Would you eat this?  I'm sorry.  I don't care how health conscious I try to be, even if it's low fat and higher protein I just don't think I can eat poop.  I can't believe I even just wrote that sentence!

 

If you think meatless, genetically-modified (GM) soy food products are a poor alternative to real meat, wait until you see the latest in vegetarian meat replacement technology. According to a recent Inhabitat report, Japanese researcher Mitsuyuki Ikeda has developed a new kind of meatless burger made from soy, steak sauce essence, and -- brace yourself -- protein matter extracted from human excrement.

Ikeda's poop burger is literally derived from "sewage mud," which is just a nice way of saying that it was created from human waste. By extracting the protein and lipids from this "mud," Ikeda was able to take these components, add a reaction enhancer to them, and process the slurry into a meat-like product. Ikeda then added a steak flavoring agent, soy sauce, and food coloring to the mix, and voila, an imitation meat product that he says tastes just like real beef.

According to reports, the final meat-like product is 63 percent protein, 25 percent carbohydrates, nine percent minerals, and three percent lipids.

"I admit that few people would be keen to eat it knowing it's made of human excrement," said Ikeda in an interview. "As far as the cost is concerned, because at the moment it includes the cost of research, our artificial meat is 10 or 20 times more expensive than normal meat. But once the research is complete and it's put on the market, we'll probably be able to price it at roughly the same level as normal meat."

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