Engineering Lifestyle
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a direct link if your more than a little curiousness to ,ale a difference here ...
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"Just exactly where are they going to get the raw materials to make this fake ...
Today’s special: 3-D printed meat
Leslie Langan
8/15/2012 7:17 PM EDT
Fire up the grill for the latest in 3-D printing. Modern Meadow, a Missouri-based start-up has secured backing from billionaire Peter Thiel’s philanthropic foundation to create printable meat.
“If you look at the resource intensity of everything that goes into a hamburger, it is an environmental train wreck,” said Modern Meadow co-founder Andras Forgacs in an interview with Mashable.
Specifically, it takes 6.7 pounds of grain, 52.8 gallons of water, 74.5 square feet of land, and 1,036 Btus of fossil fuel energy for feed production, according to a recent NPR study.
Take those numbers and multiply them by the 26.4 billion pounds of beef that was consumed in the US in 2010 and the environmental burden becomes catastrophic.
Despite these fact Americans, myself included, refuse to give up our love affair with our favorite meat.
Enter 3-D printing to save the day.
Modern Meadow hopes the same 3-D printing technology currently being used to create medical grade tissue can be used to provide food for your table, without the environmental impact.
Before this replica flesh appears in your local supermarket, however, it has a number of hurdles to jump.
The firm has written a submission to the Department of Agriculture’s small business grant program, noting that its short-term goal is to create a chunk of meat one inch long.
Aside from the technical production challenges, Modern Meadow will need to prove to the public that printed meat is a viable replacement for their Sunday roast. The success or failure of this, and any invention, rests with the consumer.
So, would you eat printed meat? Let us know in the comments below!
“If you look at the resource intensity of everything that goes into a hamburger, it is an environmental train wreck,” said Modern Meadow co-founder Andras Forgacs in an interview with Mashable.
Specifically, it takes 6.7 pounds of grain, 52.8 gallons of water, 74.5 square feet of land, and 1,036 Btus of fossil fuel energy for feed production, according to a recent NPR study.
Take those numbers and multiply them by the 26.4 billion pounds of beef that was consumed in the US in 2010 and the environmental burden becomes catastrophic.
Despite these fact Americans, myself included, refuse to give up our love affair with our favorite meat.
Enter 3-D printing to save the day.
Modern Meadow hopes the same 3-D printing technology currently being used to create medical grade tissue can be used to provide food for your table, without the environmental impact.
Before this replica flesh appears in your local supermarket, however, it has a number of hurdles to jump.
The firm has written a submission to the Department of Agriculture’s small business grant program, noting that its short-term goal is to create a chunk of meat one inch long.
Aside from the technical production challenges, Modern Meadow will need to prove to the public that printed meat is a viable replacement for their Sunday roast. The success or failure of this, and any invention, rests with the consumer.
So, would you eat printed meat? Let us know in the comments below!
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David Ashton
8/15/2012 9:45 PM EDT
Arthur C Clarke has (as usual) beaten them to it. In "3001" he describes a thing called an "Autochef" which produces meals on demand. However by then they've lost their taste for meat and regard Frank Poole (a rescued Astronaut from 2001) with some disdain when he remembers the meat of his previous life.
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NewYankEE
8/16/2012 8:20 AM EDT
And of course the food replicators had this beat on 60's Trek episodes where they skipped all the messy details and converted energy right to food matter of whatever choices desired (as long as the food data was in the computer's "tapes")...or maybe it was the Jetsons win where both fuel for transportation and food were all conveniently reduced to pills. Utopia if it were not for the push-button-itus maladies of that scene.
I will try printed meat when it can have green eggs printed along side it, sam I am.
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ReneCardenas
8/16/2012 11:53 AM EDT
Why stop at green eggs and ham, if the process can dial the color of programmable food, provided it keep same flavor ;-) the sky is the limit ... LoL
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Shinryuu
8/16/2012 1:42 PM EDT
next step is obviously digitizing people and printing them elsewhere, teleporter anyone?
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SylvieBarak
8/16/2012 5:47 PM EDT
Isn't that called cloning? ;)
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Sheetal.Pandey
8/17/2012 7:00 AM EDT
Agriculture is fun. And bringing in some new technology why not? After all we need food to survive.
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sviofs
8/17/2012 11:39 AM EDT
I personally think that sounds disgusting. Although, the meat I get at McDonald's isn't exactly kosher.
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WiLess
8/17/2012 6:18 PM EDT
Why don't they grow beluga caviar? I'd try that. Otherwise I'd rather be vegetarian.
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Duane Benson
8/20/2012 2:04 AM EDT
Something tells me that a variation on this theme is in our future whether we like the idea or not. Already we have "pink slime" which is meat that's been mechanically chewed off it's host and more or less recreated. We have water and flavoring being injected into meats and who knows what else.
If it is deemed safe for human consumption and is less expensive to produce, it will end ina a store near you.
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jnissen
8/20/2012 2:10 PM EDT
No thanks. Sounds disgusting to be be honest. The pink slime sounds appealing compared to this!
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prabhakar_deosthali
8/21/2012 4:27 AM EDT
Why not printable vegetables first?These would be more palatable than the idea of eating a printed meat.
Or for that matter we should first get habituated to this printed food concept by eating say printed bread or printed biscuits.
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didymus7
8/27/2012 7:43 AM EDT
I'd say no to 'printed vegetables', we have enough executive management already.
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Chas56
8/21/2012 7:35 AM EDT
No one has addressed the real problem inherent in this: our broken agriculture system. When it takes 8 grams of oil energy to produce 1g of food energy and we feed grain to cattle (and antibiotics to keep them healthy on an alien diet), we have got things severely wrong.
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Duane Benson
8/21/2012 3:59 PM EDT
Our food system may have problems, but I'd call it far from broken. All of that fuel is used on machinery and automation that allows greater quantities of food to be produced. It allows greater variety of food to be produced in various parts of the world, allowing fresh fruits and vegetables to be available for far more of the year than would otherwise be possible.
Yes, I know correlation isn't necessarily cause and a lot of other factors are at play, but there is a lot of correlation between mechanization of food production and a pretty dramatic increase in lifespan over the last 50 or so years.
I certainly think we've taken it too far in some areas. i.e., that a small amount of contaminated meat can lead to a recall of millions of pounds, and the super-sizing of fatty foods. But on balance we're healthier and live longer because of it.
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rroy22520
8/21/2012 9:58 AM EDT
Answering the immediate question, yes I would eat printed meat. It would probably have no grizzle, be intricately layered with fat, and hence taste as good as the particular source materials and structure design can allow. (Not going to discuss the source materials!)
The not so immediate question in my mind is what complex foods can be printed? Simple breads seem to be well handled at present, but much more interesting layered and decorated products could be made.
And my big gripe (since so many else are off topic) is we eat WAY TOO MUCH creating FAR TOO MUCH demand which breaks down food supply systems and creates a myriad of awful environmental issues.
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Isleguard1
8/21/2012 4:34 PM EDT
Sorry All. But the first thing that came to mind when I read this was "Soylent Green". I suspect that may be why it will not catch on quickly, if at all.
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jtdavies
8/24/2012 4:16 PM EDT
If you can print meat, couldn't you also print it pre-cooked?
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JetForMe
8/24/2012 7:32 PM EDT
Check your units. The stats shown in the infographic are for a 0.25-lb patty. Also, why didn't you use the 2011 number of 25.6 B lb of beef?
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WKetel
8/24/2012 9:12 PM EDT
THis discussion certainly gave all of the meat-haters a chance to rant a bit. So, would I eat printed meat? Of course, at least once. It might be good, and it might be healthy, and there does indeed exist a chance that it may be cheaper than regular meat. But I offer a point of concern, which is that there is a crowd around who won't even eat geneticly altered food, which is still the real thing, just a bit different. So you have an army of ignorant people who will be against the very idea before there are any published facts available.
Aside from all of that, I am certain that it will be much nicer to eat than much of the stuff in survival training. And once you have been through that you can eat anything.
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Haven Wildcat
9/21/2012 8:35 AM EDT
This article has me boiling, and it's not because I'm against fake meat. The main emphasis of the article seems to be whether folks will buy into the notion of fake meat, and I'm OK with asking that question. What's got me riled up is it reflects a too common mentality that is trying to demonize our food. The article uses loaded phrases like "environmental train wreck" and "catastrophic" (regarding environmental burden) to describe the meat production industry as it is today. Then, it takes some numbers and makes them sound terrible. I went through the math, and it's not terrible. For instance, (by their numbers) it takes about 3/4 the size of Wyoming to produce all the beef consumed in the United States. That's not terrible. BUT SO WHAT IF IT WAS TERRIBLE? Somehow in that whole discussion is the idea that a particular use of private land is morally wrong. Let's say I've got 11 acres (I do). What if I want to produce a few cows on it? Isn't that my prerogative? I drove through Wyoming recently. What else are they going to do with that land (beef is their largest agricultural product)? Growing crops on it isn't totally feasible. Plus, I think the folks in Wyoming know how best to use their land. To me it's morally wrong for some writer sitting at a cubicle somewhere to decide what should and shouldn't be done with someone else's land.
The next rub comes in the 6th paragraph where it implies all this will be done, "without the environmental impact". What!!!??? Just exactly where are they going to get the raw materials to make this fake meat? It's going to have to be grown or dug out of the ground somehow and transported from there to the factory. And where are they going to get the free energy that doesn't have any environmental impact? What are the waste products of this fake meat factory going to be and how are they going to deal with that?
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kjdsfkjdshfkdshfvc
12/5/2012 1:05 PM EST
"Just exactly where are they going to get the raw materials to make this fake meat?"
as Isleguard1 points out everyone loves printed SG after all why make your own when they do all the work for you ,great for all those low income people down the local vegas flood systems underground-tunnels this and every holiday season see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=grbSQ6O6kbs
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kjdsfkjdshfkdshfvc
12/5/2012 1:14 PM EST
a direct link if your more than a little curiousness to ,ale a difference here and everywhere like it in the world
time to pass the hat and give them something useful this year perhaps...before their cleared out as the PR ramp's up again EE
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/featured/sin-city-underground-tunnels/18773?image=16
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