While the rest of us were wasting our time sleeping or soaking in the spa, our ambitious food scientists have been steadily beavering away on the cultivation of chicken tissues. The goal is toward the mass production of chicken-like food. Poulterer and Kentucky Colonel Harlan Sanders will be transformed into tissue farmer Dr. Sanders in a lab coat and goggles.
The mass production of tissue cultivated meats won’t happen anytime soon. However, it is something that is being investigated by serious workers in the field.
I have to admit that my unquestioning embrace of Progress is weakening. Nonetheless, interesting things are happening. Consider the work of Vladimir Mironov, Director of the MUSC Bioprinting Center at the Medical School, University of South Carolina in Charleston. In an effort to get around the engineering problem relating to the construction of 3-D structured tissues, the idea of layering cells by ink-jet deposition was developed.
Who knows where this is going? Mironov’s technology will be very expensive initially, so its application to the production of $4.59 pork tenderloin sandwiches at the local diner is some distance into the future. More likely than not, it will be used for the cultivation of designer transplant organs.
Eventually, some company with deep pockets will attempt to market engineered meats. I would venture to say that the marketing problem is nearly as big as the technology challenge. Wide acceptance into the marketplace will take a while. I wonder how the first ad campaign will take shape? PETA approved Beef-Like Steak Food. Marbling and tenderizing is already engineered into the “cut”. Marketing may eventually be its undoing.
Synthetic chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and synthetic gravy. Genetically modified Roundup Ready corn on the cob boiled in reverse-osmosis purified water. HEPA filtered air in a kitchen cleaned with anti-microbial soaps. Mouths freshly gargled with hydrogen peroxide and bellies full of nutritional supplements. Lordy. Where are we going with this?
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Lamentations on Chemistry 
I can imagine a few positive outcomes such as allergen-free peanuts, milk and flour, but those are pretty small markets and I doubt the payback would be there until the technology is so advanced that a high-school student could do it.
A very large amount of agricultural products are inefficiently converted to chateaubriand, scrapples, and chicken fingers, requiring a correspondingly large amount of chemicals as fuel, fertilizer, peticides,…and the generation of such amounts of animal waste, flatulence,… The US would have a wildly different countryside in the absence of agriculture, perhaps for the better. As much as I enjoy seeing the change of the seasons in a farmer’s field, I think I would prefer that tallgrass prairie.
“Lordy. Where are we going with this?” I agree, but sadly I take this as a sign that we are getting old. I’m beginning to see that there will be changes in the future that I just don’t want to take on. Have me wander into the desert and let the vultures pick at my bones. (Or for the non-Al-Gore insipired future, set me on an icefloe and the polar bears can have a rare treat.)
I can’t wait. I want my own do-it-yourself kit. The niche food market will explode! Cultivate some do-do birds or polar bear thin film roll-ups.
No more guilt at my excursions into bear claw soup laced with wolf tongue (Joke, but the Chinese eat the stuff).
I agree with Craig completely. Except for the joke part. I want a club sandwich with lions, tigers, and bears oh my.
Hopefully I will someday be able to have a velicoraptor shish-ka-bob.
There could be quite a few new opportunities for sushi.
Maybe John’s right. Maybe I’m just getting old.
Dirty Jobs last evening contained the mass collection of turkey semen and mass insemination of female turkeys. It’s hard to imagine how stainless steel vats could compete with a barn, some sawdust, and 3000 toms being aspirated.
What a waste of time and money – they already have chicken flavored tofu.
I was in the poultry business for a short time as a junior in high school. It was an egg operation and my job was to pick eggs that rolled out from under the cages. We would then stack them on flats and take the stacks to the cooler where they would go on for cleaning and inspection. One sad day I knocked over and broke 36 dozen eggs in a fall from the cart.
I was one human in a long building with ca 65,000 smelly hens. It was my observation that every once in a while they would all stop clucking for a moment of eerie silence in the ammonia rich air. It was almost scary. What the hell did they know that I didn’t?
“What the hell did they know that I didn’t?”
That we’re all just chickens waiting to be plucked?