Meat from sewage: how would you market this?

“It’s probably no worse than anything you’re already eating!”
No, I couldn’t eat this…God, I feel like the commercials would be some horrific spoof of 2 Girls 1 Cup..

What a world we live in. What a video.

I can imagine people buying this, certainly. As pet food, and as long as it’s made by someone with a genuine commitment to quality control. Obviously, it’s a long time until someone would buy this knowingly from a Chinese producer, for example, given the very visible product adulteration that has been emanating from there in recent years.

I also don’t think it will be purchased for any reason (other than novelty) as long as the price is merely “competitive” with existing meat prices. It’ll have to be a lot lower – as pet food already is.

So, yeah, if it were marketed as “Alpo” or “Purina” it could find a ready market. As New York Sewer Strip Steak, I hardly think so.

Goes in the same way it comes out.

In reality, I don’t think it can work, because sewage is made up from all of the stuff our body can’t digest or use, that’s why it ends up as sewage in the first place. Or do you have some type of theory that I’m unaware of?

What a way to spread spongiform encephalopathy. That’s the kind of process where prions thrive.

Marketing tag line- “Tastes like shit!”

By only mentioning where it comes from when you absolutely had to, and using terms like “synthesized from recycled organics.” You’d also want to play up the overall efficiency of the system, and present the… compound… as a product of the bacteria (in turn presented as ‘micro-organisms’), not of the sewer lines.
I think that it would have the most success as an additive.

* sigh * Thank you, Japan, for being eternally weird.

You could maybe a Classic Hollywood “What a Dump!” campaign:

Bette Davis

and

Elizabeth Taylor

along the lines of the “Got Milk?” campaign

or maybe you could go for sort of a niche marketing concept and go for the Coprophilia/Coprophagia consumer. “Shit: It’s out of the closet and it’s what’s for dinner!”

I personally will never, ever eat a “meat substitute” made out of mine or anyone else’s shit. But I will continue to do my part by providing the raw materials.

And yes, I will join @Nullo in thanking the Japanese for being eternally weird, yet thrifty and ingeneous. Though I believe the Japanese have been recycling human feces to use as fertilizer since at least the 9th century. I think they should maybe revive that business rather than the recycling human waste as food nastiness.

You had to ask this question the night I made meatloaf for dinner… yuk.

lol@lilycoyote… vegetarian instead?

I suppose it could be marketed to people seeking a low carb/high protein meat substitute? Atkins burger anyone?

I personally will pass a motion that it should never appear on a menu at my house.

@Bellatrix I’ve been an on again off again vegetarian since I was thirteen, currently a meat eater though after reading this question I swore I wouldn’t eat anything I hadn’t grown or slaughtered myself but I’ll be over that by tomorrow. I may give up any meat that is ground or processed in anyway until I have gotten past this question. If I eat any meat, chicken or fish it better look like it came right off the animal, that’s all I can say.

I will pass the same motion too! This may be the beginning of a whole bowel movement! ;-)

Or a heck of a lot of puns around that topic… I hear you! @lillycoyote! I might have salad for dinner.

The fact is, even though it is made from feces, it isn’t. If you think about it, even “real” meat that you eat is “made” from feces. For example, manure may be used to grow plants which are fed to cattle, which are then slaughtered and packaged to grocery stores. A feces molecule can be traced from the moment it is spread on soil to when it enters a cow, but by then, chemical processes have done their work and it is no longer feces. The same applies here.

If a Japanese lab made it, I’d eat it. I’m guessing the process sorts out the good bacteria from the toxic chemicals and uses their protein to make the meat.
The video is quite funny, from the hand shaped pointer to the experiment description on the refrigerator.
If I were marketing this I would avoid discussing the source and focus on the positives:

Cruelty free meat
Consistent quality meat.
No grizzle, bones or animal parts
XX grams of protein in every bite. XX calories, XX grams of fat.
Disease free. No Mad Cow, No E. Coli O-157. Guaranteed.

At the press conference I would address the inevitable first joke scientifically by stating molecules are the same no matter their source. We breath air that statistically has molecules from the Shogun’s last breathe (or Caeser’s or Jesus’s). The water we drink has water molecules from the urine of our ancestors. The food we eat today has nitrogen from the manure of dinosaurs and the first inhabitants of this land.
Our process merely involves the recycling of molecules.

But the biggest marketing ploy would be to have some “Idol” eat some and pay her to say it was delicious.

Now that I think about it, Tayler used “bacto-steak” as a foodstuff in his sci-fi webcomic, Schlock Mercenary. Other authors have had similar concepts. So we could even present it as one of those futuristic things that we’ve finally been able to accomplish.

Soylent Brown is from people!

Parc chops anyone?

Shitake mushroom substitute?