Science. Tasty, Tasty Science

[mistermack]

I think it's the 'You are what you eat' theory. Wild game eats whatever it evolved to eat. We force-feed genetically modified corn, mostly, on our factory food animals. Wild boar is a helluva lot different from store-bought. Same for rabbit, fowl, fish, etc. There's no way to describe flavors using words, though. It's just...intrinsically better.

If you could solve the flavour problem, you could be a billionaire. Just from mushrooms alone.
Grow a tasty farmed mushroom, and the world would beat a track to your door.

Farm mushrooms have about five percent of the taste of wild ones. They smell much the same, and are of similar consitency, but that's about it.

If this cell-grown meat catches on, I bet we'll end up reminiscing about the days when you could get real meat, that actually tasted of something.

I have my doubts though. A pig has a digestion system, that converts food into the building blocks of muscle.
So you would have to replicate that, on a grand scale, to grow meat cells. More work to do, I think.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Perhaps they should grow the cultures in hickory-smoked agar?

[mistermack]

Perhaps they should grow the cultures in hickory-smoked agar?

Yeh but, farmed hickory wouldn't taste like wild hickory.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Perhaps they should grow the cultures in hickory-smoked agar?

Yeh but, farmed hickory wouldn't taste like wild hickory.

As long as they made the smoke with wild fire...

[Robert_S]

Anyway, this would mean that far fewer pigs would be born, if it caught on. It's bad enough being kept for meat, but is it better not to be born at all? I dunno, meself.

Depends on the conditions they're kept in.

[Blind groper]

The taste of meat does depend on what the animal eats. It is not a problem of GM corn. it is the difference between weeds versus grass versus grains.

The best tasting beef I ever ate was in Argentina. They run their cattle on the pampas, where they eat a wide range of plants - wild weeds. Those plants contain a lot of chemicals, including toxins, and the flavours permeate the meat. Here in NZ, we run cattle on farms where the grass is carefully selected and grown. The meat is good and tasty, but not up to the meat from cattle that eat such a wide range of wild plant species. The worst beef I ever ate was American grain fed beef, in a restaurant in Memphis. We were told that it was the best beef in the world, and very tender. Well, they were half right. Tender, yes. Tasty, no. the only strong flavour was grease.

Exactly the same principle applies to venison. Here in NZ we have deer farms, and the deer eat similar grass to what our cows eat. Wild deer has a much stronger taste, from the wild plants they eat. Pork is the same. Wild pork is much more strongly flavoured, for the same reason.

Some people hate the 'gamy' flavour and prefer the domestic meat. Each to his/her own.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Argentine beef, raised on the Pampas grassland, is incredible. We can't get it in the US because the local beef ranchers protested.

[Blind groper]

Now here's an idea. Purely for the flavour, you understand!
Feed your cattle cannabis. I am sure it will make beef that tastes good.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Now here's an idea. Purely for the flavour, you understand!
Feed your cattle cannabis. I am sure it will make beef that tastes good.

Or taste like Twinkies and Doritos.

[mistermack]

Our family farm in County Clare used to have a flock of geese.
They roamed wild, and never got fed, apart from a few spuds at bed time.
They used to taste fantatsic, and were never oily or fatty, like the geese you buy.

A usual sized goose from that flock would weigh about eight pounds. A similar one that you buy would be about 12 to 13. And all the extra weight is fat under the skin, in the bought goose.

Mind you, I like both, food of the gods is goose.