Mitsyuki Ikeda has invented a new way of making hamburger. He extracts proteins and fats from "sewage mud."
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1N6QfuIh0g
Mitsyuki Ikeda of the Environmental Assessment Center in Okayama, Japan, has invented a new way of making hamburger. He extracts proteins and fats from "sewage mud," a delightful little euphemism for human excrement, and makes an expensive, eco-friendly steak sandwich.
The whole thing sounds very suspect, although the prospect of making meat—or raising vegetables for that matter—from waste is a provocation that will only become more compelling as the world begins to address the growing demand for food. In many cases around the world, as Pay Drechsel told National Geographic, the benefits of "using untreated human waste to grow food outweigh the health risks." Here, though, anything related to wastewater faces an uphill battle against our moral feelings of disgust, a major hurdle in bringing in vitro meats and recycled wastewater to reality.
All this aside, you have to wonder: Would a turd burger be any different than much of the inexplicable crap that gets passed off as hamburger today?
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