8 thoughts on “More Lab-Grown Meat”

  1. A lot of game doesn’t taste gamey and usually if it does, someone didn’t process the animal correctly. The revulsion the author has for meat is the same that many people have for game, it’s yucky to her imagination.

    It reminds me of the documentary, Demolition Man. In this documentary of the future, humans don’t have sex because it’s yucky.

  2. I don’t think I have a “gamey” taste receptor. My wife does, and it’s hard for me to figure what triggers it.

  3. If a vegetarian doesn’t file down their canine teeth, then they are hypocritical poseurs. If they do then they’re idiots.

  4. One of the food-related links Rand has provided over the years has changed my life to an extent. That was an article on the myth of negative health effects of monosodium glutemate (MSG). I haven’t consciously avoided it at all, but it has been winnowed out of our food chain as a market-driven response. I had never experienced any adverse effects from it. But I also had completely forgotten what it does for food. So I started using Accent once again. And it makes almost everything taste better, and not by a little bit – it is astonishing the improvement it makes.

    I even experimented with putting it in coffee. Rand hates the taste of coffee, but drinks it daily for its health benefits. He might try Accent. I can’t decide whether it is better or worse, because I love the taste of coffee. But it is so different that it is worth anyone sampling once, to see if they like it. It gets rid of 100% of the bitterness of coffee, and the closest thing I can come up with is that it makes it taste (remotely) like beef broth. It will take me a long time to decide whether I like it or not.

    I imagine that MSG would improve the lab grown meats, particularly beef and lamb. Chicken? Not sure about that.

    I have always wondered what the first guy to eat chicken said when asked what it tasted like…

    1. Well, that goes back to the chicken and egg problem. When did the red jungle foul really become a chicken? We were probably eating them before they were official chickens, because we figured out their wonderfully weird life cycle of laying massive numbers of eggs whenever they got too much food.

      In other chicken news, Rewinding the Clock on Chickens

      Just selecting for tamer jungle foul produces a quick set of beneficial changes, such as size, laying bigger eggs, and fearlessness.

      I saw an archaeology study last year that was looking at evidence of the earliest chicken domestication. They couldn’t find evidence that we were actually eating the chickens or their eggs, and this apparently went on for a really long time. We were just living side-by-side with them, as if they were pets. The researchers were stumped, wondering whether maybe we domesticated them for cock fighting.

      I figured that the researchers should sleep outside as family units in potentially hostile territory more often, just to see how they decide who stands watch all night against predators, snakes, bandits, thieves, and murderers. By day three they might think “Ya know, if we had a bunch of noisy chickens around they’d probably alert us to any approaching threat, and we could all sleep soundly.”

      1. Thanks for that link, George. Last year, my wife decided to keep (not raise) chickens. Being an engineer, she built an elaborate mobile chicken coupe/run. And we went and bought four nearly mature hens – two Rhode Island Reds (Rhoda and Big Red), and two Wyandottes (Wanda and Wendy). After a while, they all started laying eggs, and for a short time we had four a day coming in.

        Then Wendy, our psycho-chicken, went “broody.” This is when a hen’s hormones compel her to sit on a clutch of anything that looks like eggs until they hatch, even if it means starving to death. We’ve tried almost all of the on-line recommendations for breaking broodiness (and there are probably more chicken websites than pr0n websites these days). Wendy was crazy before she went broody, though, and broody is the chicken definition of crazy. It’s been seven days now, and she’s still at it. And they don’t lay eggs during broodiness. Wanda has stopped, as well. All in all, this has been the most interesting animal experience I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a bunch!

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