For your TL9+ Non-Agricultral worlds

[Lycanorukke]

There is a big difference in taste between the beef of an Angus and the beef of an elderly Holstein dairy cow.

Which is why the vat meat PR pieces are hamburger patties (Soya products do it as well as well IIRC).

The 'contents' of real mince is mostly the lowest quality crap and offcasts from the butchers floor which can be thrown in the mincer. It's turned into a mush which can be flavoured, coloured and packaged thus disguising the poor quality materials used to make it. Sausages are occasionally called 'mystery bags' for just this reason as well.

By the way, have you tried the latest in protein substitutes? I think they call it Soylent Green...

 

[Meeko100]

Interesting.

It seems to me though, that it would be a very long, complicated process for the cat beef to take like the real deal. Lots of little things make up what we taste as cuts of meat, so I doubt that it be feasible for steaks of the stuff to get off the ground. Ground up Chuck, possibly. Fine sirloin, it's be easier to just shoot the cow. Tastier too. At least, I imagine it that way. The massive amount of amino acids and other things that make up animals seems out of reach to mass-produce slabs of meat in cohesive bits.


Seems to me that if you were colonizing a planet, you'd bring an animal along anyway to work your fields. Bessy doesn't run out of fuel in quite the same way the tractor does. So people would already have real animals that prolly died and had kids that eventually will die and be eaten by the folk.

I imagine vat meat holds the same place that top ramen holds now. It tastes alright, is cheap and plentiful, and is food. I imagine that provided there is a supply of real animals, people with the cash will have acquired a taste for them. Even if animals from off-worłd just got there, I'm sure the first thought that will go through the people mind will be how does it taste. Plenty if people have asked that question about things that clearly aren't food (paintballs, marbles, mothballs, chlorine pool tablets, etc), so if your free trader shows up saying that it's food, people will likely want to at least try it.

But yeah. I think that the taste will never get so good as to surpass finer cuts of meat, so it's likely going to only be for the foods that prolly should have meat/taste like meat, but be low cost enough to be able to sell the product cheaply. Hot dog meat, essentially.

 

[Selandia]

The reason the patties are overcooked has much less to do with marketing and much more to do with liability attorneys looking for clients. No restaurant wants to have customers filing lawsuits for getting sick from undercooked meat. Just about every menu that I look at has a warning about the hazards of eating less than well-done meat.

Granted, the attorney is the guest chef. Still, given the topic at hand: overcooked patties swamped in sauces, might be horse, beef, old caw, dog or vat grown and the client would most likely be unable to tell the difference because you taste the sauce a lot more than the meat. It is not about TL+9 vat meat, it is about lousy food been over spiced/swetened/salted/pepered...since TL+1. Unless you cook your (choice)meat yourself, the commercial patties would be overcooked anyway to disguise low cost supplies as part of TL+6marketing gimmick.

have fun

Selandia

 

[simonh]

From an economic point of view, I don't agre that vat grown food is always going to be cheaper that natural grown. After all, the floor on the cost of natural grown food is just the cost of harvesting it. Depending on the suitability of the environment that cost can go up if you need to prepare the land, provide fertiliser, use pesticides, innoculate or care for cattle, provide supplements for elements lackign in the environment, etc.

Full-on aquaculture, food vats, food animals grown in pods linked to cow-Matrix virtual environments and such are the extreme end of that continuum and therefore surely the most expensive?

Simon Hibbs

 

[rancke]

From an economic point of view, I don't agree that vat grown food is always going to be cheaper that natural grown. After all, the floor on the cost of natural grown food is just the cost of harvesting it. Depending on the suitability of the environment that cost can go up if you need to prepare the land, provide fertiliser, use pesticides, innoculate or care for cattle, provide supplements for elements lackign in the environment, etc.

Full-on aquaculture, food vats, food animals grown in pods linked to cow-Matrix virtual environments and such are the extreme end of that continuum and therefore surely the most expensive?

According to the article I referred to in an earlier post, the experimental carniculture method that is still only in it's initial stage of development uses 45% less energy and 99% less land than the average global representative figure for farming cattle. I think it is quite plausible that by the time the technology is mature, it will be able to outcompete natural sources of meat. I don't have figures for hydroponics, but I know ordinary greenhouse farming is already commercially viable.


Hans

 

[Frankymole]

The following quote is from H. Beam Piper's book, Four-Day Planet.



In other stories, Piper uses carniculture meat, with the caveat that is does not taste as good as genuine live-grown meat, but is acceptable as a substitute.

Douglas Adams's "Dish of the Day" seems feasible (a genetically genuine ever animal that actively wants to be eaten) as does Pohl's "Chicken Little", a vast brainless organism again genetically engineered and mostly nourished, IIRC, from reflected/concentrated sunlight and plankton.

There's always Judge Dredd's "Resyk" synth paste... essentially Soylent Green...

 

[simonh]

According to the article I referred to in an earlier post, the experimental carniculture method that is still only in it's initial stage of development uses 45% less energy and 99% less land than the average global representative figure for farming cattle.

Sure, but farm land doesn't run on metered electricity delivered from a power station. You don't need to plug grazing pastures into the grid for it to generate meat. Yes, I know pesticides and herbicides incur and energy cost, but it's not as though carniculture doesn't require chemical materials as well. To capture the vast majority of the energy required to grow meat naturally, all you need is land and grass seeds. It's not super efficient, but it's incredibly cheap.

If you're sitting on an Ag planet with an abundant natural environment suitable for cattle rearing, I don't think building carniculture facilities and growning vat meat instead is going to be cheaper. Of course it depends entirely on what your constraints are. On an Ag planet with a very high population, land may be so valuable that the intensiveness and productivity per acre of carniculture might make it a preferable option. All I'm saying is that carniculture being cheaper and more efficient than live rearing isn't going to be a universal constant.

Simon Hibbs

 

[Condottiere]

I recall one farming concept where it's carried out in an environmentally controlled high-rise, probably hydroponics.

 

[Lycanorukke]

Sure, but farm land doesn't run on metered electricity delivered from a power station.

You could throw in food security as another concern as well. Sure you can grow everything in a factory, but lose power, specialised nutrient imports or the next world over decides to trade block you, and you have about 3 meals before your lab is overrun by a torch wielding mob. There was an article about Roup at SJ Games, where circumstances resulted in a loss of off world tech, and now they are essentially 'strip mining' the oceans to keep 3 billion people fed.

As a side, a lot more comes from animals other than meat protien. Fats, textiles and leather, oils, medical products, glues, fertilizers, etc. Sure you could have a factory for each of those, but when you have a few thousand self replicating, self powered, self operating bio-chemical factories walking around converting plant matter and water to useful products, the economics starts looking attractive despite the space problem.

 

[Timerover51]

I looked this thread over, and realized that I had not posted the following link to it. It comes from the book, Colonies in Space, by T. A. Heppenheimer, and does have a good discussion of growing food in space.

http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/colonies_chap09.html

Heppenheimer does present the optimum result of space farming, although you might come close to what he expects. He anticipates feeding 10,000 persons on 100 acres. If you are on an airless or close to airless planet, or one with a hostile atmosphere, I would lean to being conservative, and assume feeding no more than 30 people per acre, so as to give a fudge factor, and also have a good food reserve.

 

[rancke]

I looked this thread over, and realized that I had not posted the following link to it. It comes from the book, Colonies in Space, by T. A. Heppenheimer, and does have a good discussion of growing food in space.

This seems to be TL7-8 food-growing, not TL9+ food-growing. And it does not include the most recent advances in hydroponics and carniculture.

It could make for a nice baseline, though. We might consider basing TL7 production figures on them and treat recent advances as TL8.


Hans