Just Another Blog
Thursday, April 11, 2002
 
I Think I'll Stick With Tang

It appears that we may now have the ability to grow fish (the food) without so much need for fish (the animal). The idea is to have sustainable and efficient food supplies for long space trips. On one hand it's a pretty neat idea, but on the other hand:
Benjaminson's group cut chunks of muscle five to 10 centimetres long from large goldfish. After washing the chunks in alcohol, they immersed them in a vat of fetal bovine serum, a nutrient-rich liquid extracted from the blood of unborn calves, which biologists usually use for growing cells in the lab.

After a week in the vat, the fish chunks had grown by 14 per cent, Benjaminson and his team found. To get some idea whether the new muscle tissue would make acceptable food, they washed it and gave it a quick dip in olive oil flavoured with lemon, garlic and pepper. Then they fried it and showed it to colleagues from other departments.
Yuck! I know that Laughing Hyena has been promoting the benefits of fish oil, but this might be too much for me.