h a l f b a k e r ySugar and spice and unfettered insensibility.
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Spicing up those boring old animals with some old fashioned genetic tampering:"Tastes like chicken," will become a thing of the past. Using gene splicing, scientists will create animals that are already half way gourmet! Popular new hybrid species could include Garlic x Chicken, Cow x Onion, Pork x
Mint, etc.
Why Not Go the Whole Hog?
http://www.halfbake...al_20Farm_20Animals
May contain nuts. Also link to "Scientists Cross Pigs With Spinach" news story. [lostdog, Oct 04 2004]
[link]
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[mfd removed after reading the pig-spinach article] |
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However, if you can get a pig to smell like mint, I'll change this to a bun. [+] Mmmmmmm mint AND spinach!
Now, how about a cow that has cabbage and garlic in the brisket. |
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Double Chicken™ tastes more like chicken than chicken tastes like. |
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//any gene expressing the proteins required to produce the chemical flavors mentioned by [El_Zaque] could be spliced//
These chemicals, from my grade school science class, are largely starches, proteins, sugars and oils. These are all the result of photosynthesis. I don't doubt the ability to splice vegetables genes to animal genes, but I seriously doubt if these new creations will ever survive cell splitting beyond the petri –dish(if even that far). How would a chicken produce the flavorful oils in garlic? How would a bovine produce the succulent sugars found in the onion bulb? How would a pig produce the refreshing oils of mint? Mmmmmm...mint. |
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Perhaps it would be more straight forward to put these falvors in the syringe allong with all the other drugs we give these animals, but that would be another post. |
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A large amount of meat flavour comes from the chemical processes that go on during cooking - the Maillard reaction, or scheme of reactions as it should more properly be known, are vital to this. Therefore changing the composition of the meat is only part of the trick - you'd need to think about how that composition would change with the various reactions that go on between sugars, proteins and lipids. |
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In order to implement this idea we'd need to know the genes responsible for making particular flavour compounds in the garlic, mint or onion and then be sure that this would be expressed in the animal in the same way. The dimethyl disulphide which is partly responsible for garlic odour (and therefore flavour) will come from a particular biosynthetic pathway which probably doesn't exist in cows. |
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More importantly, the animal muscle will have a very different composition from the garlic bulb, particularly in terms of the lipid (fat) and water composition. This water-lipid interface is hugely important for the distribution of flavour compounds and our ability to detect them. Many flavour chemicals are fat-soluble, but we generally only detect these when they are pushed into a water phase (since they are more easily volatilised). Hence a flavour chemical in one water-lipid mixture may be easily detected. Up the lipid content and fat-soluble flavour compounds will be dissolved and undetectable. |
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//Cow x Onion // Like my eyes don't water enough passing a cow pasture. Sorry, but I'm getting too many mental images of mint-green, leafy pigs waddling about. |
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hazel said what I was going to say. |
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Actually all you have to do is make it so so a good pecentage of the animals diet is composed of the corresponding spice. Their meat will pick up some of the flavor. For example, many people enjoy eating Prarrie Sage Grouse, as its diet consists mainly of sage and thus the bird tastes like sage. |
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