Yonsei University has a group of South Korean researchers it’s literally full of beef. Lab-grown rice grains are infused with cow muscle and fat cells, so they’re part plant and part meat. The rice is also an appetizing shade of bright pink, which is what happens when the meat comes into the picture.
The team hopes to eventually offer a cheaper and more sustainable protein source with a lower carbon footprint than actual beef. It will also save time for those who enjoy a nice pot of beef over rice does beef stew.
How did they get this culinary delight? The researchers first coated each grain of rice with fish gelatin to help the meat cells adhere. Next, they placed cow muscle and adipose stem cells inside each grain, which were then cultured in a petri dish. Rice grains have a porous but organized internal structure that actually mimics the “biological scaffolds” found in meat cells. Thus, rice grains offer a housing that allows cells to grow and develop, along with molecules to provide nutrients.
Flesh cells grow both on the surface of the rice grain and inside the grain. After about ten days, you get the finished product. Research, publication The issue is says the rice grains taste like beef sushi, which makes sense given the ingredients.
“Imagine getting all the nutrients we need from cell-grown protein rice,” lead author Sohyeon Park “Rice already has a high nutritional value, but adding cells from livestock can increase it even more.”
The team even envisions a day when cattle will be completely removed from the process. They hope to develop a cell line that continues to divide and grow over a long period of time, so that they can be derived from this line rather than from real cows. “Then we can create a sustainable food system”
Obviously, this is still in the research phase, so pink beef rice won’t be appearing on restaurant menus anytime soon. The team is improving the growth process to produce rice grains with greater nutritional value. They also hope to further improve the taste, texture and color. “It could one day be food aid for famine, military food or even space food,” Park said in a press release.
It’s just one part of a global effort to do something about the ongoing environmental disaster of meat production. Cattle for slaughter are responsible for 6.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere each year. That’s about 12 percent of all human-caused carbon emissions.
For this purpose, there is to create tasty and cost-effective lab-grown meat from to steaks grown using for the aforementioned beef rice. There is also the rise of insects
