Foodies of the longer term is also eating on beefed-up rice.
A brand new lab-grown meat product merges rice grains with cow cells, scientists file February 14 in Topic. The rice acts as a scaffold that helps the expansion of fats or muscle cells. In combination, the elements shape a rice-meat hybrid that steams as much as a pinkish-brown mash.
It tasted scrumptious, “nutty and slightly candy,” says Sohyeon Park, a chemical engineer at Yonsei College in Seoul, South Korea. Lab-made beefy rice isn’t in a position for the dinner desk but, she says, however it might in the future be offering a extra sustainable approach to consume meat.
Present strategies for generating meat come with farming farm animals, which calls for huge expanses of pastureland and emits greater than 100 million metric lots of methane into the ambience each and every 12 months. Discovering techniques to eschew the moo is also higher for the surroundings, scientists counsel. Some attainable possible choices come with cricket farming and swapping meat for fermented fungal spores (SN: 5/2/19; SN: 5/5/22).
Lab-grown meat is in a different way to chop the cow (most commonly) out of the equation. Within the lab, Park and associates covered rice grains with fish gelatin and enzymes after which added cow cells to each and every grain. The fishy coating helped the cells stick with and develop within the grains. And rice gives a 3D construction for cells to grasp to, like vines mountain climbing a trellis. That construction provides the aesthetic cells a extra meatlike heft, Park says. On their very own, the cells develop in skinny, flat layers.
Nutritionally, the hybrid rice is extra sizzle than steak, with simply 8 p.c extra protein than standard rice. However Park hopes to spice up that quantity by means of packing extra cow cells into each and every grain. Rice wasn’t firstly on her radar; however the grains labored strangely neatly, she says. What’s extra, they’re affordable, nutritious and already widespread — a grade-A factor.