feed, breed and slaughter actual animals”
Will we ever be able to create non-meat meat? Probably. We already have products like quorn, a vegetable-based protein promoted as a meat substitute. Some concerns have been expressed about growing genetically-modified meat cells in a petri dish, but the ultimate question is whether the average consumer will ever go for something grown in a lab.
What's at stake here is more than just a desire to change our eating habits so we pollute less. The vegetarian/vegan market is expanding, and whoever first manages to produce an acceptable meat alternative will dominate the market.
In an effort to solve the problem of producing the increasing amounts of food we need to feed an ever-growing population, we have manipulated DNA. We have created new types of disease-resistant plants and new animal breeds. As we've now been finding out, these strategies have a downside.
Science stands as a ready tool to help combat modern difficulty. It'll be up to us whether or not we let the market create a Frankenstein's monster.
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