Subject: Re: food?

From: [email-masked] (Depree, Jonathan A)
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 1996 13:23:58

In article <[email-masked]> victor pierobon <[email-masked]> writes:
>From: victor pierobon <[email-masked]>
>Subject: food?
>Date: Wed, 11 Dec 1996 13:01:08 -0500

>New Plant Food Source:
>>======================
>>There is a variety of mountain goat on the Canadian Rocky Mountains
>>that have a special gut bacteria that in symbiosis helps the goat
>>digest plant cellulouse fiber...
>>Is there any research in isolation this bacteria and using them to
>>convert tree pulp or the remaining weat stalks and chaff fiber
>>into human digestible food.

>Meat Subtitute:
>>===============
>>
>>Instead of killing our fellow animals for animal meat .... why don't we
>>grow animal meat cancer cells in a vat of plant nutrients .... growing
>>nice cubes on meat for human consumtion.
>>

Would you eat it? A lot of people won't even eat fruit with a single foreign 
gene inserted into it. I can't imagine them eating cancerous tissue. People 
would somehow get the idea that you could get cancer from it. I have seen 
suggestions on one of these bulletin boards that eating modified maize with 
an antibiotic-resistance gene could make the human who ate the maize 
antibiotic resistant.

I think you'd be better off developing a plant or fungus that produces 
something indistinguishable from beef.

Jonathan Depree,
Lincoln University, P.O. Box 84, Canterbury, New Zealand.

Socrates was a famous Greek Teacher who went around giving
people advice. They killed him.   (school history howler)