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Welcome to cultured meat – not pigs reading Proust but a viable alternative to slaughter

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Texture is the problem with lab-grown meat, same as with the imitation "meat" in things like the impossible burger. Compared with the sad slabs of cardboard you get in a maccas or burger king you might be able to say the imitation is similar, but the moment you compare to a real, decent burger, or a decent steak, there's just no competition.

The difference is, the plant based stuff can't really solve the problem; plant matter and plant fats have a distinct texture and taste that can't be disguised completely. The cultured meat stuff can. They need to find some way to simulate muscle movement, some way to twitch the muscle fibres so that they gain the texture of meat, and introduce fat layers to round out the flavour profile. Until they do that, you're just getting beef-flavoured slurry. Once they figure it out, you're getting something indistinguishable from the real thing, because it essentially is the real thing.

And imagine the side-technologies that would come of it. If you perfect the ability to grow muscles in a vat, you can extend it to other parts of the body. Skin would be an obvious one.

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