The Ongoing Quest for In Vitro Meat

For many years, people who think about these things have posited that lab grown meat could replace meat from animals as food, thus eliminating all of the animal cruelty and environmental issues associated with farming animals for meat. "Cultured meat" could be the choice of future carnivores.

However, making this meat is easier said than done. Growing muscle tissues in a laboratory setting is not an easy task, nor, it turns out, is it cheap. Right now, it requires many man hours and expensive supplies and equipment to grow mammalian cells in culture. Muscle cells, the kind that make up the animal meat we eat, also needs to be stretched or exercised in order to develop into tasty muscle. As an additional hurdle, many in vitro mammalian cell culture systems used by scientists use products made from farmed animals. If laboratory meat is going to be made in a way that does not harm animals, components like this are off the table.

Additionally, if people are to eat this in vitro meat, it would have to taste something like meat from animals, and would have to be comparably priced. That requires some advancements in the methods and technology currently used to grow tissue in culture. In an effort to promote innovation on this front, currently PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is offering one million dollars to anyone who can produce and affordable lab-grown replacement for chicken before June 30, 2012.

Recently, however, there has been some progress toward the production of cultured meat. Dutch scientists have created lab-grown meat from bovine stem cells harvested from a slaughterhouse. The "meat" consists individually grown sheets of muscle tissue, grown in culture using Velcro tabs to stretch the fibers so that they develop properly. Right now, the cost of a hypothetical burger made out of this meat, consisting of hundreds of thousands of sheets of muscle tissue, is estimated at $345,000. That's still a little steep for consumers, but the scientists say they plan to produce one as proof of principle within a year. Since the tissue is grown without a circulatory system, it lacks blood and is white in color, and it also lacks the associated fat of meat from an animal. Currently, the scientists say that improving the taste and color, possibly by adding laboratory-grown fat or blood, are goals that they are working towards.

Proponents say that this meat could replace or supplement modern factory farming as a more sustainable, cruelty-free meat product. However, challenges include making the meat palatable, ensuring that the product appears appetizing, and producing it at a cost where it can compete with farmed meat.

Until your laboratory-grown burger becomes available commercially, if you'd like an environmentally friendly, affordable, laboratory-grown protein, you'll have to be satisfied with mycoprotein (which, as an omnivore, I find quite tasty, even though it's not meat).

(via BoingBoing)

(Image: ...meat x 250, a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 image from x ray delta one's photostream)

Probiotics - How Do They Work?

(Image: Yogurt Parfait, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from mrdestructicity's photostream) 

In the past couple years, there has been a lot of debate (and at least one lawsuit) regarding the effectiveness of yogurt and other foods and supplements that contain "probiotics," or beneficial microorganisms. Various studies have linked the consumption of probiotics to various health benefits, including treatment of gastoenteritis and diarrhea, lowering cholesterol, improving immune function, and reducing inflammation, among other claims. However, most of these studies studied one particular strain of bacteria, so results may not be applicable to all probiotics, and many studies involving humans show correlation with positive health outcomes, but not causation. To date, little is known with scientific certainty about the effectiveness of probiotics, and even less about how they function in the human body.

A recent study has evidence that probiotics may function by altering the expression of genes in your gut bacteria, thereby altering their metabolism of the foods that are present in your gut. After feeding mouse and human subjects probiotics, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that, although the composition of gut bacteria were not altered, gene expression of the gut bacteria of the mice were. The effects of the resulting metabolic changes could be observed in the mice's urine.

This study sheds some light on a previously mysterious process. It seems that probiotics may have a real effect on the human digestive system. Hopefully further studies will be able to further elucidate the mechanism of the changes brought about by these organisms and help us to understand which strains may be beneficial and for what purpose.

(via BoingBoing)

Yeast Geneology

(Image: S cerevisiae under DIC microscopy, via Wikimedia Commons user Masur)

At the Smithsonian food blog, Food & Think, there is an interesting bit about the origin of lager yeast.

As you may know, most beer we drink is brewed with a species of yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Depending on the type of beer, a different strain of this yeast is used. For ales, brewers use a strain of ale yeast, which ferments more or less at normal room temperatures (15-20C) and is known as top-fermenting yeast. For a lager, one would use a lager yeast, which is a bottom fermenting yeast that functions at cooler temperatures (around 5C). Additionally, lager yeast is able to digest raffinose, a sugar present in wort (unfermented beer) that ale yeast cannot ferment. This means that lager yeast can contribute to a higher sugar-to-alcohol conversion and results in a less sweet beer.

Previously, scientists had compared the genomes of lager and ale yeast and found that lager yeast resulted from a cross between S. cerevisiae and another type of yeast. Recently, this type of yeast, which was previously undescribed, has been identified, as described in a recent paper in PNAS. Interestingly, this yeast is native to South America, suggesting that modern lagers (even European ones) owe many qualities to a species of New World yeast. Previous to the European exploration of the Americas, lagers in Europe may have been brewed with unhybridized S. cerevisiae, resulting in a different beverage than what we identify as lager beer today.

It seems that globalization hasn't been such bad news for beer, after all.

Food & Think

I recently discovered a really intelligent and interesting blog about food over at the Smithsonian Magazine website: Food & Think. It's the thinking person's food blog, full of information about the culture and history of food, with great tie-ins to current (non-food) events (see several posts relating to the recent hurricane situation in the Northeast). You should go check it out, right now!

Archaeology of Beer

 The Smithsonian Magazine website, there is a really interesting article about brewers trying to re-create fermented beverages as they might have been made thousands of years ago. (One familiar example of this is the Dogfish Head Brewery's Midas Touch, pictured above, a beer based on an Iron Age recipe including Muscat grapes, saffron, and honey.) Many brewers have enlisted the help of Patrick McGovern, an archaeologist from the University of Pennsylvania specializing in ancient libations. Go check out the article, and maybe it will inspire you to brew your own version of an ancient brew!

(Image:  Dogfish Head Midas Touch, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from add1sun's photostream)

Gin, Tonic, and Temperature

The weather is getting warmer. You'd like to sit outside in the sun, enjoying a cold beverage. However, while you're sipping your gin and tonic on the rocks, your ice is slowly melting. A drink without ice gets warm quickly, but a drink with ice becomes watered down while you're drinking. Oh cruel fate!

What's the solution? Science!

The good folks at Kaiser Penguin have tested (and graphed!) several possible solutions to the problem of how to make a temperature-controlled drink. So, go get your geek on and check out the way to make an optimized gin and tonic!

(via BoingBoing)
(Image:  Gin and Tonic, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from Global Jet's photostream)

The Perfect Bloody Mary

Here at Food/Science, we love us some brunch cocktails. Luckily, some folks with Ph.D.'s spent time and effort to determine, scientifically, the best way to make one such libation: that brunch classic, the Bloody Mary. At a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society, scientists presented research showing that, basically, it boils down to using fresh, quality ingredients and cheap vodka. Hooray for thriftiness, and science!

Personally, I like mine garnished to the hilt, with pickles and olives a must.

Check out the full story here, (via The Kitchn).

Also, as a bonus, why not pair your scientifically-proven Bloody Mary with a Mobius Bagel? So much geekery, in one brunch!

(also via The Kitchn)