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In celebration of the fact that we’re now slightly further into the Future than we were a while ago, I’ve decided to write a short series about Foodie Developments Of The Future. Part 1 – Cloned Meat.

Sooner or later, it would seem very likely that we’ll develop the technology to clone meat from cells, rather than hacking it from the corpses of dead animals. (That lovely image brought to you by…). But what are the implications of that?

Well, first of all, you’ve got the likely source of the cloning technology. The people furthest down this particular road right now aren’t foodies, they’re medics – cloned organs will be huge business if they’re possible. Medical trials have already been completed on, erm, bladders – according to Wikipedia," In April 2006, scientists reported a successful trial of seven bladders grown in-vitro and given to humans "

So the first meat that we can clone in the lab is likely to be human. But it won’t have come from a human – it’ll be entirely artificial. And if vegans would be prepared to eat vat-grown bacon, why can’t everyone dine on a nice bit of well-cooked long pig?

The vegan issue is going to be another huge can of worms, of course. Is vat-grown meat vegetarian-friendly? We’ll see another splitting of the veggie movements, as those who don’t eat meat for religious reasons or because they just don’t like it are split by the test-tube from those who won’t eat meat from killed animals, but are perfectly happy to eat the stuff that’s had exactly as much conciousness as tofu.

In high-end restaurants, tuning the meat will be the concern. Initially, there’ll be a lot of resistance to totally even-textured, flat, boring meat. But as we start to learn how to tune the process, we’ll be able to dial up exactly the elements we want in a steak – a little bit of marbling, say, but not too much, and about .5% connective tissue…

Food poisoning concerns will be another massive change. There’s no reason why vat-grown beef should ever have e. coli, or chicken be filled with salmonella. Chicken sashimi, anyone?

All of which will have nothing on the results of the first lengthy conversation that someone like Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adria has with a cloning scientist.

After all, if we can tweak the meat and reproduce it, there’s no reason that we have to stick with meats that already exist. How about something with the texture of salmon but the deep meaty taste of venison? Something about half-way between crocodile and horse? Quail breast if the quail had been sixteen feet tall?

We’ll need names for these new meats, of course. Handily, there are some obvious ones readily available, and I’m sure someone with a fairytale sensibility like Dr Blumenthal will come up with the idea fairly quickly.

“New on the Fat Duck tasting menu 2021: Confit Unicorn rump steak with a cockatrice jus, served on a bed of…”

(Thanks to Charlie Stross for brainstorming up a lot of the ideas in this post)

A happy new year to all of you from everyone at KKC! Looking forward to lots of cool banter/cooking/science/bad plans in the new year!

(And yes, those will include “better spam filtering”)

It’s nearly time for the annual drinking and falling over fest here in Scotland, after which we’ll all attempt to remember a) the number of the year, and b) our names, addresses, and the reason we’re wearing a policeman’s helmet.

And that means it’s time for us at KKCook to think about future plans.

First, we want to think about the website and the way we deliver KKC. What would you like to see on here? We’ve already heard a few people mention a forum, so we’re looking into that. What else? Photo feeds? More Facebook stuff? Better spam filtering (actually, we’re definitely getting that anyway)? Other cool ideas to make us world-famous and popular?

Fire ’em off!

I’m actually on holiday with my folks here and not technically meant to be blogging, but I had to share this one with you all (although it’ll be of most use to our UK readers).

Sainsburys are currently selling a brilliant little double whisk thingy. It’s not a balloon whisk, but one of the old double interlocking whisk style. It’s great – electric, of course, five speeds, and I’ve used it tonight for a dinner party to whisk up eggs for a souffle (successful, I might add – thanks, Cooking for Engineers) and foam from lecithin.

It’s from Sainsbury’s Basics range.

Oh, and it costs £3.97.

Including VAT.

That’s less than the eggs I used it to whisk.

Need a whisk? Might as well get one, considering it costs about the same as a pint and a half of decent beer.

Isn’t that fantastic? Any similar bargains? Anything Stateside our US readers should know about?

Here’s hoping everyone had a fantastic Christmas. If you’ll recall, just before you all had your turkey-infused indulgence-fest, we were talking about how to live on locally-sourced ingredients through the medium of the Fife Diet. When you last joined Your Heroes, we’d completed seven days on the Diet without dying—now here, below, are our thoughts from immediately afterwards.

Did we change our minds after several months’ hindsight? Frankly, I’m not sure. Let us know what you think in the comments.

And now, the end is near. Here are our journal entries for the last day of the Diet. We’ll be back after Christmas with our posts from the aftermath.

It’s the last-but-one day of the Fife Diet Blog Retrospective, and I’m running out of cool things to say as an introduction. If you’ve seen the episode, you already know how it all turns out. If you’ve not, why not?More details, and pin-sharp deathless prose, are available below for your reading pleasure.

It’s almost a year since we did the Fife Diet, which was in late March/early April last year – so have we changed our minds since then on the various problems we found?

That’s the end of this season of Kamikaze Cookery – we’ll be back in the Spring with more, and of course the blogging will continue in the meanwhile, but for now, thanks very much for watching our first series!

I’ll have more details on the future of KKC after Christmas – keep watching the skies.

And also the Interwebs.

When we last saw Our Heroes, they’d managed to complete half a week of Fife Diethood without dying. Can their four-day winning streak be extended? Find out only in the Fife Diet Retrospective Blogfest!

New viewers may be interested in seeing a collection of all our Fife Dietary goodness, here in one place.

For the uninitiated: there’s a locally sourced diet called the Fife Diet which has been getting a lot of UK press. Fife is just up the road from us, and frankly, we didn’t think that it would be a very good idea to live on its produce for a few days, let alone a year.

So we decided to try it. For a week. For Science.

Part 1

Part 2

The Blogs

Introduction
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4

And it’s the answer to the question you’ve all been asking (and I have indeed been asked multiple times) – did we survive the Week of Fife?

Some of you may be curious about the methodology behind the rice/potatoes comparison in the episode.

Firstly, to be blunt, this is definitely back-of-an-envelope level stuff rather than a controlled study. However, even at that level, it demonstrates that there’s clearly a lot of variation in energy and hence carbon emissions from cooking, probably more than travel in a lot of cases.

CO2 emissions for travel were taken from a major climate change site (can’t recall which one, sorry), and the capacity of the plane was taken from the Wikipedia entry on 747s. I assumed that the rice was being air-freighted, which is probably wrong, so in actual fact the carbon emissions for travel are likely to have been much lower.

Cooking figures were assuming an induction hob, because that’s what I had the wattage figures to hand for, and also because an induction hob is, according to the stats I’ve seen, about as carbon-efficient as gas and a lot more carbon-efficient than normal electric cooking. I’m assuming a one-person portion of both rice and potatoes, although it’s me so it’s a pretty large one-person portion. The rice is cooked with 2.5 times its volume of water, a la Nigel Slater, whilst the potatoes are boiled. (Roast potatoes come out orders of magnitude less efficient still).

So – possibly not exactly right, but where I had the chance, I made assumptions in favour of the “food miles” camp, rather than against them.

As a related note, this does throw up one important point. If you’re concerned about your food-related carbon emissions, and you have a conventional electric cooker, you’ll probably make a much greater dent in your emissions by switching to gas or induction (twice as efficient) than any amount of local shopping!

Anyway – there it is! Fife Diet over. We’ll have a summary mini-episode a bit later on, discussing the week as a whole, and we might post soon about what we’d do differently to make up a livable locally-sourced diet, but in the meantime – what do you think? Have you tried living locally? Is it something you’d give a go, or have we put you off?

Thinking about getting the DVD, but haven’t yet?

Our Manufacturing Department (aka, erm, me) is going on Christmas holiday on Tuesday. However, if you want to get our Season 0 part 1 DVD (with commentaries on every episode and a bunch of extras, lest you’ve forgotten) before Christmas day, we can still get it to you if you’re in the UK!

Technically, the Royal Mail say that you’ve already missed the final posting date. However, if you order using this link, we’ll post it out to you Special Delivery, meaning it’ll arrive for Christmas Day:

It’s a bit more expensive because it’s coming next day delivery, but it’ll get there!

This only applies to the UK, sadly. If you’re outside the UK, please feel free to still buy a DVD, but it’ll arrive after Xmas now.

Today on the Fife Diet Retrospective Channel, some minor successes with limited ingredients….

In today’s exciting installment of our daily Fife Diet journals, Hugh narrowly averts crisis, Alex grazes, and Paul rediscovers sugar.

We’re continuing with our daily journal entries from Fife Diet Week. Paul subverts the dominant paradigm! Hugh eats offal! All this and more herein!

Don’t forget that the concluding episode will be released on Monday (the 22nd), not Wednesday, this week.