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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Get ready for Food Vats! 

Continuing the "PARANOIA food" theme of recent posts, Karl Low of the Traitor Recycling Studio points out this story from the Canadian news magazine Macleans (warning: popups!):
While the test-tube pork chop is perhaps 15 years in the future, in vitro-processed meat for chicken nuggets, hot dogs, sausages or hamburgers is well within reach, says Jason Matheny, an agricultural policy scientist at the University of Maryland. "Most people don't care enough about where their meat comes from or how it's ultimately produced," he says. "What they want is something that is healthy, tastes good and is relatively cheap."

Matheny envisions meat factories housing 10,000-litre tanks with built-in stirrers. Muscle cells would likely have to be sprayed onto plastic sheets (they require something to latch onto, otherwise they will not multiply), which would then be lowered into so-called bioreactors filled with, perhaps, a mushroom- or soybean-based nutrient broth. There, the cells would feed, divide in two, and repeat the process until harvested.

Some of the most advanced work in this area is being conducted in the Netherlands by Henk Haagsman, professor of meat science at Utrecht University. [...] Haagsman wants to prove, within four years, that it is indeed possible to grow industrial quantities of porcine cells destined for our grocery shelves. Work started last April, with more than $6 million in funding provided by, among others, Holland's department of economic affairs and Dutch sausage maker Stegeman, a division of Chicago-based Sara Lee Corp. Any consumer reluctance, says Haagsman, can be overcome by a frank public airing of the issue's pros and cons. "There was a lot of opposition to genetically modified plant foods," he says. "Now, people just eat them."
Posted by: Allen Varney / 1:04 PM

Comments:
Ouch, another science topic I am way too familiar with within a week's time. Your choice in blog entries scares me, Allen ;-).

What Haagsman and colleagues have in mind is to produce a kind of muscle specific stem cell that rapidly reproduces. It grows on a sheet, but due to lack of blood vessels to distribute nutrients, it won't grow into a layer of more than a few cells thick. Scrape many of those unstructured layers off the sheets, press them into a ham can and you have your meat 'food vat style'. It won't have the structure of meat and you can bet it's going to need a good dose of flavoring, but hey, it's meat.

A few ideas for PARANOIA based on this:
* How many more 'natural foods' are actually made like this? A Sierra Clubber's debate on why that apple from the Outdoors can't possibly be real. It tastes wrong.
* Just like in soylent red, you can be sure there are no clone bits in there. Are you sure that flesh wound you took near the meat vats didn't leave behind any muscle tissue...?
* To grow a layer thicker than a few cells you need cancer-like cells. Do I need to detail the implications? Somehow the Black Pudding monster from good old D&D springs to mind.
* With this technology, in a time of scarcity, the clone tanks can be used as emergency food vats. Or vice versa. You were decanted when, citizen? What are you looking at - never seen a registered 'guacamole' mutant before?
* Docbots would probably love to get their hands on this technology.
* In the hands of Corpore Metal it could lead to a faction who feels that bots are too superior to get their hands dirty, but rather send out their home grown mindless meatbag minions to do the fighting. Wasn't there a CM cell hiding out in the sewers?
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : November 25, 2005 5:54 AM
 
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