Forty years ago the company I then worked for produced a
meat substitute called KESP. It received a considerable amount of publicity at
the time including an appearance on the BBC's flagship Tomorrow's World.
The company specialised in the manufacture of synthetic textile
fibres and the basic principal behind KESP was that a paste was made using soya
flour which was then spun into a fibre in exactly the same way as nylon or
polyester fibres are made. This simulated the fibrous nature of meat and the
fibres where bonded together to form meaty chunks and even - if my recollection
of the Tomorrow's World programme is correct - a whole ham.
This article in the New Scientist describes the 1972 press
conference at which the product was launched. The company's employees were able
to purchase frozen chicken and beef flavoured chunks and mince from the company
shop. These could then be used in stews, curries and Bolognese sauce. In due
course the company sold the production technology and the entire pilot plant to
a food company. I can find no reference to its continued production and
searching for the KESP brand name reveals that it is defunct.
Interestingly a research paper published in 1975 dealing
with synthetic meat products reached the following conclusion: in spite of initial resistance, new
developments will mean products will very soon resemble best meat in texture
and further developments in the flavour and colour to the protein will make it
difficult to distinguish real from imitation.
To the best of my knowledge the only product that ever came
close to fulfilling that prophecy is Quorn which is produced from a fungus
grown as a live culture in vats. This latest development - and here I must
confess that I am at a loss as to which of the 625 articles pulled up by Google
to link to - uses stem cells from cattle to grow muscle cells in a laboratory
so the resulting product really is meat, not a vegetarian substitute.
Incidentally, at the same time they were developing edible spun
protein, to give KESP its technical definition, the same company had a team
working on synthetic tobacco. I was a smoker back then and tried one of the
cigarettes. Actually I was supposed to smoke a whole pack of twenty but one
puff was enough! A smoker who has inadvertently lit the wrong end of a tipped
cigarette will have some idea of what the version of synthetic tobacco I was
given to try tasted like. The rest of you will have to use your imaginations.
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