Be it a matter of cost, principle, or just plain being landlocked, the idea of 3D printed vegan eel over the real deal is quite an attractive development. An Israeli company called Steakholder Foods has introduced this very thing — something they claim is the world’s first plant-based, printed eel.
One thing to note about eel is that they are quite intricately textured, a problem which seems tailored for 3D printing. The company say they achieve similarity through precise layering and “a unique combination of materials”, which are proprietary. Although the current product is based solely on plant materials, the plan is to incorporate eel cells in the future. Right now, the company is looking to collaborate by providing printers and ink so that participants can create short-term revenue.
While it’s unclear whether the eel is printed and then cooked, or print-cooked like this chicken, it sure looks tasty. Would you eat printed food? Have you done so already? Let us know in the comments.
It’s not eel. Shouldn’t be called that.
What’s next? “Oh no, don’t call that Milk, Milk is an animal product, that’s Coco juice”
Correct.
But there has been “milk of magnesia” for centuries.
I do think that people are actually capable of working things out you know.
Almond “milk” should be rightly called nut juice.
Can’t imagine why the marketing teams didn’t like that idea…
Almond drink or Almond juice sounds just fine. Almond drink is more accurate as a almonds don’t produce juice so a lot of water needs to be added, so it is diluted quite a bit.
Reactionary weirdos getting upset about this is really funny to me, because plant-based milks are thousands of years old and they’ve pretty much always been called ‘milk.’ The recent innovation here is dairy milk getting good, safe, and cheap enough to actually compete with them, through massive subsidies and regulation.
If they are calling it ‘something eel’ because it tastes/looks/feels like eel that is a time honoured and very normal practice. Eel is the frame of reference selected to describe how this is similar in the same way the faux leather and actual animal leather or synthetic opal etc is done.
The real issue with stuff like this is not the naming it in a way that indicates what it is supposed to be it is the nutrition. If it is pretending to be an eel very successfully (which most of these fakes don’t really manage – usually at best adjacent in taste and texture) but providing none of the nutrition of an eel it doesn’t actually work at its intended function of replacing eel.
This, reading the headline I got the impression they’re 3d printing lab grown eel meat. Clearly not the case.
Depending on the ingredients used, it could be called Tof-Eel (like Tofurkey), or they could be honest and just call it immitation eel (like immitation crab, so often found in california rolls).
My personal vote goes to ‘robot-made quasi-organic aquatic snake-thing analogue’, though. Once they add eel cells, they can then call it ‘robot-made quasi-organic aquatic snake-thing analogue – now with real lab-grown aquatic snake-thing cells!’.
It just sounds right.
Still fuming that my hotdog does not contain any dog
and that my hamburger does not contain a resident of hamburg :)
rice paper isn’t paper….
Can’t wait for lab grown meat to take off so I can eat a comically large slab of meat (like in the old cartoons).
“You will eat ze bugs” is acceptable to me, only if I can eat a kilo heavy steak of firm, exotic insect meat(??) from a cow sized insect, genetically engineered to be delicious. That’s the future I expect. The current state of insect based foods is laughable, its 90% chitin and they expect you to like it.
And soy imitation meats? No thank you. They can’t even get the texture right for all the money they charge.
“exotic insect meat(??) from a cow sized insect, genetically engineered to be delicious”
Your-scientists-were-so-preoccupied.jpg
Be careful what you wish for…
starshiptroopers.jpg
People know that ten or twenty years after this stuff becomes widespread, they’ll find that it’s actually atrocious for the environment and health and was only done in order to corner and monopolize markets which have been stubbornly independent for thousands of years. Everyone gets that, right?
I have no problem with people eating lab grown “meat” or bugs. As long as they don’t tax, restrict or ban real meat. Let people eat whatever they want.
Never understood why folks try so hard to make a fake something when they could make a something else interesting and new without the harsh light of direct comparison. I went once to a vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco (Sunshine something?) I’m sure its gone decades ago. Everything on the menu was “meat” shaped and colored “like” the target of the imitation. It was all tofu and tempeh based so it was terrible but it was mind blowing that they went through the effort to make little lamb chop shaped food that was pink in the middle, little salmon similar fillets that were orange and you could get in slab or cross section style, little drum sticks of chicken cheap etc etc. the menu had pictures of every item and they were all labeled as the model meat. They should have called it Play Doh World Restaurant. Why is so much effort expended getting people who dont want to eat meat to eat what looks like meat? And for those who do want to eat meat, its a collosal challenge to reproduce the sensory experience. To slightly change course theres the green goo and protein powder “market” which is again ridiculously bland and proud of it. Just make something new! Why not mix the protein powder and rice fiber and fruit flavors into a celestial energy star that has just the right amount of crunch and umami? I would love to eat a Jetsons meets Willy Wonka style meal of intricate geometric, mobius strip shapes with an incredible array of tastes, smells and textures. Then slurp down my amino acids in a carrageenan spiral silly straw that I could crunch up after. Try harder!
Both are happening at the same time. There are tons of plant based foods with distinct flavors and textures, for example varieties of tempeh, quorn, and lots of bean based products. You could eat a new vegan dish every day for the rest of your life without eating anything that tries to be similar to meat based dishes. But there’s also a lot of products that take inspiration from the shape, textures and taste of foods people are already used to eating before trying or going vegan. I don’t think that’s hard to understand or puzzling in any way – it is very seldom a taste or texture that makes people go vegan, but instead an ethical stance that the harms when animals suffer and die in factory farms, transportations and slaughter houses. (To get a glimpse of that just google “ventilation shutdown” and read and view undercover video of that so called “culling” method.) Or climate change concerns or antibiotics resistance concerns. For example I tend to use IKEAs plant meat balls when some relatives come over for dinner because they find the taste kind of similar to what they’re used to. Nice to have that option.
Exactly, if you don’t want to eat meat then stop trying to imitate it. If you want people to like vegetarian and vegan food then make good food, don’t just try (and mostly fail) to copy meat.
So do you also believe that we should stop using emulators and virtual machines? I mean, the same argument holds there after all ;)
Here’s the thing… people may want to stop killing animals, not necessarily stop eating meat.
well, we could start with the fact that enough people like eating eels that a lot of species are endangered due to over-fishing
seems like a pretty good reason to come up with a substitute option.
Neat, looking forward to trying it out if I get the chance! Step by step vegan meats get more complex textures. As a long time vegan I enjoy trying out these novelties at least once. I’m quite happy with core plant based eating (tempeh, tofu, beans, lentils, lupin, quorn and so on in addition to a wide range of vegetables, fruits and nuts and seeds) but have picked up a few favs over the years. Rice ice cream beats oats beats soy. IKEAs plant meat balls are a treat. I think in a few years fermentation based vegan meats will ramp up production and get really price competitive even with meat from killed factory farmed animals.
Do you know the difference between wild salmon and breed salmon ? Breed salmon does not contain omega3, and a lot other things are missing too. So eating breed salmon is equal in eating the flour they are fed with. No nutritional addition value.
I do not like sea food, but as a human being, I need it, so from time to time, I eat some.
Same for the meat. As fresh and natural as possible.
I am thrilled with 3D printing, but food (beyond the technical challenge, I am a hacker =o) ) is a dead end for me.
There’s plenty of nutritional value over a bag of flour. Omega 3s aren’t the only nutrient in the world. That said yes wild caught is better. The problem is that we are already far in excess of a sustainable “wild” population, and are being sustained entirely with ag science tricks and chemistry (most notably the Haber-Bosch process, but also many pesticides and herbicides) and factory-farms. Something has to give eventually, and the famine will be the worst thing in recorded history.
If we relied primarily on wild salmon, wild salmon would very quickly be extinct. That’s the whole point of farmed fish (and pretty much any farmed animal, at this point) – to not drive the wild population to extinction.
Humanity has long surpassed the point of a naturally sustainable population, so we either start killing people at random until population levels stabilize, then sterilize random newborns at birth to maintain that level, or, we use other methods to keep us alive.
Btw, your statement about the absence of Omega-3 in farmed salmon is simply false, and 5 seconds of googling would have confirmed that for you. Farmed salmon generally contains a lower percentage of Omega-3 per volume of fat, but also contains more overall fat, causing the numbers to pretty much equal out:
“It turns out that you probably won’t shortchange your heart if you choose the less-costly farmed salmon, as both types seem to provide similar amounts of omega-3s per serving. But that’s likely because farm-raised salmon tend to have more total fat — and therefore more omega-3 fat — than wild ones.”
Source:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/finding-omega-3-fats-in-fish-farmed-versus-wild-201512238909
Harvard?
really?
Well, maybe the report they plagiarized is accurate.
B^)
“Btw, your statement about the absence of Omega-3 in farmed salmon is simply false”
Can confirm, also did the quick web search. You’re fine with wild or farm-raised.
You don’t need animal based omega3. Your body won’t accept it. It will pass right through you. If you want omega3, eat some brussel sprouts. Not that you need it. The biggest studies on omega3 have shown that omega3 supplements do absolutely nothing. As a vegetarian, I brought it up with my GP, who also is a professor at a local university. She said it’s just a fad and there is no data to backup these omega3 claims. It’s like a new version of homeopathy.
My hovercraft is full of synthetic eels.
Wow. They made scop. We’re already living in a dystopian hell.
I wasn’t even aware people were eating eels. Seems like a weird thing to eat. I’m a vegetarian with a seafood and shellfish allergy, so maybe I’m the wrong person to judge.
I’ve never eaten it. But in my country they’ve been eating it for at least 6200 years. You can easily catch them by making traps. It is usually smoked. It’s a very fatty fish, so it contains a lot of Omega 3. So it was very important food for people to survive harsh winters. So it’s not weird food.
On the photo is eel sashimi, I guess, which I’ve never eaten. I always get it with the rice underneath. :)
Eel sushi is delicious. A little sweet sauce over the top… Mmmm