Hacking Meat: "With the Googleburger and Soylent, Silicon Valley Is Officially on a Quest for Food"

From Motherboard:

Image: Cultured Beef

On August 4th, the first lab-grown burger was subjected to a taste-test. The prognosis? "Not unpleasant." Needs salt, maybe cheese. The same day, Google's Sergey Brin was revealed as the benefactor of the expensive synthetic meat project—that single hamburger, the internet loves to point out, cost $330,000.
Brin's lab meat isn't the only high-profile food innovation Silicon Valley is serving up at the moment, though it's probably the most expensive. Convention-thwarting food products and ideas have won headlines in recent months, from that stem cell hamburger to meat-hacking conferences to Soylent, the internet-famous food replacement serum. Part of the reason that these products are garnering so much media attention is surely because they're being "hacked" by Silicon Valley's bigwigs and aspirants alike.

Last March, Bill Gates wrote that "the time was ripe for food innovation" in a piece published on Mashable. Mr. Brin evidently shares the sentiment.

"It's really just proof of concept right now, we're trying to create the first cultured beef hamburger," the Google co-founder explained in a short film made for his lab burger's debut. "From there I'm optimistic that we can really scale by leaps and bounds." That language should sound familiar.

"The food industry is prime for technological disruption," Diane Gould, the founder of Food+Tech Connect said last June. Gould had organized the Hack/Meat Silicon Valley conference held at Stanford that month, and convened food-enthusiast tech entrepreneurs from around the nation.

You see the trend here: The floodgates are opening, and Silicon Valley is throwing itself into the culinary world. Its leading proponents are applying largely the same approach, ethos, and lexicon  to improving food technology as they have to information technology. As with software, apps, and social media services, so with faux meats, prepackaged meals, and nutrient shakes. It's not in Silicon Valley's nature simply to seek to invent a better-tasting lunch meat; these efforts are aiming transform the established food system altogether....MUCH MORE