Finally, all those hard-working food scientists are getting their share of the limelight. First, Dutch researchers announced they’d made baby steps toward growing pork in petri dishes. Now, New Zealand tells us that it has a herd of cows able to produced pre-skimmed milk. One cow even has a rogue gene for always-spreadable butter.
A report in the trade journal Chemistry & Industry (also released widely on the Internet) says that herds specifically bred to produce low-butterfat milk that’s high in polyunsaturates could become available to dairy farmers by 2011.
This does, of course, reverse a longstanding tradition of valuing certain dairy breeds, like the Jersey and the Guernsey, for their rich, high-butterfat milk. Just as pork enthusiasts have sought out fattier and more flavorful heritage breeds in the face of ever-leaner commercial pigs, cream-top lovers of the future might have to seek out old-fashioned cows to get their daily dose of dairy goodness.
Scientists are also excited about the discovery of a single cow—appropriately named Marge—that has what we’d have to call the Parkay gene. Butter made from Marge’s milk stays soft even when chilled. Could this be an end to the leave it out/keep it in the fridge debate long tyrannizing all butter-dependent households?
frightening. I like the heritage breed comparison. yes, these ideas provide convienence, but they homogenize a foodie’s world. No thanks, I like my food as nature intended.
Odd thing too…how does a cow produce spreadable butter? Butter is solid at cooler temps because of the chemistry of fats, margarine or shortening on the other hand are always spreadable because liquid fats (oils) have been processed to be partially-hydrogenated and therefore solid at room temp, this is where those lovely aretery clogging trans-fats that you hear so much about come from. So butter, because it’s made from the fat found in milk, can’t be naturally spreadable. Has this cow been genetically engineered to process more malleable fats?
I left the world of chemistry and engineering years ago because of unnecessary R&D like this.
…just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
Wow. I never thought pork would ever be able to be raised in a petri dish, it reminds me of the KFC internet rumor that their chickens were scientifically created blobs grown in hidden labs.
I prefer local and sustainable meats, dairy, and eggs. The site Sustainable Table (http://www.sustainabletable.org) is particularly helpful in finding local farms, restaurants, and other vendors that sell sustainably-raised meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs. I would much rather eat products not grown in labs!
The Marge and her daughters are NOT genetically engineered. They found her as a result of studying the far genetic outliers in the New Zealand dairy herd (where unusally they have 40 years of genetic data). She is a natural fluke and by studying Marge they found the gene. Marge is a jersey-fresian cross, which are commonly raised in New Zealand. I know this stuff, because I pitched the original story to Chemistry & Industry!
The butter is spreadable because it contains higher than normal levels of unsaturated fats than average milk.