Cultivating pork fat in bioreactors

[Free]

The title of this post sounds like a line from a science fiction novel, but I took it from the sub-headline of this article on a company that is cultivating, and I guess incubating meat in an extraordinary way.

This pig's bacon was delicious. But she’s alive and well.

Mission Barns is cultivating pork fat in bioreactors and turning it into meatballs and other products. Honestly, they're pretty darn good.

grist.org

I’m eating Dawn the Yorkshire pig and she’s quite tasty. But don’t worry. She’s doing perfectly fine, traipsing around a sanctuary in upstate New York. (Word is that she appreciates belly rubs and sunshine.) I’m in San Francisco, at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon not made of meat in the traditional sense but of plants mixed with “cultivated” pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barns got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitamins — essentially replicating the conditions in her body. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal’s fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami.

Meat that's not quite but sort of meat, without any kind of butchering. Is that kinda vegan?

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Is that kinda vegan?

The consensus is that lab grown meat is ethically vegan because no animals have to suffer. ....whether or not it's good for you is a totally different matter.

 

[Free]

The consensus is that lab grown meat is ethically vegan because no animals have to suffer.

You're still breeding and farming pigs for the source of the fat samples, which must involve some level of injury or physical discomfort for the animal. You're just not slaughtering them as an end result. So one might claim it's technically not "totally ethical."

I do like the term technically vegan, though...

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

You're still breeding and farming pigs for the source of the fat samples, which must involve some level of injury or physical discomfort for the animal. You're just not slaughtering them as an end result. So one might claim it's technically not "totally ethical."

I do like the term technically vegan, though...

Well... I assumed they'd eventually not have to keep the pigs around and just keep reproducing the samples they already took. This could be a wrong assumption. It's an interesting technology regardless.