Insulin. The buzz on the street is that cultured meat works like shit. Insulin on the other hand is already made in bioreactors, and there’s no reason that you couldn’t do it yourself with the know-how as far as I know.
Said people on the street are people involved in the production, not the consumption. It tastes fine, but animal cells don’t want to grow like that so it’s massively expensive and resource hungry, and will take a lot of research and trouble to make less so if it’s even possible in this regulatory environment (the EU doesn’t like GMOs).
Maybe stick with plant-based alternatives? They’re really good now and they didn’t used to be.
It was Eva Saxl. She had fled the Nazis from Czechoslovakia only to find herself under Japanese occupation in Shanghai. From the Wikipedia article, it seems like she extracted the insulin from water buffalo pancreas. I’m not sure if that counts as homebrewing. When I think of homebrew insulin, I think of actually manufacturing it by fermenting specialized yeast as opposed to harvesting it from animals. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but it isn’t really the same.
There’s not really a problem with meat either. You don’t have to eat it and if you do, you don’t have to feel bad about eating animals.
That said, there is kind of a problem with insulin manufacturing in that it’s kind of centralized and distribution can be difficult, especially in remote areas with unreliable electricity. If insulin manufacturing could be done at the garage or shipping container scale in the places where it’s needed, it would help a lot of people.
They already have chocolate 3D printers, and lab meat is almost or already at market somewhere and would also actually make someone money in our largely capitalist dominated world, so I’m gonna go with that.
I’m just thinking that having food safe printing stuff makes it slightly closer to reality than the other option, even if the medium would require reengineering some of the internal parts.
I think most 3D printers are food safe technically, as they get really hot, which should kill the bad stuff. I haven’t looked into the chocolate printers, but I’ve got to imagine it works pretty similarly to a standard 3D printer: nozzle gets very hot and you just insert “filament” rolls or cartridges made of chocolate instead of plastic. A meat printer would need to do a lot more, if you’re talking just completely making meat from scratch. Would be awesome, but I think we’ve still got a ways to go before those are consumer friendly.
It’s sad. People will die. But this is the world we live in. We will also have to watch rich people eat 3D printed meat before the rest of us get this cruelty free choice.
My bet’s on 3D printed meat making it to our plates before we’re DIY’ing insulin.
Regulation for medications like insulin is super tight (rightly so!). You can’t just whip up life-saving stuff in your garage without some heavy-duty checks and balances from the FDA and the like. Plus, the DIY part is insane, we’re talking high-level genetic engineering and biochemistry here, not homebrew beer.
Then there’s the demand part. The hype for environmentally-friendly, cruelty-free meat is real and growing every day. If they can get the taste and texture right, not to mention a decent price, lab-grown meat is gonna fly off the shelves.
Meanwhile, homebrew insulin’s got a smaller audience - mainly type 1 diabetics and some type 2s. And given that botched insulin can be lethal, a lot of folks might stick to the tried-and-true stuff from pharmaceutical companies.
So yeah, I’m thinking lab-grown burgers beat homebrew insulin to the punch. But hey, it’s 2023, who knows what’s around the corner? Fun to think about though!
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