Mitsuyuki Ikeda, a researcher from the Okayama Laboratory, has developed steaks based on proteins from human excrement. Tokyo Sewage approached the scientist because of an overabundance of sewage mud. They asked him to explore the possible uses of the sewage and Ikeda found that the mud contained a great deal of protein because of all the bacteria.
The researchers then extracted those proteins, combined them with a reaction enhancer and put it in an exploder which created the artificial steak. The “meat” is 63% proteins, 25% carbohydrates, 3% lipids and 9% minerals. The researchers color the poop meat red with food coloring and enhance the flavor with soy protein. Initial tests have people saying it even tastes like beef.
If some faeces ends up in the soil, is broken down by bacteria and goes into plant matter, which is eaten by a cow and then ends up on your plate as a steak… that’s OK, right?
I mean, this squicks me out too… but how many stages of “reprocessing” does a molecule that was once part of someone (or something’s) urine or faeces have to go through before it’s cool to eat it? Does it matter whether the process is natural or artificial? Considering how long animal life has been around, it’s hard to believe there’s even a single meal you can safely eat without (indirectly) consuming wastes.
Once you get around the gross-out factor, couldn’t this be potentially useful technology for the space program? NASA has already been researching how to recycle urine into drinkable water, so why not recycle faeces too, if it’s possible?
So, wait a minute - aren’t all the crap parts of the crap cooked off here? I don’t think human excrement is particularly protein rich by itself (because humans are not cats, which is a pretty flimsy reason to assume a thing, but there you have it), so all they’re really doing here is using sewer mud as an agar plate. So it’s a lot like organic farming - they grow a bunch of crap out of post-consumer waste.
Yeah, this seems right. In general, excrement is the leftover from when we’ve taken all the good stuff out of it. There’s not much in it of worth. But they are interested in protein bacteria that grows in the sewage.
However, it will give new meaning to the phrase ‘Eat shit and die!’
Hmm… they’d have to bring the bacteria with them, I guess, and it may be difficult to replicate the ecosystem that allows sewage on Earth to break down in this manner. But if they could, it seems like it would be useful. It would probably taste better than Tang.
It is funny to hear them constantly use the term, “turdburger” in the official newscast.
The question I have is all the chemicals being found in todays waste: anti-depressants,antibiotcis, drugs etc. How do they make sure that stuff is all gone?
You don’t necessarily have to. Most effective drugs are going to be processed out of your system by your liver and they’re not going to be chemically identical to what they were when you put them inside you. By the time I take my brain pill tomorrow morning, all the brain medicine will have been converted into other chemicals before they’re processed into feces (if that even happens - I don’t know the precise path for fluoxetine). All that they have to do is test a lot sample of the finished product for harmful or hazardous chemicals, which there are standard lab tests for.
This really is just organic farming of bacteria (instead of plants), because the food used in both cases are the same. If you trust organic products to be safe (I personally prefer to get non-organic vegetables and cook the ones that I can’t find that way, precisely BECAUSE they’re grown entirely in post-consumer waste, which is the polite term for rotting garbage and feces), they have precisely the same issues as this would have.
Not entirely. The fundamental difference is that in the bacterial instance, the relative size of the harvested organism is roughly equivalent to the size of the contaminant. It’s one thing to wash a few bits of manure off your apple or zucchini. It’s a bit more demanding to strain all the rotting organic debris out of the protein strands you’re harvesting. It’s even worse to try to get all the byproduct chemicals released by the rotting organic debris. Which is why they’re saying they -hope- to get this stuff down to the price of regular meat (instead of telling us it will only be 1/X the price of regular meat).
Inasmuch as they’re just harvesting bacteria, the end product is no worse than any other bacterial mat harvested into foodstuffs. And there’s certainly potential due to the fact that the waste product this bacteria is being grown on is more “waste-y” than many others. But they really need to figure out a better processing method so that it’s economically attractive, given the stigma of the source material. (And it does remain to be seen whether or not certain pathogens are potential red flags. I don’t know enough about biology to know whether or not things that work on the microorganism/parasitic level are easily extractable.)
My guess would be they are talking about secondary sludge, activated sludge plants produce huge amounts of bacteria. It’s getting rid of all the bacteria thats the problem.
My understanding is that a good percentage of the substance of poop is made up of the remains of the bacteria etc. that live in your gut - it’s not just the stuff that wasn’t digested.
Having seen what the yeasty mass at the bottom of a fermenting vessel looks like after it’s done with fermentation, I actually find this fairly easy to believe.
