Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2011, as a news item. The price comparison and the lab’s expectations of mass acceptance are from that time.
Back to Japan (a country of entrepreneurs and inventors), where a laboratory seems to have found the solution to the world’s food problem. This laboratory, based in Okayama, has managed to make meat steaks from human excrement.
That’s not all: the first “brave” volunteers who tried it said it tasted exquisite, even better than real meat. The idea came about when a company in charge of managing Tokyo’s sewers discovered that our excrement is rich in protein because of the bacteria it contains. The laboratory then managed to extract those proteins and combine them with other substances to create the “artificial steak”.
To make the product more appetizing, they added colorings and soy protein to improve the flavor. These Japanese scientists hope the synthetic meat business will be a profitable and healthy one, since they have the support of the government and environmental bodies, which say synthetic meat will reduce environmental pollution and could help end hunger in developing countries.
This kind of meat is still expensive (understandable, given such exquisite raw material) and costs more than regular meat, although the laboratory is counting on future mass acceptance by consumers to bring the cost down.
The good thing about the idea is that the raw material used to make it is unlimited, so I doubt its price will be affected by market conditions. That said, as for me… well… you go ahead and try it first, and then tell me what you think of the taste, the texture and all that.
Further reading
Featured image: HaJunkiyada, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
