mellowtigger: (Terry 2010)
mellowtigger ([personal profile] mellowtigger) wrote2011-06-28 09:10 am
Entry tags:

crafted flavors

I've never once experienced a craving for a pill of any kind, not even multivitamin or B12. I'm lousy about taking pills on any schedule. I recently discovered that my multivitamins expired back in July 2010. The bottle is almost full.

The problem, I think, is that my body has no reason to crave these morsel-sized supplements. It has no cue on which to make an association to learn that pills are "good". So why not give it such a cue? That's how we learn that natural gas is an unsafe odor, after all. It's because we artificially give it that odor.

I think that vitamins should be chewable, flavored pills. Each kind of supplement should be assigned specific flavors (regardless of brand manufacturer) or odors, and each flavor should be unique so as never to be confused with an actual food dish flavor. For instance, what if multivitamins all tasted like broccoli-grapefruit? What if B12 pills all tasted like carrot-grape? I think our brains/bodies could learn to associate the flavor with the benefit, thereby giving us cravings for a pill when we were in short supply of a nutrient.

In semi-related news, it appears that people are making progress on production of vat-grown meat. I've written before that I would very much like to add such humane meat sources to my diet. These researchers recently conducted a comparison of production requirements based on their current process.

The researchers based their calculations on a process, using Cyanobacteria hydrolysate as a nutrient and energy source for growing muscle cells, that is being developed by co-author Dr Joost Teixeira de Mattos at the University of Amsterdam. At the moment this sort of tissue engineering technology is confined to the laboratory, but the researchers estimated what the various costs would be for producing 1000kg of cultured meat using a scaled-up version of the technology compared to the costs associated with livestock reared conventionally.

In comparison to conventionally-produced European meat, the team estimate cultured meat would involve approximately 7-45% lower energy use, 78-96% lower greenhouse gas emissions, 99% lower land use, and 82-96% lower water use depending on the type of meat.

- http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-lab-grown-meat-emissions-energy.html

I'd like daily pig ham for breakfast, chicken breast for lunch, and cow steaks for dinner, please!  All without harming any creature at all.  Nice!

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