But the mad cow prions are only found in the brain and spinal cord. just dont eat that part!
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 9:04 AM, Stephen A. Lawrence <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On 12/04/2009 09:32 AM, Jed Rothwell wrote: >> >> Rick Monteverde wrote: >> >>> Well, let's start with KJ ("mad cow") and go on from there. There's >>> something wrong with eating your own stuff. There's genes in there. Code >>> for >>> proteins that don't fold properly. Other stuff. Yuck. In fact eating pork >>> (chimpanzee, etc.) might have similar drawbacks due to the genetic >>> similarities. >> >> DNA is destroyed by cooking. > > But prions aren't, and that's where mad cow comes from. And what's more > lots of people like their meat "rare" if they can get it that way, and > pretty much nothing's destroyed in the pink parts in the middle of a "rare" > steak (though the filthy U.S. food supply has put a damper on eating rare > meat in recent years). > > But in any case test tube meat is likely to be a whole lot safer than random > meat because it will all come from one individual (individual cow, human, > chipmunk, or whatever) and one can *hope* that the individual used for the > "starter culture" will be tested and verified to be "clean". > > Testtube meat could make it possible to serve species which are otherwise > completely impractical to eat. Humans, which we've already brought up, are > the obvious one, because it's considered ethically unacceptable to chow down > on them when you're cooking up "whole humans" to do it, but there are other > possibilities as well: All the animals which are too small to eat might be > culturable into something useful. Besides chipmunk, there's mouse, vole, > shrew ... all kinds of possibilities. > > And if we go the direction of "custom made" meat, it might be possible to > take samples from particular individual creatures and "custom make" steaks > from it. You could literally eat your ... well I think we've gone far > enough with this thought, eh? > >
