Savages...

U.S. Aims to Curb Peril of Antibiotic Resistance

The Obama administration on Thursday announced measures to tackle the growing threat of antibiotic resistance, outlining a national strategy that includes incentives for the development of new drugs, tighter stewardship of existing ones, and improvements in tracking the use of antibiotics and the microbes that are resistant to them.

The actions are the first major White House effort to confront a public health crisis that takes at least 23,000 lives a year, and many experts were pleased that a president had finally focused on the issue. But some said the strategy fell short in not recommending tougher measures against the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture, which, they argue, is a big part of the problem.

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The government has estimated that more than 70 percent of antibiotics in the United States are given to animals, and scientists and industry are at odds over how much that use in industrial-scale farming contributes to problems in people. Companies use antibiotics to prevent sickness when animals are packed together in ways that breed infection. They also use them to make animals grow faster, though the Food and Drug Administration has taken steps that it says will stop that.

But many advocates and experts remain skeptical that the agency’s actions will be effective, because the rules contain what they say is a sizable loophole. Experts expressed disappointment that the White House was not calling on the F.D.A. to close it.

The section on agricultural use in the council’s report “sounds like it was written by someone from the meat industry,” said Dr. James Johnson, a professor of medicine and an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota. “Really disappointing. Actually, depressing.”

- More Here and Tyler comments:

This initiative — or its failure — is potentially a more important health issue than Obamacare, yet it will not receive 1/1000th of the attention.  Without reliable antibiotics, a lot of now-routine operations would become a kind of lottery.

Quote of the Day

“It’s pretty amazing to hold leather that no pig or cow died for,” says Lindy Fishburne, an officer of the Thiel Foundation. She is describing a slightly creepy “biofabricated” product made by a startup the foundation funded with a $350,000 donation. The company, named Modern Meadow, makes leather and, indeed, meat by taking skin or muscle samples from animals via biopsy and then growing them in vitro.

- Peter Thiel disagrees with you

Growing meat in Labs Could Cut Hunger, Tackle Climate Change & End Animal Slaughter ...

Last summer you unveiled the world's first lab-grown – or "in vitro" hamburger. How did it feel when you had it fried up, and you gave it to the first person to test? What if they had spat it out and said: "Ugh, this is awful"?
Well, yes. We'd selected food critics who said they wanted to taste synthetic meat at some point. But still, they are food critics, so they have to live up to their own standards. So, it was a nerve-racking moment. I felt they were pretty polite.

It's a paradox, isn't it? When I said to my sister: "I am going to interview a scientist who's created artificial meat," she went: "Ugh". And I said: "Yeah, because slaughtering animals to eat sounds so much more appetising."
Exactly. Part of the process is that we are thinking more and more about what meat is. If something comes out of the laboratory and you analyse it under the microscope and it's exactly the same, why wouldn't we consider it just as meat?

Could it be that people think – because you haven't bashed it over the head and slit its throat – that it can't have that same degree of deliciousness?
Right. People find it hard to think about these terms in the absence of any real alternative. I think [lab-grown meat] will change our attitude to animal welfare. Those issues are there today but we ignore them because we don't have an alternative. If we had an alternative, we could no longer ignore them. It will change our whole attitude towards meat, I think.

So do you think there is as much of a philosophical hurdle to overcome as a technological one?
Absolutely. We actually have philosophers on our team. You have to. If nobody wants to accept it, and nobody wants to eat it, then what's the point?

It was unveiled at the press conference that your anonymous donor was Sergey Brin. How did he get involved?
He approached me. Well, his investment company approached me. They identified this as a programme that they wanted to support – the idea of culturing beef. Mostly, from an animal-welfare perspective. That was the personal motivation to do this. Then they looked around the world for who is doing this, and they approached a couple of people including me.

- Interview with Professor Mark Post

Synthetic Meat Made From Stem Cells

From Regenerative Medicine To Food On The Table

Inspired by the way current research labs go about their stem cell work, van der Weele and Tramper devised a manufacturing process that starts with a vial of cells taken from a cell bank and ends with a pressed cake of minced meat.

- More Here

Wisdom Of The Week

I always had great respect for Peter Thiel; this week, I realized Thiel Foundation is doing some amazing stuff on the animal rights front. Thiel Foundation via BreakoutLabs is investing in:

Modern Meadows:
Tissue engineering is a method of growing tissues that has been developed initially for medical applications. This emerging medical field weaves together several fields of science and engineering to make tissues and organs that can mimic, restore, maintain or improve body function.

Modern Meadow’s scientific team pioneered some of the technologies behind medical tissue engineering and invented a tissue engineering technique based on bioprinting, the 3D assembly of tissues driven by computer controlled processes.

We are now applying the latest advances in tissue engineering to culture leather and meat without requiring the raising, slaughtering and transporting animals. From a technical perspective, our approaches integrate innovations in cell culture, biofabrication and bioreactors.

We are working with leading artists, designers and professional chefs to make early samples of cultured leather and meat of the highest quality.

Hampton Creek Foods:
San Francisco-based Hampton Creek is one of those companies. It's trying to replace eggs with a plant-based substitute that's cheaper, but just as tasty and just as good for you. It's backed by Bill Gates, Peter Thiel (who co-founded PayPal, was an early investor in Facebook), and Khosla Ventures.

And here is the list of projects his foundation is backing.

Peter Thiel in his speech at Effective Altruism Summit 2013 gives some insights about his new book Zero to One: Notes on Start-ups, or How to Build the Future

Hampton Creek - Meet The Startup That's Going To Make Eggs (Yes, Eggs) Obsolete

San Francisco-based Hampton Creek is one of those companies. It's trying to replace eggs with a plant-based substitute that's cheaper, but just as tasty and just as good for you. It's backed by Bill Gates, Peter Thiel (who co-founded PayPal, was an early investor in Facebook), and Khosla Ventures.

As for why Silicon Valley investors are interested in Hampton Creek, Tetrick says, "they look at the inefficiency of [the egg industry], it's like, I'm investing in iPhone technology where I can monitor my heart rate, and these f--king eggs are coming from rusty cages with chickens shitting all over each other?"

He adds, "For some reason, innovation decided to pass food along the side of the road. And yet there is this incredible innovation — at least in some part — in energy, in software, in mobile, across the board, and we're still getting our eggs from chickens crammed in rusty cages? Savvy investors like Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, and Vinod Khosla look at this and they think it's f--king bizarre. They think it's antiquated 19th century technology for a world that requires more."

Hampton's next major product under development is going to be its real game changer. It is working on making an egg substitute that scrambles up just like normal eggs. It's working on the taste of the scrambled egg right now. "We're going to get there," says Tetrick.

- More Here

What I've Been Reading

The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health by John Durant. We all should be thankful for John Durant for writing this insightful book. I learned so much from this book, one of the best books of this year. It's not a diet book but its a lifestyle book - highly recommended !!

• Lots of other fields have something to offer. Geneticists are unlocking a wealth of statistical inferences about our ancestors. Primatologists teach us about other closely related species, such as chimpanzees and bonobos. And paleoanthropologists put all the pieces together, grounded in a theoreotical framework based on evolutionary biology. Combining these disciplines allows us to make an educated guess at what an ancestral human lifestyle might have looked like during the middle to late Paleolithic.
• Don't count calories; eat high-fat, moderate protein, low-carbohydrate diet.
• What you eat directly reflects on your dental hygiene. Look at your teeth and alter your diet accordingly.  
• The tight link between physical and spiritual purity led to the religious proverb “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” And it prescribes effective methods of disinfection, such as hand washing, bathing, sterilization by fire, boiling, soap, quarantine, hair removal, and even nail care. Follow that.
• In contrast, biohackers begin by acknowledging their own ignorance: How does the body work? The simple truth is that no one has a very precise idea. Not doctors, not molecular biologists, and not the average Joe. Rather than looking for the answer in a scientific journal, molecular biology textbook, or classroom (like tools would), biohackers get their hands dirty. They, too, follow the Hands-On Imperative. Biohackers experiment on themselves: trying new foods, removing others, and tracking how their body responds. This trial-and-error approach has a number of virtues: it’s fast and cheap; the results are customized to unique persons or circumstances; and it doesn’t require a PhD in molecular biology. Biohackers also understand that “Perfect is the enemy of the good.”
• Two of the most well-known factors that influence feeling energetic have nothing to do with energy intake: the perception of a serious threat causes the release of adrenaline, and morning sunlight causes us to wake up.
• Red meat from grass fed animal is healthy. At the same time, there are plausible ways in which eating red meat might be unhealthy. Insufficient cooking might not kill all viruses, parasites, or bacteria. It’s also probably not a good idea to cook meat at extremely high heat, as charred meat has many toxins. But there’s good reason to be skeptical that red meat— the flesh of adult mammals— is inherently unhealthy.
• What to eat: Mimic a hunter-gatherer (or herder) diet. 
• How to eat: Follow ancient culinary traditions. When dealing in proverbs and old wives’ tales, it can be hard to separate superstition from science, so it’s a good idea to look for traditions that are old (persistent), widespread (pervasive), and originated in multiple cultures (profitable).
• What not to eat: Avoid industrial foods (meat, processed, microwavable etc), sugars, and seeds. 
• Make it meaningful: Experiment, customize, enjoy.
• The most healthful plants are green leafy vegetables and seaweeds, fruits and berries, and roots and tubers (in contrast to grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds). For most people, roots and tubers are a good source of “safe starches” or “safe sugars”— safe because of the low levels of problematic antinutrients. These include sweet potato, potato, yam, taro, carrots, parsnips, rutabaga, beets, onions, and squash. Another good source of nontoxic starch is white rice.
• Dairy is one of those areas where personal experimentation is required— exclude it entirely for a time, then add it back in and see how you feel. Many people seem to do just fine with full-fat or fermented dairy, including real butter (very popular), heavy cream, sour cream, cheese, and yogurt. It’s best to avoid low-fat, ultra-pasteurized dairy entirely.
• Humans have co-evolved with the bacteria in our gut since long before we were human, and fermentation simply externalizes that synergistic relationship.
• Slow cooking is one of the oldest methods of cooking. A mix between steaming and baking, it relies on indirect, low heat for a long period of time. Hunter-gatherers often used simple earthen ovens: dig a fire pit, light a fire, let it go out, bury the embers along with the food, and dig it up hours later, ready to eat. Get a slow-cooker.
• Traditional animal fats include tallow (beef fat), lard (pork fat), butter, and ghee (clarified butter). Healthy plant oils include coconut oil and olive oil. Generally, tropical plants provide the healthiest oils. Choose cooking fats and oils that are low in polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs). Avoid industrial vegetable oils, such as canola oil or soybean oil. try butter made from the milk of grass-fed cows. Grass-fed butter is a rich source of vitamin A, a healthy fat called CLA (conjugated linoleic acid), and vitamin K2. Many grocery stores now carry Kerrygold, an authentic Irish grass-fed butter.
• The different colors in plants indicate different chemical compounds, and each provides a different set of antioxidants and nutrients. Eating a variety of colors is a good way to eat a variety of micronutrients.
• According to the Talmud, “An egg is superior to the same quantity of any other kind of food.” People who order egg-white-only omelets are missing out on the most nutritious part of the egg: the yolk. Dr. Chris Masterjohn points out that of all the nutrients in an egg, the yolk contains 100% of the fat-soluble vitamins (A, E, D, and K), essential fatty acids DHA and AA, and carotenoids.
• They are a rich source of omega-3 fatty acids, as well as vitamin D, calcium, and vitamin B12. Whether cooked, cured, or canned, whole fish are an under-appreciated way to eat nose to tail, getting the skin, bones, and many of the organs.
• Eat Seaweed - Seaweed typically contains iodine, vitamin B12 (rare among non-animal foods), and large amounts of protein— making sea vegetables particularly popular among vegans.
• Despite all the hysteria over the sodium added to industrial food, there is only meager evidence that low-salt diets significantly reduce blood pressure, heart attacks, or strokes. If you generally avoid industrial foods, then your own sense of taste should be a reliable guide to salt intake.
• The seeds of cereal grains contain toxic proteins. Many of these toxic proteins are intended to make it difficult for a grazing mammal to digest the seed. From a seed’s perspective, it doesn’t “want” to get digested— it wants to make a new plant. The goal is to exit a mammal’s digestive tract still intact, dispersed and covered in the manure that will fertilize the seed’s growth. Grains that contain the heavily toxic bran are described as “whole grains,” and are often mistakenly viewed as entirely healthy. For those who keep grains in their diet, sprouting, soaking, and fermentation are three traditional ways to make them less toxic. For a wonderful exploration of fermentation, read the fourth part of Cooked by Michael Pollan.
• Consumption of wheat has been associated with a vast number of chronic health conditions, including cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, and cancer. Corn contains many toxic proteins similar to those found in wheat and other cereal grains. Of all the cereal grains, white rice is the least toxic, largely consisting of pure carbohydrate. Therefore, depending on one’s level of carbohydrate intake, white rice is a good low-toxicity option.
• Avoid Legumes - Legumes are grain-like seeds. The most important legume in the industrial diet is the soybean, the fifth largest agricultural crop in the world. Other common legumes include peanuts, lentils, peas, alfalfa, and any variety of beans. Many seeds come in strong casings or shells, which is nature’s way of saying: “Stay out.” Of the “big eight” food allergies, half involve a seed or seed-like part of a plant: peanuts, soy, wheat, and tree nuts.
• For those getting started, the single best online resource is Marks DailyApple.com. Published by Mark Sisson, author of The Primal Blueprint, it has excellent introductory material on just about any health topic. For those with a need or desire to take a deeper dive into diet, I highly recommend Perfect Health Diet by Drs. Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminet PerfectHealthDiet.com). The best resource is PaleoHacks.com, founded by tech entrepreneur.
• Cook food that is distinctive to your lineage. Learn some family history. Dig up your great-grandmother’s cookbook or look up traditional recipes from your ethnic heritage. Learn how to cook one dish better than anyone else in the family. Find out how your ancestors died, and see if you can uncover any hereditary conditions. Get your genome sequenced. Do some ancestor worship. Fasting is a part of most religious traditions, so look up traditional forms of fasting in yours. Observe those holidays.
• Eat less frequently and less predictably than we currently eat.
• Fasting helps the body fight infection. One indication of this effect comes from the behavior of sick animals, including humans, who often lose their appetite until an illness has passed. Farm animals, pets, zoo animals, and wild animals often just stop eating altogether when facing an acute infection or a serious injury. The widespread nature of this phenomenon suggests it’s an adaptive response. Loss of appetite isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. The health benefits of fasting go beyond fighting infection; fasting is also one of the most promising areas of cancer research. Fasting alters the playing field by activating ancient starvation defenses in the cell. Fasting is a signal to the body that resources are scarce. Healthy, nonmalignant cells take the hint and stop dividing as often, focusing instead on cellular repair mechanisms that conserve resources. So even as chemo damages healthy cells, they are hard at work repairing chromosomal damage. But malignant cells don’t stop dividing; they’re “cancerous” because they refuse to do anything but grow and grow. In an era when potential blockbuster drugs get caught up in lengthy and expensive trials, fasting is free, entails no high-tech equipment, requires zero government approvals, and offers hope for many people who have nothing to lose. Fasting is also beneficial for metabolic health, protecting against heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.
• Breakfast is important to many people for the same reason that fasting is hard: they’re addicted to sugar. Smokers like a cigarette in the morning, too. Breakfast is a fix.
• CrossFit a new fitness movement that billed itself as the antithesis of big box gyms. But how do you train for everything? The answer, according to CrossFit, is a combination of three things: (1) high intensity interval training, (2) constant variation, and (3) functional movements. By the outfit’s own admission, these concepts had been borrowed from a wide variety of existing disciplines in order to deliver well-rounded athleticism.
• A common view is that the occasional vigorous exercise is a sufficient antidote to a sedentary lifestyle, the notion that a couple hours of cardio a week somehow counteracts days of sitting. But a number of studies suggest that sitting is unhealthful in its own right, independent of the occasional visit to the gym.
• According to bestselling author Nassim Taleb, “To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.” Standing and walking are exactly the sort of low-level movement missing from most people’s workday. Forget about calories and focus on accomplishment: don’t take life sitting down. Then, when the day is done, you’ve earned your rest.
• Barefoot Ted McDonald founded Luna Sandals, a company that produces comfortable and versatile sandals built with a traditional, minimalist design (LunaSandals.com). Many large shoe companies have jumped on the minimalist bandwagon— a welcome development.
• Sweat baths, tun down thermostat, work out outside. We try to reduce the sun to just so much vitamin D, as if those golden rays could somehow be captured in capsules of fish oil.
• Vegetarians have been resistant to financially supporting an alternative food system based on ethically raised meat. Since they ideologically oppose buying any type of meat, they refuse to buy ethically raised meat from entrepreneurs who are trying to create an alternative to the factory farm system and thereby alleviate the suffering of domesticated animals.
• If, say, 5% of the population is vegetarian, that means that the market for factory farmed meat is 5% smaller. To any of the big agribusinesses, that 5% hit isn’t going to put them out of business. They can further identify vegetarians as a consumer segment and then turn around and sell them Boca Burgers made with industrial soybeans. However, that same 5% would have a huge impact on the sales of entrepreneurial, ethical farms that are experimenting with alternative food systems. Talk to any entrepreneur about the importance of that first dollar of revenue, breaking even, and finally getting to cash flow positive— all are major milestones. That means in terms of “starting up” a more humane food system, one can have a far greater impact by contributing money to start-ups that are doing it right than by abstaining from buying products from established players that are doing it wrong. Here’s the kicker: once the big guys see that there’s money to be made by being ethical, they’ll get into the game themselves. But the very people who clamor the loudest about animal suffering won’t actually pay for meat that has been ethically slaughtered. If 5% of the population had been insisting on ethically raised meat for the last two decades, a lot more progress would have been made in satisfying that demand. The relatively tiny Jewish community has been willing to pay a small premium for kosher slaughter for millennia, and they’ve been getting kosher slaughter for millennia.
• My personal opposition to the worst aspects of factory farming isn’t motivated by feeling animals’ pain. Put a wounded animal directly in front of me and I feel its pain. Remove it from view and I sleep soundly. As Adam Smith pointed out long ago (in reference to an earthquake in China), humans have difficulty feeling the pain of other humans, much less animals. My opposition to the mistreatment of animals is honor-based. What we do to many factory farm animals is dishonorable in the same way that carelessly wounding an animal while hunting is dishonorable. In combat, respected adversaries have always merited a quick and painless death. There is every reason to extend that honor to the animals that give us our strength.
• Not all of these changes will be good ones— and those should be resisted. But without being too fatalistic, all prior growth revolutions— Paleolithic, Agricultural, Industrial— took place without planning or coordinated control. So far, the Digital Revolution is no different. The danger, of course, is that we engineer our way into disaster— but that’s why our design solutions should hew closely to those in the natural world. Nature must be the model.
•  The quest for a healthy human diet doesn’t end in the Paleolithic— but that’s the right place to start.

Modern Meadow Founder Andras Forgacs On How To Print Meat & Leather

Andras Forgacs is trying to grow meat. This is a concept he had to be talked into.

See, Forgacs and his father, Gabor, co-founded Organovo, which 3D-prints human tissue. And as people found out what the company did, they would often ask: If you can grow human body parts, can you also grow animal products like meat and leather? He thought they were crazy. Soon, however, he came around to it.

“This isn’t so crazy. What’s crazy is what we do today,” says Forgacs on the TEDGlobal 2013 stage. “We raise and slaughter billions of animals to make our hamburgers and our handbags.” According to Forgacs, each year we raise almost 60 billion land animals for meat and dairy goods. These animals occupy a third of Earth’s ice-free land, they drink 8% of global water, they create 18% of greenhouse gases and, because they live in such close quarters, they create a breeding ground for disease.

“Clearly, we cannot continue on this path which puts the environment and public health and food security at risk,” he says. ”Animal products are just collections of tissues. So what if instead of starting with animals, we started with cells.”

Thus was born Forgacs’ latest company, Modern Meadow. For its first product, they opted to start by printing leather; they see it as a “gateway material.” It’s two-dimensional, and made from mainly one type of cell. If cultured leather works, Forgacs says, he believes people will be open to meat made in the same way.

- More Here

Vegetarians Have A Moral Obligation To Eat IVF Meat

Julian Savulescu, the director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Ethics, said the details were irrelevant and urged vegetarians to embrace the biological breakthrough. “People who are vegetarian for moral reasons—the environment, the treatment of animals—have a moral obligation to eat this meat,” he told the BBC. “They need to do this because it will contribute to an ethical alternative to conventional meat.”

- More Here

Modern Meadow - Printing Hamburgers

There has been lot of good news on the IVF Meat front and now, it's "collaborating" with 3d printing !!

As its short-term goal, Modern Meadow will use bio-ink – a substance consisting of living cells – to print a mix of layers that, combined, create “a sliver of meat around two centimetres by one centimetre, and less than half a millimetre thick, which is edible.” The company acknowledges that there will be hurdles to overcome between the lab and the grocery store, and predicts that their first customers will probably include ethical vegetarians and “culinary early-adopter consumers,” which may be code for “avant-garde Manhattan/Brooklyn restaurateurs.” Eventually, it hopes to reach out to populations who avoid meat for religious reasons, as well as to those for whom safe meat production is limited.

Beyond Meat

I’ve never tasted anything as realistic as Beyond Meat. The chicken strips look, feel, and taste closer to real meat than any other food I’ve ever eaten. They’re more tender and moist than Quorn and Gardein, they’re not packed with sodium (like many of Morningstar’s products), and unlike Field Roast, they don’t taste grainy or vegetal.

“Our goal is to see that category redefined—instead of having it be called ‘meat,’ it would just be called ‘protein,’ whether it’s protein coming from a cow or chicken or from soy, pea, quinoa, or other plant-based sources,” says Ethan Brown, Beyond Meat’s founder. As the firm ramps up production, Brown expects to sell Beyond Meat for less than the price of real meat, too. 

Brown’s long-term goal is to offer a product that can satisfy the world’s growing, and largely unsustainable, demand for meat, especially in ballooning markets like India and China. His investors believe that if Beyond Meat realizes that goal, it can become an enormous business. “When I met them I was absolutely stunned by the magnitude of their vision and the science behind it,” Stone says. “I was expecting to meet with a bunch of hippies who were like, ‘Yeah man, save the animals, we’re gonna make a meat thing out of carrot dust.’ They’re approaching it with real science. When they told me their plan to be a player in the multibillion dollar meat industry, I was like, Are you kidding me, this is incredible!”

- More Here

IVF Meat Debate

Transhuman philosopher David Pearce and activist Jordi Casamitjana, why they are for or against in vitro meat - Here

Four Futures of Food - Imagine 2021

• Future #1 Growth:
   Hydrogen-based fuels ensure clean power and allow us to continue using existing infrastructure. The steady climb of food costs that gripped the previous decade reversed and prices fell. New, more convenient foods keep busy young people fed, but keep them out of the kitchen. And safety is not an issue for the elderly, with meals that self-heat when removed from the package. Others, though, choose to pull back from these strong global flows. They see the abundance of fresh, frequently local produce as a call to simplify.
• Future #2 Constraint:
  The global food web faces a number of potential major blows in the coming decade. Water shortages, oil scarcity, or, as in this scenario, the unexpected outbreak of zoonotic disease, could easily send the food web into chaos. In response, political actors of all sizes engage in the often-contentious process of designing regulations and agreements to curb the ef- fects of disruptions on the supply chain.
• Future #3 Collapse:
  While all of the scenarios in this briefing assume a certain amount of environmental instability, in this scenario, a widespread refusal to prepare for and adapt to environmental problems has lead to persistent stresses on land and water resources. Cereals that form the cornerstone of national food security strategies, animal feed, and processed foods become very expensive and are hoarded by nations, companies, and individuals. A third of all the crops grown in North America and Europe are severely compromised and then obliterated. And an extended fuel crisis makes it increasingly hard even for people with resources to cope by having foods shipped to them from elsewhere.
• Future #4 Transformation:
  ab grown, in-vitro meat has been approved for sale in the United States and parts of Asia and Latin America since the mid-2010s. In response, many of the commodity crops that had been used in meat production have been repurposed for more direct human consumption. The shift has slowed down the environmental costs of food production and has dramatically lowered hunger—but that’s just one of the factors disrupting global food trade.
  3-D food printers, which layer food and flavors in precise ways, have been commercialized for home use and are in one in ten kitchens in the developed world. In Africa and Latin America, community groups have begun investing in shared food printers. As a result, entrepreneurs all over the world have established businesses that sell downloadable recipes that work with 3-D printers for everything from snacks to entire meals.

- Four Futures of Food: Alternative Scenarios Briefing Report (via here)

Three Meals That Matter

IVF Hamburger By End Of 2012

Great news for animal morality (and I don't say hunger)... but I am pessimistic since if they fail to "deliver" in that cost vs taste battle then people will stigmatize it for a long time to come (via MR):

"Cultured or in-vitro meat may still be years away from our supermarkets, but scientists in The Netherlands say they will be able to grow a hamburger by the end of this year.

Professor Mark Post, who is refining the meat-making process at Maastricht University, says once perfected, the technology could slash the environmental footprint of growing food. He predicts in-vitro meat could reduce the requirement for livestock by a factor of one million."

Rest of IVF related stories here on this blog

Messianic Hopes and Politics in the Food Movement

"The ability to eat high-quality food is a luxury, and until that changes, it’s hard to believe that those of more modest financial means with families to feed will be persuaded to forego the convenience and price of, say, McDonald’s in favor of a healthier approach. The superiority of the good-food movement’s arguments is not self-evident when stacked against the realities of limited resources. Ethical and nutritional appeals alone are not enough to overcome the structural advantages of Big Food. For the movement to take the next step forward, it will have to find new and effective ways to reach people beyond the aisles of Whole Foods and bring them into the fold.

The U.S. food system is too global, too all-encompassing a network to be overhauled by one approach. It will take many incremental changes and varied strategies, and it will take politics. This will require playing politics the way it is typically played: with money, with lobbyists, with carefully disciplined strategies, and with targeted messages. An ability to live with compromises, and a realistic understanding of how inert something as institutionalized as food will be when it comes to actual change, needs to become part of the movement. It is encouraging that there have been recent signs of a move toward more concrete and broader political goals. In a New York Times op-ed piece in February 2009, Alice Waters proposed a significant expansion of the National School Lunch Program and called for tripling the program’s budget from $9 billion to $27 billion. Whether or not this particular initiative stands a chance of being realized, it is a step in the right direction.

Similarly, Michael Pollan, in an op-ed in the Times in September, suggested that health care reform could finally provide the food movement with an ally in its fight against intractable agribusinesses. Under present circumstances, health insurers benefit handsomely from our chronically unhealthy food system. “One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry,” Pollan writes. But should health care reform pass, he says, this equation may change in the food system’s favor: “When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system—everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches—will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it has never had before.”

Pollan’s idea strikes me as a perceptive, and more important, as a pragmatic idea. It’s a reminder of how shrewd a thinker he can be. Partnering with the much-vilified health insurance industry is the kind of political calculus that the movement will inevitably need to make. Alliances with less-than-appetizing interests are a necessary way forward. Progress may well mean sacrificing the movement’s pristine image. How the sausage gets made, after all, isn’t quite an organic process."

- More Here

To get up-to speed with the "definition" of the food problem, check out the following books: 

• The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
• In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan 
• Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes by Mark Bittman 
• The Man Who Fed the World: Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug and His Battle to End World Hunger by Leon Hesser
• The Boy Who Changed the World by Thomas Nelson
• The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer and Jim Manson

Of-course don't forget to support GM crops (sans that notorious patent restrictions) and when time comes, please embrace IVF meat. And most importantly learn about Norman Borlaugh and pay your gratitude to him for making a world better place for us or in other words, how he helped us (which includes you) forget hunger.
For those who are not "into" reading books (yes, people do proudly proclaim that without a hint of irony), then you can order a free (yes, "free") DVD on Norman Borlaugh - Freedom from famine. 

IVF Meat - The Cost vs Taste Hurdle

"Right now, the artificial meat consists of little more than muscle tissue grown from stem cells. An actual piece of meat is substantially more complex, as the muscle fibers have integrated into a coherent tissue and built up through use. Associated tissues, like blood and fat, also contribute to taste, appearance, and texture.

It might be possible to overcome these hurdles. Stem cells for blood and fat have been identified, and culturing them and getting them to differentiate into mature tissues is probably not much more complex than getting muscle fibers to grow in a dish. But this comes back to cost: getting any cells to grow into mature tissues is ferociously expensive, and adding additional cell types will increase the complexity and cost."


- More Here

What I've Been Reading

A Planet of Viruses by Carl Zimmer. There are very few science writers in the world who are capable of packing so much information, so fluently in less than 100 pages. There is no question, Carl Zimmer is one of the best of the best science writers in the world. Between, viruses are yet another reason to go vegetarian and to embrace the IVF meat in the future.  

• Rhino Virus: Common cold and there is no vaccine yet. Human rhino-viruses may help train our immune system not to overreact to minor triggers, instead directing their assaults to real threats. Perhaps we should not think of cold as ancient enemies but as a wise old tutors.
• Influenza Virus: Originated from Birds, they are very adaptive and hence evolves fast.Yet another reason to stop factory farming and even better reason to go vegetarian.
• Human Papillomavirus: Two-third of the HPV co-exists peacefully with their hosts (us) but they have the potential of transforming rabbits into jackpoles and men into trees. They cause cervical cancer.  Current HPV vaccine targets only 2 strains of the virus (which accounts for 70% of cervical cancers).
• Bacteriophages: A virus which makes bacteria it's host. Phages since they kill bacteria without harming humans, they are used to treat bacteria infections. A human friendly virus!!
• Marine Phages: Every liter of sea water contains around hundred billion viruses but only a minute fraction of them infect humans. Marine viruses are powerful because they are so infectious that invade a new microbe host ten trillion times a second, and every day they kill about half of all bacteria in world's ocean. In 200 liters of seawater, scientists typically find 5000 genetically distinct kinds of viruses. In a kilogram of marine sediment, there may be million kinds. Thanks to gene borrowing, viruses may be directly responsible for a lot of the world's oxygen. 
• Endogenous Retroviruses: Over millions of years, our genomes have picked up a vast amount of DNA from dead viruses. Each of us carry almost a hundred thousand fragments of endogenous retrovirus DNA in our genome, making up about 8 percent of our DNA. They are dangerous parasites but few of them are symbiotic as well. 
• Human Immunodeficiency Virus: There's good reason to worry about any HIV vaccine, even one that shows promise in small trials. That's because HIV is evolving in overdrive. HIV belongs to a group of viruses - including influenza - that are very sloppy in their replication. They create many mutants in very little time. These mutants provide the raw material for natural selection to act on, producing viruses that are better and better adapted. Within a single host, natural selection can improve the ability of viruses to escape detection of the immune system. 
• West Nile Virus: It's not clear how the virus survivesNorth American winters. It's possible that they survive in low levels among mosquitos in the south, where the winters aren't so harsh. It's also possible that mosquitos infect their own eggs with West Nile virus. When infected eggs hatch the next spring, the new generation is ready to start infecting the birds all over again. There is neither a vaccine to prevent West Nile virus nor there are any drugs to treat the infection. 
• Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome & Ebola: The virus started in Chinese bats. From bats to catlike mammal called civet and then to humans. SARS was a very young virus when scientists discovered it, and the speed at which it was discovered helped make it a relatively small outbreak. 
• Smallpox: In 2010, the WHO reopened the debate over whether to finally destroy the two remaining officially declared stocks smallpox in Russia and the United States. Today scientists know the full genetic sequence of the smallpox virus. And they have the technology necessary to synthesize the smallpox genome from scratch. 
• Viruses are not "living" beings: Viruses carry genes encoded either in DNA, or it's single-stranded version, RNA. For a number of reasons, RNA is an inherently more error-prone molecule to copy. Hence, RNA viruses like influenza and HIV, have smaller genomes than DNA viruses. Forced to carry tiny genomes, viruses could not make room for genes that did anything beyond make new viruses and help those viruses escape destruction. They could carry genes to let them eat. They could not turn raw ingredients into new genes and proteins on their own. They could not grow. They could not expel waste. They could not defend against hot and cold. They could not reproduce by splitting into two. All those nots added up to one great, devastating Not. Viruses were not alive. 

Check out the brilliant essay, Waiting For The Final Plague by Nathan Wolfe and his TED talk.

IVF Sausage in 6 Months!!

This is excellent news for now until the genesis of pure meat "revolutionaries":
This week, researchers met in Gothenburg, Sweden, to plot out a path towards meat without slaughter. The idea of pain-free meat has been bandied about in the past decade, but several false dawns later one fact remains unchanged. "No one has produced in vitro meat yet," says Julie Gold of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, who helped organise the meeting.

The first lab-grown sausage might be just six months away, though, according to Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands - a major pioneer and champion of the technology. Post has experimented mainly with pig cells and has recently developed a way to grow muscle under lab conditions - by feeding pig stem cells with horse fetal serum. He has produced muscle-like strips, each 2.5 centimetres long and 0.7 centimetres wide.

Researchers know very well that their work can be regarded as unnatural, and consequently struggle to attract funding. A notable exception is $1 million offered by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) for the first commercial synthetic meat. Welin points out that ironically, the livestock in vitro meat could replace is often kept in unnatural conditions and dosed with hormones or antibiotics.

Strengthening the moral case for synthetic meat is its low impact on the environment. Hanna Tuomisto at the University of Oxford estimated the resources needed to grow 1000 kilograms of lab meat by extrapolating from the demands on energy, water and land made by industrial-scale, cellular-based pharmaceuticals operations. She compared those results with the environmental costs of generating 1000 kilograms of beef, lamb, pork and poultry (see diagram). "The impacts are so much lower," she says. For instance, cultured meat will require 99 per cent less land than beef farming.