The taste of test tube meat (an interview with Oron Catts)

(Originally published ‘The taste of test tube meat’, http://www.sbs.com.au/blogarticle/107961/the-taste-of-test-tube-meat [04 June 2008]. I’m republishing it because SBS have taken it down and it gets a shout out in Catts, Oron & Zurr, Ionat. (2013). Disembodied Livestock: The Promise of a Semi-Living Utopia. Parallax. 19. 10.1080/13534645.2013.752062. I think it might have been the first published description of what lab grown meat tasted like(?). Link rot is bad if you’re a researcher. Apologies if you read this more than a decade ago.)

PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, recently offered a million dollar prize for growing a saleable quantity of artificial chicken in vitro, slabs of meat grown in a laboratory destined for human consumption. The aim: to produce a meat product identical to “real” chicken meat without
any involvement from a free-roaming chicken apart from the unwilling donation of a few starter cells.

The New York Times’ knee-jerk reaction was to practically republish the same article the last time something interesting in the world of lab-grown meats came around in 2006. Slate has two of the more insightful articles: one decrying the idea as a poorly conceived prize and economically unviable in the given time frame; the other strangely optimistic. Neither source investigated whether meat from a vat is a taste sensation.

Meat (or at least muscle tissue without veins or bone) has been grown in a lab with varying degrees of success for quite some time but never for commercial sale as food. The process boils down to harvesting and proliferating some original cells (embryonic myoblasts or adult skeletal muscle satellite cells) from the animal of choice, attaching them to a fabric-like scaffold to hold them together and then running a rich and juicy gravy of culture medium over them*. The fabric can be stretched so that the cells arrange into myotubes and then myofibres, making it loosely recognizable as the muscle that would otherwise grow on a more familiar animal.

On the ethical front, eating lab-grown flesh had been given the thumbs up a few years earlier by ethicist Peter Singer:

If, one day, cultured meat becomes an efficient way of producing food, we see no ethical objection to it. Granted the original cells will have come from an animal, but since the cells can continue to divide indefinitely, that one animal could, in theory, produce enough cells to supply the entire world with meat. No animal will suffer in order to provide you with your meal.**

Everything in Peter Singer’s statement is true, apart from the final sentence.

The culture medium that is used to grow artificial meat is made from fetal cattle. If you’re currently growing meat in a lab, you’re essentially making meat with other meat, reducing a larger animal into a miniscule sliver of flesh. You’ll need an obscene number of fetal cows to produce a saleable amount of meat because the process is about as efficient as raising a chicken, eating a single but perfectly-formed feather and then throwing the rest of the bird away.

If PETA (or Peter) had delved into the Journal of Tissue Engineering, I’m sure that they’d be mortified to know that hundreds (if not thousands) of litres of liquefied cow would be needed to produce a kilo of meat using current techniques. No vegetable or mineral replacement for the calf serum looks at all promising. The utopian vision of having a bread machine-sized bioreactor in every home, generating aged porterhouse on command, does not look as tempting to the vegan set if you have to pour a drum of calf extract into it to kick start the process. It doesn’t look hugely attractive to a committed carnivore either.

Obviously the current techniques aren’t aimed at the estimable vegan ethicist or even the most amoral bacontarian; they are harnessed for the more important task of growing human body parts for human transplantation, an ethical minefield when we start to weigh the value of human lives against those of animals. But beyond the question of ethics (and more relevant to this food blog), how does vat-grown meat taste? And why is taste so rarely central to these debates?

The most hopeful of the lab meat farmers namely, Jason Metheny from Soylent-Greenish-sounding New Harvest, hopes that the first few vat grown products to hit the shelves will be “traditionally processed meats as hamburger, sausage,chicken nuggets or fish sticks” which hardly sets the bar too high in terms of tastiness and suggests that the man has never eaten a truly great sausage nor considered that all these products already function to turn meat waste into tasty treats.

There are eight people on earth who have already eaten lab-grown flesh, and artist and tissue scientist Oron Catts at the University of Western Australia is one of those few. As part of the Tissue Culture and Art Project’s Disembodied Cuisine, he was part of the team that grew some frog meat on a slide, fried it up and ate it as a part of a “feast” to end their project into the uneasy relationship of meat and science. Following earlier successes in 2001 at growing lamb in a lab, Catts and his team grew coin-sized frog steak in 2003 at a cost of roughly $650 a gram, just millimeters thick.

“We grew the frog meat on a matrix which was like fabric and didn’t exercise the muscles,” Catts says. To grow like a living muscle, the matrix needs to be stretched. At the end of the two and a half month exhibition, the matrix had not fully broken down and remained quite intact.

They fried the thumbnails of frogmeat in garlic and honey with a dash of Calvados, a recipe which they named “a la Davis” in honour of a fellow bio-artist Joe Davis whose frog muscle-powered ornithopter failed to launch on ethical grounds, a process as cruel as marinating dead amphibian in honey and eating it.

The Lilliputian amphibian steaks were served with a selection of herbs, also lab-grown from plant tissue culture. Eight people sat down to this micro-degustation. The results were a success, at least in terms of replicating an uneasy relationship.

“Four people spat it out. I was very pleased”

As for the sensation of eating lab-grown meat: “It tasted like jelly on fabric.”

* – It is of course, much more complex than that to grow meat in a lab and it’s also not gravy, it’s liquified fetal cow parts. There are a few different tactics to growing muscular tissue. If you want a summary of growing meat in a laboratory, read “In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production” P.D. Edelman, M.Sc., D.C. MC Farland, Ph.D., V.A. Mironov, Ph.D., M.D., and J.G. Matheny, M.P.H., TISSUE ENGINEERING, Volume 11, Number 5/6, 2005. Then you can complain about the huge amount of science that I summarized into a single blithe paragraph.

** – Peter Singer and Jim Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat, text publishing, 2006, p.237

Footscray Market Opening Hours – Christmas 2015

I’ve now been blogging for 10 years. In that entire time the Footscray Market, one of Melbourne’s biggest wet markets, has never published their Christmas opening hours online. This post marks the 7th year of my Christmas vigil to celebrate it.

Here are the opening hours as published on a photocopy on the door:

DayHours
Tuesday, 22 December 20157:00AM-6:00PM
Wednesday, 23 December 20157:00AM-6:00PM
Thursday, 24 December 20157:00AM-6:00PM
Friday, 25 December 2015CLOSED
Saturday, 26 December 2015CLOSED
Sunday, 27 December 2015CLOSED
Monday, 28 December 2015CLOSED
Tuesday, 29 December 20157:00AM-4:00PM
Wednesday, 30 December 20157:00AM-4:00PM
Thursday, 31 December 20157:00AM-6:00PM
Friday, 1 January 2016CLOSED
Saturday, 2 January 20167:00AM-5:00PM

As for the regular Footscray Market trading hours, they are as follows:

Monday – Closed
Tuesday and Wednesday – 7:00am-4:00pm
Thursday – 7:00am-6:00pm
Friday – 7:00am-8:00pm
Saturday – 7:00am-4:00pm
Sunday – Closed

Update

It’s a Christmas miracle. The hours are now published on their website. Herein ends my vigil, unless they forget to update them next year.

Melbourne’s Oldest Restaurants

Melbourne’s oldest restaurant is Florentino (est.1928), if you count restaurants opened on the same site, serving the same cuisine under the same name. The oldest continuously running restaurant (as far as I could find) is Cuckoo Restaurant in Olinda (est.1958) which took over the site from Quamby (est.1914). Even though they’re important to local cuisine, I’m not counting pubs. The oldest is the Duke of Wellington (est.1853) but it’s unclear if it has had a kitchen for that long.

Can you make generalisations about who will last a quarter of a century in the restaurant business? Is there a recipe for success in Melbourne?

Name yourself Jim and serve any cuisine at all as Jim’s Greek Tavern, Jimmy Watson’s (Italian), Jim Wong (Chinese) all attest. As for location, get in on Lygon Street and serve affordable Italian food, or as close to Parliament House as possible. Public servants obviously like to eat.

As for what to serve, it doesn’t seem to matter a great deal. The quarter century industry survivors run the gamut from some the world’s finest dining to unmitigated shit. There’s not any clear pattern as to what price point or level of service guarantees longevity. What does guarantee it is that they’re almost all family-friendly. If you go to any of them for a weekend lunch, I’d bet there would be more than one high chair. This is a list of restaurants where people went as children and still return as adults.

Here’s the list from the map: all of Melbourne’s restaurants older than 25 years as of today. Huge thanks to eatnik, essjayeff, stickifingers, mysecondhelping and dananikanpour for all the suggestions.

I’m sure that there are a large number missing: almost every suburban fish and chip shop will be 25 years old by now. It also omits chain restaurants. The first McDonalds opened in Melbourne (Glen Waverly) in 1973 and by 1982, there were 33. In the same year, there were 35 Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. Burger King set foot in town in 1986. Also a word of caution about the opening years: they’re not necessarily exact. Quite a few were gleaned from reviews where they mention that a restaurant has “been open for more than 30 years” without mentioning an exact date.

If you know of any missing, comment below.

NameEstablishedCuisine
Abla's1979
Alasya Restaurant1978Lebanese
Bedi's Indian Restaurant1980Indian
Brunetti - Carlton1985Italian
Cafe Di Stasio1989Italian
Caffe e Cucina1988Italian
Casa Del Gelato1980Italian
Cuckoo Restaurant1958German
Donnini's Pasta1981Italian
Domenico's Pizza1968Italian
Dragon Boat Restaurant1986Chinese
Dunyazad Lebanese RestaurantLebanese
Flower Drum Restaurant1975Chinese
France-Soir1986French
Gaylord Indian Restaurant1985Indian
Golden Orchids Malaysian Restaurant1979Malaysian
Grossi Florentino1928Italian
Hanabishi Japanese Restaurant1988Japanese
Il Gambero1970Italian
Izakaya Chuji1989Japanese
Jim Wong Restaurant1968Chinese
Jimmy Watson's Wine Bar1935Italian
Jim's Greek Tavern1980Greek
Joe's GarageItalian
Kunis Japanese Restaurant1977Japanese
La Porchetta Carlton1985Italian
La Spaghettata Restaurant1984Italian
Lobster Cave1987Seafood
MariosItalian
Masani Italian Restaurant1984Italian
Paris Go BistroFrench
Patee Thai - Fitzroy1983Thai
Pellegrini's Espresso Bar1954Italian
Penang Coffee House1976Malaysian
Poon'sChinese
Ricardo's TrattoriaItalian
Shakahari Vegetarian Restaurant1972Vegetarian
Shark Fin Inn City1980Chinese
Spaghetti TreeItalian
Stokehouse1989Modern Australian
Stuzzichino Caffe Bar Spuntini1987Italian
Sukhothai Restaurant1989Thai
Supper Inn Chinese RestaurantChinese
Tandoori Den Camberwell1981Indian
Isthmus of Kra1989Thai
The Old Paper Shop DeliCaf‚
The Olive Tree1971Italian
The Waiters Club1947Italian
THY THY RestaurantVietnamese
TiamoItalian
Toto's Pizza House1961Italian
University Cafe1953Italian
Vlado's Charcoal Grill1964Steak
Warung Agus1989Indonesian
Geppetto Trattoria1981Italian
Eastern Bell1989Chinese

Your funds buy my food security.

The Jonas family grows pork that makes most other pork taste like that foamy pizza topping ham-substitute. If you’ve ever planned to cut down on how much meat you eat and then reward yourself with the best, this is it. You’ll remember where you were the first time that you ate it. Tammi Jonas is a friend, so that completely colours my view of their success and probably, the bacon.

But to paraphrase Amartya Sen, there’s no such thing as an apolitical food problem, and the problem that they’re solving agrees with my politics.

Maybe it’s me getting older, but I’ve started thinking more about food in the long term rather than day-to-day eating. Guaranteeing the future supply of the food that I want to eat is just as important as eating it in the short term. Part of that problem is how to put a relatively small amount of capital upfront to ensure that it happens. As much as I can do that at my local butchers or supermarket with what I buy in the short term, there is no transparency of supply.

So here’s a rare chance to support mine and your own food security. The Jonas’s have a crowdfunding campaign up at Pozible for a small-scale boning room and refrigeration. Funders are rewarded, quite literally, with pork.

I hope that it is the start of something much bigger.

Deactivating almonds: foodie backlash and the commitment to food

Overcommitted.

If you’ve been on Twitter over the past week in Australia, the slightly bewildering hashtag #activatedalmonds has been in ascendency. Pete Evans, chef, reality television judge and corporate spokesperson for Weight Watchers and Sumo Salad was eviscerated 140 characters at a time over a weekend newspaper fluff piece that documented his day of eating:

7am: Two glasses of alkalised water with apple cider vinegar, then a smoothie of alkalised water, organic spirulina, activated almonds, maca, blueberries, stevia, coconut keffir and two organic, free-range eggs.

8.30am: Sprouted millet, sorghum, chia and buckwheat bread with liver pate, avocado, cultured vegetables plus ginger and liquorice root tea.

12.30pm: Fresh fish, sauteed kale and broccoli, spinach and avocado salad, cultured vegies.

3pm: Activated almonds, coconut chips, cacao nibs, plus green tea.

6.30pm: Emu meatballs, sauteed vegetables, cultured vegetables plus a cup of ginger and liquorice root tea.

It’s the sort of empty listicle that a PR rep answers on behalf of the talent by email; a gaily-colored box of text to further brighten the weekend’s non-news. Something a bot might write on your behalf. They’re hardly the most hard-hitting or meme-worthy pieces of newsprint. Collective schadenfreude is Twitter’s raison d’etre and on this occasion, it could taste the slight alkalinity of blood. Why did this article in particular spawn a virulent response?

Search any newspaper website for the word “superfood” and you’ll get a similar bucket of nutritionism snakeoil. Pete alone is not spearheading an unforeseen interest in spirulina or the weird hubris of passing off food as nothing more than a nutrient delivery system.

Evan’s sample menu is aimed at any number of masters: his corporate sponsors, his reality television employers or the subscribers of the Sunday Age. It plays to the obsessions of desperate, rich dieters and smacks of a strange corporate fealty. It’s not the daily diet of a man who eats for the unambiguous pleasure of doing so which is what the public is lead to believe about chefs.

Celebrity chefs are strange advocates for good eating. When commercial imperative clashes with chef’s previous personal tastes and ethics, commerce wins every time. Here’s an ad for a cheap pilsener starring Ferran Adria. Here’s organic chicken aficionado Jamie Oliver making industrial chicken sandwiches for fun and profit. Pete’s transgressions aren’t noteworthy alongside his international counterparts.

There is something about the deep commitment to his routine that is unnerving. He didn’t crack at 3:00pm and eat a pastry from the catering table. No midnight drive-thru at KFC, eating powdered mash and gravy one-handed on the drive home, crying into the empty “Family” sized bucket on the couch. This was the first image that came into my head when I thought of Pete Evans’ diet. I barely know who the man is and expected the worst.

When we see the growing “backlash” against foodies, it seems to be against this deep commitment. I hate the term “foodie” because it has no real definition and seems to encapsulate any particular interest in food from haute cuisine to ethical eating. You can as easily be labelled a foodie if you can comfortably follow a cupcake recipe or you’ve taken a decade to write the world’s definitive history of cupcakes. There’s no shortage of nuanced nouns to pigeonhole people who eat. But foodie backlash it is, not gourmet backlash or glutton backlash; an all-encompassing counterattack on the commitment to food.

Instagramming your meal to death.

Steve Cumper, Australia’s best food blogging chef, recently noted the new zealotry for “real food”, the modern hipness for home-growing everything and being the person who shoots, skins (and photographs) the rabbit pre-terrine.

This real food is apparently unencumbered by status, it is home grown, it is foraged, its is hunted, it is gleaned, it is not, as Lance Armstrong put it, about the bike, or in this case, not about the Kodak moment.

This is honest, unprocessed, un-wanky, un-restauranty, un-gather your photographer mates around you to capture the ad hoc picnic in the dis-used cannery on the wharf kinda food. This is the kinda food that doesn’t need embellishments, is SO un-gourmet, shrugs off pretensions and artifice and reveals itself to a few hip but grounded uber-cools who operate high in the coolosphere where the air, I’m told, is crisper.

The trouble is: Why are people like me hearing about it all the time?

I feel smug when I publish what I grow in my garden, mostly because growing up outside the city, planting a vegetable garden was unremarkable and the least noteworthy of domestic pursuits. Hopping the back fence with a .22 to shoot dinner was just something that I thought most kids did even if it wasn’t the case. It didn’t seem to mark any deep commitment to food because it was common amongst neighbours.

And the Internet didn’t exist.

The backlash isn’t so much about the commitment but the conspicuousness of people’s commitment to food whether it is Pete Evan’s voluntary deprivation or hearing about real food all the time from Facebook updates and blow-by-blow degustations captured on Instagram. When I hear that people want out of Facebook, I wonder how boring their collected acquaintances are and I’m certain what they had for dinner is a large part of it. Where previous backlashes against foodies was more about the excesses of gourmets, it is now all-encompassing because our friends don’t know when to stop; to leave the unremarkable experiences unremarked and save the best for conversation.

The end of food reviewing

I’ve just read all 94 reviews of Melbourne restaurant Chin Chin on Urbanspoon. Few are longer than a hundred words and a handful of photos, so you don’t come away feeling any great sense of achievement. If I was to then describe Australian restaurant review bloggers in a single word, it would be “compliant”. In general, restaurateurs have nothing to fear from Australian food bloggers apart from the risk of a damp backside from the prodigious arse licking.

There aren’t many barbed tongues.

When I started blogging, it was very much about having and fostering an alternative voice. For me, an alternative to the lazy, parachute travel journalism deployed in Cambodia and the sincere but ill-informed backpacker blogs that hopped from the Killing Fields to orphanage visit to “happy” pizza. The difference between the blogs that I liked and the ones that I avoided (or mocked) marked the difference between food criticism and food reviewing. Food criticism links what happens on the plate to the rest of the world, or at least, to the rest of the writer’s world. Food reviews just look at the plate in front of them and then move onto the next one; an endless stream of disconnected meals to be consumed in any order.

In the age of ubiquitous social networks and historically high patronage of restaurants, one of your friends has already been to somewhere that you want to go and has probably pressed their Like button. Facebook and Twitter provide a vast architecture of personal recommendations that sate any possible peccadillo.

The presses can’t keep up with the constant online feed. By the time a food review hits the newspapers, I’ve seen it on Twitter, discussed it at work and generally had somebody that I know visit the restaurant in person. There is no longer a need for printed food reviews when the ambient noise about them is faster, more trustworthy and tailored to my tastes.

I imagine with the collapse of metropolitan dailies in Australia, we’re going to lose most, if not all food critics. I don’t imagine that any of the food liftouts from Australia’s newspapers are financially viable and who knows if Gina Rinehart likes her food? If you’d like a summary of how this has happened elsewhere, Eater picks over the bones of newsprint food criticism in the US. Newspapers are not the lone bastion of food criticism in Australia but they are more likely than elsewhere to provide it and pay for it. Criticism is more important than ever because there is so little of it.

It seems to suggest that the era of earning a living wage through either food criticism or reviewing is well and truly over and the only financially viable platform is blogging. At least, financially viable for those rare few that can wrangle community management, SEO and sales whilst finding time to eat and write.

Warning to Coles shoppers: ROBOTS TOUCH YOUR FOOD.

You know what the average shopper at Coles Supermarket fears? Robots. Giant robots who touch their food. This secret informs their latest sleight of hand that boasts that their home delivered food is “Hand picked, hand packed and hand delivered”.


Screenshot from http://www.coles.com.au/Shop-Online.aspx/ (full page, 28 June 2012)

This was originally spotted in the wild by Harvest Feast, adorning Coles’ Tasmanian delivery vans.

Coles’ food is however, picked and packed by giant robots at some point in its journey from factory to you. Here’s the video of that happening:

SSI Schaeffer, who installed the systems, are quite proud of their achievements. From their press release:

Automated picking solutions at Coles’ two national distribution centers align with the companywide strategy to deliver store-ready stock more efficiently. Supply Chain Review goes inside the Melbourne facility to inspect the world-class system. At least part of the supply chain transformation of supermarket giant Coles is being handled not by people, but by robots. Automated picking solutions at Coles’ two key national distribution centers (NDCs) in Sydney and Melbourne are, according to the retailer, providing significantly improved store-friendly deliveries while minimizing end-to-end supply chain costs and making warehousing operations safer and more efficient.

(emphasis is mine)

Moreover, almost all of the processed food that goes into Coles’ deliveries was picked and packed by robots (or at least, some automated system) at the original manufacturer. So why the sudden bout of robophobia from one of Australia’s supermarket duopoly?

Welcome to the coopting of handmade. Western luxury is no longer defined by owning perfect objects but by having the time to select pieces that display the tell-tale imperfections of the human hand. It’s what you probably stare longingly at on Pinterest. Just like “artisanal” before it, now well dead and obituarised by The Atlantic, major corporations now battle to appear as if real humans touched their things and by doing so, render the terms meaningless.

I’m no longer certain whether any of these terms are redeemable, but at the very least, we can point out the most egregious of lies.