[HN Gopher] World's first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k b...
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World's first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day
Author : hochmartinez
Score : 221 points
Date : 2021-06-28 11:42 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.slashgear.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.slashgear.com)
| shaunregenbaum wrote:
| I worked in this lab! Would be glad to answer questions.
| kadonoishi wrote:
| From a comment above,
|
| > But you have to feed the cells. And you can't just grow some
| plants and feed it to the cells, you have to manufacture a very
| precise blend of chemicals (amino acids, sugars, surfactants,
| antioxidants, etc.) at >99% purity for each one. Often
| extremely nasty solvents are involved in the production
| process. Usually, some sort of petroleum product is a
| feedstock.
|
| How would you assess these statements?
| shaunregenbaum wrote:
| I would say that's quite ridiculous. While the serum is very
| important when experimenting, later on the goal is to grow
| the cells serum-free (from what I understand). These types of
| cells would die from any high exposure to petroleum...
| Mvhsz wrote:
| Have you tried it? How was it?
| shaunregenbaum wrote:
| I haven't tried it personally (I worked in a different part
| of the lab), but I've been told that its pretty
| indistinguishable from ground chicken/beef.
| deegles wrote:
| Is it just meat or also fat? How does the nutritional content
| compare to say beef liver or a regular steak?
| shaunregenbaum wrote:
| The main IP in the lab is replicating the fat + other stuff
| in meat. It compares to average ground beef by design.
| Trufa wrote:
| Is it only burger style meat? Grinded? Or are they trying to
| replicate the shape and consistency of a steak too?
| shaunregenbaum wrote:
| Future Meat is focused on ground meat/chicken products. There
| are other companies in Israel focused on more refined
| products, check out Aleph Farms. More refined products are
| wildly more expensive though as you can't easily grow it in
| vats.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| The price seems to be ~$3.90 to produce chicken breast. Given
| that I regularly find chicken breast in a store for $1.99, I'll
| assume that's still ~3x as costly as just farm raising chickens.
| It will be interesting if subsidies can change this though. The
| negative externalities of raising animals must be huge. The jobs
| tied up in these industries are enormous as well though.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| That makes it cheaper than many of the vegan substitutes I've
| seen. It means that even without subsidies, this is
| economically viable, not in the future but right now (unlike
| the $20000 burgers that I've seen mentioned a few years ago).
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >The price seems to be ~$3.90 to produce chicken breast. Given
| that I regularly find chicken breast in a store for $1.99
|
| $2 Chicken is non-organic. Organic is ~$5 at Costco.
| EspadaV9 wrote:
| 3x the price isn't too bad. Plant based "meat" is usually a bit
| more expensive than regular meat, and for some people paying 3x
| to get "real" meat without the need to kill an animal will be a
| worthwhile trade. Add in the environmental benefits too and it
| could give some people some peace of mind.
| XorNot wrote:
| 3x not to torture chickens for their short lifespan in
| horrific conditions is worth it even if you're not a moral
| vegan. The poultry industry is horrendous, and dominated by
| demands of corporate boards rather then farmers to boot.
|
| I already try to buy free range, but the grim reality is that
| label can't possibly account for the amount of production it
| supposedly represents. Taking chickens with nervous systems
| out of the entire process is preferable.
| justsid wrote:
| This is where I fall on the topic as well, and I think so
| do many others. This seems like an easy way to bootstrap
| and scale this, start with a premium on the product pricing
| and have people who can afford it fund the scaling. At the
| end, economies of scale will bring the price down for the
| rest.
|
| I can also totally see people buying this occasionally to
| supplement their regular meat consumptions.
| Retric wrote:
| 5k burgers a day is a long way from mass production. It seems
| completely reasonable to expect a 70-90% price drop from scale.
| Until then selling at a premium to people who love meat but
| don't want animals slaughtered seems like a viable.
|
| Where things get interesting is if it actually becomes cheaper
| than farm grown meat. Over half of all farm land is devoted to
| meat production, even a 50% switch to lab meat would have
| dramatic knock on effects. On possibility is a dramatic
| increase in bio fuel production.
| vidarh wrote:
| I love meat, and don't have a problem with eating slaughtered
| animals, but I still might pay a premium for these kinds of
| products if the environmental benefits hold up and the taste
| is close enough. I think there's a massive premium market.
| Even more so if they can start producing speciality products
| that are "better" than real meat along some other axis (e.g.
| embedded flavourings; more perfect distribution of fat etc.)
| mrinterweb wrote:
| $3.90 is an incredible drop in price considering what it was
| just a couple years ago. I'm certain the price will come down
| more as more competition and the technology improves. At the
| rate the price is falling for lab-grown meat, I'd be surprised
| if it is not cheaper than animal meat in a couple years.
| https://vegnews.com/2019/7/price-of-lab-grown-meat-to-plumme...
| xiphias2 wrote:
| There are quite good predictions for each meat type to be
| disrupted by cheaper vegan alternatives in the future, but
| what's consistent is that it will happen in the next 10-20
| years.
| trainsplanes wrote:
| I see free range chicken breasts for way more than that. If
| they're targeting the consumers who buy based on ethics,
| they've already reached a not-unreasonable price.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| It's possible, but I think that is a very difficult market to
| compete in. I'd wager most ethically minded buyers are
| wealthy enough to prefer buying free range organic chicken
| breast than lab grown meat, if they're purchasing meat at
| all. The long term play for this is almost certainly at
| beating factory farms on price, which has an added benefit of
| ethical and environmental gains.
|
| If economies of scale exist, this is a no brainer investment
| opportunity. I wouldn't be concerned at all about their
| current price dynamics and need to earn a short term return.
| edanm wrote:
| > I'd wager most ethically minded buyers are wealthy enough
| to prefer buying free range organic chicken breast than lab
| grown meat.
|
| I would easily pay more for lab grown chicken. Partly
| because I believe it's even more ethical, partly because I
| really don't trust so-called "free range organic" chicken
| (I already buy it when I can, but I expect the difference
| is minuscule).
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Would you do so if it was cheaper to purchase from a
| local farmshare? Because it probably would be. I think I
| would not.
| edanm wrote:
| Yes, I think so. I mean, I'm not totally clear on the
| ethics of raising animals in a farmshare, but I am clear
| that the lab-grown meat is totally fine ethically, so
| I'll do that.
|
| (To be clear, I eat meat now, but as far as I'm aware
| there's no easy way for me as a consumer to consume only
| meat from non-factory-farming methods.)
| sva_ wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that the poultry industry is already receiving
| major agricultural subsidies to get to that price.
| Falling3 wrote:
| Yep. Animal ag is both directly and indirectly subsidized
| pretty heavily in the US. If we removed their subsidies and
| moved them to lab grown meat, the economics work out in favor
| of the latter much sooner.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| That's almost certainly true, in the very least in the form
| of corn subsidies for feed. My point was more that there are
| millions of jobs in the poultry industry alone. This is an
| existential threat to an enormous job market. One that is
| likely to become very messy. I think the US will struggle
| greatly to embrace this quickly, but nations that don't have
| large farming populations have a huge incentive to create a
| strong lab grown meat industry and export it. Very big
| economic opportunity, as well as another impending wave of
| poverty and irrelevance for traditional players.
| xjlin0 wrote:
| Not only benefits from human economical point of view, but
| traditional farming also help environment in certain area.
| Animals convert plants (grass and beans from solar energy) to
| manure for benefiting soil. It's human that didn't evenly
| distribute it well. Lab-grown meat doesn't have that yet.
|
| ps. Not comparing wild ecology to human farming, just
| comparing traditional farming with lab-grown tech here.
| Avtomatk wrote:
| > I'll assume that's still ~3x as costly as just farm raising
| chickens.
|
| 3x? it's not even double
| dijit wrote:
| I'll assume you missed the fact that this is the store price
| vs the cost price.
|
| If you can buy a chicken breast for $1.99 in a store then the
| actual _cost_ for the meat is probably close to 80c-$1.20
| t0mbstone wrote:
| This is kind of a weird question, but how exactly does anyone
| prove that this is actually lab grown meat and isn't just normal
| meat that has been turned into meat paste and then sold for twice
| as much as normal meat?
|
| I mean, obviously, they wouldn't do this at first. They would
| wait until everyone was complacent and used to eating lab grown
| meat before they started supplementing their production.
|
| As long as creating lab-grown meat is more expensive than growing
| real animals and butchering them, there will be an economic
| incentive for this sort of fraud.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| What is lab grown meat? Is it alive? Are there any nerves? Does
| it just absorb nutrients in a pasty vat? Is there skin? Does it
| get cancer if you left it too long on there? Can you get it to
| soak up extra nutrients or make new meat types?
| t0mbstone wrote:
| I want to know the answers to these questions, too!
| edanm wrote:
| The economic reason for brands is exactly to develop trust.
|
| But also (and quite possibly more importantly), there is a
| _lot_ of government oversight and regulation when it comes to
| food.
|
| And also also, people could sue for fraud.
| madacol wrote:
| The promise is that it should eventually be cheaper than normal
| meat, otherwise they'll fail
| t0mbstone wrote:
| Realistically, even fake meat sold as "lab grown" could be
| cheaper than normal meat if what they are doing is turning
| low quality meat into paste and forming it into shapes and
| stuff.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| You can ask this about a lot of foods. How do you know your
| baby formula isn't just crushed white building material mixed
| with water? (This happened btw, see melamine baby formula).
|
| In the end big conspiracies like this leak out since there's a
| lot of employees in the supply chain and trust in the brand is
| broken. The Chinese go out of their way to buy Australian and
| New Zealand branded baby formula to this day because trust in
| their own local brands was destroyed.
|
| So this is unlikely. Possible and similar short sighted things
| have occurred in management before (see Boeing) but it would be
| ridiculously poor management to let something like this happen.
| bronzeage wrote:
| Another interesting part of it is that it might be able to
| produce kosher pork meat. The reason pork is forbidden is because
| it's not possible to slaughter pork in a kosher way, but if no
| animal dies, it might be kosher.
| OJFord wrote:
| I'm excited for these to be readily available and around normal
| meat pricing - but articles never seem to show any photos. I'm
| really curious how they actually 'grow' it, what sort of form it
| takes, and then what the final product texture is like or how
| versatile it is.
|
| For example, the '5k burgers' figure comes from dividing the mass
| produced by some nominal figure for a burger. But is it actually
| mince they're producing? Is it minceable meat that could also be
| sold as steaks or .. 'joints' or 'ribs' (-like meat without
| there, presumably, ever being a bone)? Are they (expecting to be)
| able to differentiate different cuts, sirloin, rump, etc. that
| are pretty different when naturally grown?
|
| Or is it just a sort of vague meaty thing that you can have in
| whatever shape you want, but is pretty homogeneous, and like an
| 'average' chunk of meat, or whichever piece they sampled for it
| initially?
| armchairhacker wrote:
| It looks like the lab-grown meat looks indistinguishable from
| real meat. They've even got salmon sashimi with the texture of
| real salmon. (source: captions in
| https://www.fooddive.com/news/cell-based-meat-plants-come-
| on...)
|
| I doubt it tastes indistinguishable though, from hearing other
| reports of tasting lab-grown meat.
| OJFord wrote:
| Oh wow, I hadn't heard of it being done with fish, that's
| great. Just earlier today I was looking at my (frankly
| ridiculous) dill crop and wondering what to use it with that
| isn't salmon.
| awillen wrote:
| The cuts are exactly what I wonder. Burgers seem like the easy
| starting point for the same reason that the Impossibles of the
| world started with them - the texture is fairly easy to
| achieve.
|
| But I would think here that it would be possible to grow
| specific cuts - start with pluripotent stem cells and get them
| to develop into the right thing. Whether or not that's what
| they're doing now isn't clear, and I'd love to know if that's a
| short step from burgers or a huge leap.
|
| Then beyond that, I wonder if all steaks will end up being A5
| wagyu grade. Is it more difficult to grow a steak that's more
| vs. less marbled with fat?
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I wonder why they're doing beef. I would have assumed a
| lion/woolly mammoth/T-Rex burger would have a much bigger market
| and markup.
| torcete wrote:
| How do they prevent infections without an immune system?
| mattwest wrote:
| sterile environments
| wuschel wrote:
| Really cool they made it happen. I looked at the topic years ago,
| and was pushed away from serum (e.g. FBS) costs, and potential PR
| backlash coming from using genetic modification or cell line
| immortalizion to decrease unit costs. Alas, they seem to have
| done it w/o these modifications. I need to crawl into their
| patents.
|
| There are clear advantages to produce animal protein via
| biotechnology, although I wonder if the formulation of more
| complex end product's (e.g. a bio identical steak) will be doable
| within the cost frame.
|
| I love how they made the PR in the whole industry: very
| ideologic, almost like Apple. I wonder how the acceptance rate
| will be. Interesting times for pharmers.
|
| At the end, it is just another technology leap like the Haber
| Bosch Process. Sustainable management of resources and human
| population control is what really counts.
| bckr wrote:
| I would also like to express pure excitement for this
| development.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| The problem with most lab-grown meat currently is that it still
| requires fetal bovine serum, which you need to kill cows for...
| djrogers wrote:
| FTA: >At this point, the facility is already able to produce
| lamb, chicken, and pork products without using genetic
| modification or animal serum. Future Meat says that it will
| soon also be able to start production on beef, too.
|
| So seems like they've solved that little conundrum.
| obiefernandez wrote:
| I worry that if the premium for lab grown meat is high enough,
| we'll eventually have unethical actors selling real meat as fake
| meat (with no easy way for the consumer to tell the difference.)
| rglover wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eCeX0oN4uw
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Does this meat have the same nutritional value, as in percentage
| of proteins and fats? Same taste as the real thing?
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I always wonder about the morality questions. This is like a lab
| experiment for subjective morality.
|
| For the sake of the experiment, let's assume the sci-fi writers
| are right, and eating animals will eventually be considered
| immoral. This is an extreme stance at the moment (hello PETA) but
| let's assume it will eventually be accepted as the only moral
| stance.
|
| How long will it be between the introduction of lab-grown meat
| until killing animals for food is banned? Is this a generational
| thing (so older people still consider eating animals to be
| acceptable, while younger people do not), or is it a country-wide
| thing (countries move to ban eating animals one by one, driven by
| a general shift in moral attitude), or what? How does this change
| in morality propagate through society?
|
| Will we get to the point where statues of now-famous people are
| pulled down because they ate animals? Assuming some variant of
| "cancel culture" exists then, will that act retroactively and
| currently-lionised people get cancelled because they are
| carnivores, even though the current culture that they exist in
| considers it acceptable?
|
| Will we see clever re-interpretations of religious texts dealing
| with the eating of animals? Will we get religious divisions
| between different interpretations? Will some people refuse to
| accept the general moral stance on eating animals because their
| religious text says it's acceptable? How does this interaction
| between objective religious morality and subjective secular
| morality work?
|
| It's going to be really interesting to watch this unfold.
| jalk wrote:
| And then the Synthianians will appear - that's the ones only
| eating lab grown food, since plants are living beings as well
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| That's interesting, I've not heard that term before, thanks
| :)
|
| So if you assume that at some point in the future everyone
| becomes Synthianian (Synthian?) for moral reasons, is it
| immoral to eat plants now?
| sound1 wrote:
| I would say it is less immoral to be a vegetarian because
| you only kill the plant instead of killing an animal that
| killed and ate the plant ;-)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I think "meat from animals" will quickly become considered
| higher quality, or luxury.
|
| We can kind-of see this now with seafood, where "wild caught"
| is more expensive than farmed.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Maybe for the near term.
|
| For the longer term I'd think it would be more like
| cannibalism which humanity likely widely engaged in early on
| but very few would even consider today.
|
| Just gross and icky and "you'd eat an animal!!!??"
| (disclaimer, I eat lots of meat).
| toxik wrote:
| I'm not so sure about that. Lab grown meat has the potential
| of offering consistent quality at consistent prices,
| something that's hard to do in fish farms. You're still
| breeding animals, but far from their natural habitat and far
| from their natural diet -- with lab grown meat, the equation
| changes in that sense.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That's the theory, but in practice, lab/factory meat will
| become (much?) cheaper than 'natural' meat, so even if in
| terms of flavor and consistency there is no difference
| (which I doubt), 'organic' meat will be positioned as the
| luxury product.
| thehappypm wrote:
| It will take a while for lab-grown meat to match the
| variety available for regular meat, especially on the
| high-end market. Consider a steak, and how many cuts of
| steak there are from the same animal: T-bone, filet
| mignon, ribeye, flank, brisket.. the list goes on and on.
| Then within that, there are different breeds and styles
| of beef, like veal or Wagyu. Then on top of that you even
| have alternative species altogether, like lamb, which
| also have different styles and cuts. Lab-grown might
| eventually catch up but there's a lot of ground to cover.
| vidarh wrote:
| Lab-grown meat can _exceed that_ thought.
|
| You can make cuts that are bigger than they currently can
| be. You can adjust composition, fat content, potentially
| embed flavourings directly into the meat, or combine
| types of meat, or create types of meat that doesn't even
| exist today.
|
| So I'm sure it will take time, but there's also a fairly
| good chance what will win people over will be that it'll
| be possible to provide products that just doesn't exist
| from "natural" sources.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Man made diamonds greatly exceed the quality of the ones
| dug up from the ground, yet there is still a strong
| natural diamond market.
|
| People just form an emotional attachment to 'natural'
| things.
| vidarh wrote:
| Yes, but how long will that persist for diamonds?
|
| I also think this is a lot less likely to happen with
| meat. With diamonds part of the value is in signalling
| status. As such there is little incentive for customers
| to want to participate in driving down the price.
|
| With lab-grown meat there will eventually be a number of
| outright benefits.
| Falling3 wrote:
| I think you're ultimately right, but let's not forget
| food has historically been used to signal status as much
| as anything else.
| vidarh wrote:
| To an extent, but you can do that with lab-grown meat
| too, by producing "limited edition" meats that are
| arbitrarily exclusive. Want a steak that is "designed
| molecule by molecule" by a top chef? That'll cost you.
| esens wrote:
| > How long will it be between the introduction of lab-grown
| meat until killing animals for food is banned? Is this a
| generational thing (so older people still consider eating
| animals to be acceptable, while younger people do not), or is
| it a country-wide thing (countries move to ban eating animals
| one by one, driven by a general shift in moral attitude), or
| what? How does this change in morality propagate through
| society?
|
| Just because they ate meat? Maybe not, but they may not look
| kindly on those that did large scale killing with less than
| humane practices. I could see this individuals being more
| likely to be "Cancelled."
|
| Maybe those that fought vegans or fought against animal rights
| activities?
|
| Those opposing change for the better or were active
| participants in things we in the future see as bad.
|
| Remember that most people cancelled were active participants,
| rather than passive bystanders going with the flow.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| True. We tend to cancel slave traders rather than slave
| owners, because if we were to cancel the slave owners then
| we'd have to cancel a _lot_ of people.
|
| I should clarify. I'm not criticising cancel culture. I'm
| interested in how the shift in morality happens and how it
| propagates, and what that means for us now. Is morality
| retroactive? Am I an immoral person because I eat meat, even
| though it's common practise now?
| buu700 wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if this nuance were lost in the
| hypothetical future cancel culture, but I think anyone
| giving careful consideration to present circumstances would
| realize the terrible choice we all have to make.
|
| It's easy to judge someone for complicity in the mass
| murder of countless animals when you have the luxury of
| having been saved from that choice by more advanced
| technology.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| >I wouldn't be surprised if this nuance were lost in the
| hypothetical future cancel culture, but I think anyone
| giving careful consideration to present circumstances
| would realize the terrible choice we all have to make.
|
| It already is lost among many people today so that's not
| a stretch in the slightest. There are an egregious amount
| of people that use the morality of the present to judge
| the decisions of the past when the whole system and
| culture was different. All simply because these people
| were spoon-fed and told "this is bad because of 'x'"
| without explaining from a mindset of why people thought
| the way they did at the time. I mean the simple fact that
| there is a concept of "leftism" is enough to state that
| there is an ideology that someone can measure you against
| on how "woke" you may or may not be. It's exactly no
| different than the Catholic church setting up a mock
| trial to determine if you are a heretic! Except it's not
| a centralized theology. But clearly it has enough
| adherence that there are some aristocrats that are
| willing to kowtow to the belief system.
| jl6 wrote:
| It might turn out to be easy to get to a lab-grown product that
| is 90% as good as natural, but the last 10% could be tricky.
|
| There are countless examples of products where competitors have
| tried to approach the quality of a market-leader, and _almost_
| got there, but not quite.
|
| Meat is also a good example of a product where humans are
| exceptionally good at detecting minor variances in quality.
| Objectively speaking, these are variances that shouldn't
| matter, but somehow xkcd 915 still emerges.
| akoncius wrote:
| > Will we get to the point where statues of now-famous people
| are pulled down because they ate animals?
|
| Could you tell me any case where statue of famous people were
| pulled down because they used cotton products made by slaves?
|
| eating meat is not equal to agitating for keeping slavery. so I
| think meat eaters are safe :)
|
| on the other hand, hardcore people who insist on killing
| animals without consideration for alternatives could be
| condemned later after 50 years or something, but I think it's
| fine. bigger problem is when people keep insisting on immoral
| things without consideration of alternatives.
|
| overall it's really interesting to see such a big focus on
| "cancel culture" in this comment.
| doitLP wrote:
| Probably so. But one thing is for sure. We'll soon start seeing
| an apparent grassroots movement against lab grown meat,
| complete with talking points about its dubious manufacturing
| process and how it's actually _more_ unsanitary and now that we
| mention it morally questionable than good ol beef /chicken/pork
| xbaq wrote:
| It is not a generational issue. Sometimes it seems like the
| Internet thinks that all the *isms have been invented after
| 2010. Studying newspapers or TV shows from the 1970s easily
| refutes that assumption.
|
| Also, there is no correlation between goodness and
| vegetarianism:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| So, firstly, this:
|
| > For the sake of the experiment, let's assume the sci-fi
| writers are right, and eating animals will eventually be
| considered immoral.
|
| Also, is it vegetarianism if you only eat lab-grown meat?
| It's still meat, right, so you're still not vegetarian. Or is
| it the "not eating animals" that makes you a vegetarian now?
|
| I tend to think that (e.g.) Iain M Banks is right, and that
| eventually eating animals will be considered immoral (and not
| the same as vegetarianism). You may disagree, and that's fine
| - everyone has an opinion.
|
| The interesting question is not whether the future will
| consider this immoral, but whether if it becomes immoral in
| the future that applies retroactively and makes it immoral
| now? Does morality change over time, or regardless of time?
|
| I grew up in the '70's so I've seen the change in morality
| first-hand, but that all kinda caught us by surprise. It's
| going to be interesting being more aware of the change in
| morality around this.
| Noos wrote:
| Why people take SF authors seriously about the future is
| beyond me. It's just people wishing for things. Part of the
| reason I stopped reading it is that it was so apparent that
| people used "the future" as a synonym for "Narnia" to tell
| their own stories or moral fables, and yet dated themselves
| tremendously and guessed wrong. They were more dishonest
| because they tried to make plausible magic, kings, and
| wizards instead of just realizing what they were asking for
| pretty much required it.
|
| The culture has about as much chance of coming into
| existence as the fact that we discover unicorns. So why
| should we take him seriously?
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| You're completely right - SF is not about the future, in
| the same way that Narnia is not about wardrobes. It's an
| allegory about current society. Not trying to predict the
| future, but taking current trends and seeing where they
| go. The point is not really about guessing right or
| wrong, but making commentary on our current society and
| getting us to consider choices we may have to make.
|
| Banks himself said that the Culture has no chance of
| being created by actual humans, that people would need to
| change in order to create it. But as a thought experiment
| for "what would a technological Utopia actually look
| like?" I think it's a very valuable contribution. There
| are very few Utopias that I've read about that I would
| actually want to live in - the Culture is probably the
| most attractive of any of them.
|
| In this respect, the advent of lab-grown meat does pose
| the question of whether it's morally acceptable to eat
| animals. As far as I'm aware, only SF authors have
| considered this, because that's the kind of thing they
| do. A technological change has triggered a moral
| conundrum - this is the stuff that good SF ponders. It's
| not necessary to get the details of the technology right,
| or to correctly predict it. It's enough to get us
| thinking about this stuff _before_ it happens.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| > Or is it the "not eating animals" that makes you a
| vegetarian now?
|
| That's the point of ethical veganism/vegetarianism, yes.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| So will you still be a "ethical vegetarian" if you eat
| lab-grown meat?
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| I know people self-describing as ethical vegans who
| eagerly await it. It sounds like a clear "yes" to me.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| For those that want to consume some amusing fiction on this I'd
| recommend the BBC mockumentary Carnage.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Cancel culture will always exist. I learned that Hitler
| identified it as an essential method for success in
| establishing a political party (Rise and Fall of the Third
| Reich). He employed it extensively and discovered it through
| analyzing the success of the socialists--which he hated and was
| seeking to displace.
|
| Whatever you call it, it is just highly obnoxious behavior that
| uses rethoric to defame the target. It works and people will
| use it until it doesn't.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Hitler also was a vegetarian and really liked his dog.
|
| Anyway, after Hitler blew his brains out, he was "canceled",
| and that went just fine. It's a tool that works for positive
| ends just as well.
| Noos wrote:
| It won't be accepted. If anything it probably will be treated
| like veganism, which is mostly moral grandstanding. People who
| consume boutique products to show their virtue. A lot of us
| simply don't lose sleep over the suffering of factory animals,
| in the same way we didn't lose sleep over the starving kids in
| china our mothers used to berate us about when we didn't finish
| our vegetables. That doesn't mean we constantly try to make
| things like a hellscape, but you can try and treat everyone
| morally and not get in a tizzy over "someone is being oppressed
| somewhere! See! Our moral guardians of the media are showing
| us!" The idea of telescopic philanthropy and being a Mrs
| Jellyby needs to be remembered.
|
| If it got to the point where it was mandated, we'd probably be
| in some form of dystopia where everything was in the pursuit of
| either survival (animals no longer exist or are possible to
| eat) or sort of a planned world where our governing or elite
| classes mandate their virtue on everyone, and it would lead to
| a lot more lifestyle changing that not eating meat. I think the
| latter is fairly likely, China for example seems to be doing
| pretty well at a basic form of that.
| ainiriand wrote:
| Your comment starts presenting an interesting debate but you
| steer towards some kind of partisanism or tribalism that is
| quite stange to witness.
|
| You do not need to hear any kind of moral guardian to do and
| conduct yourself knowing that every single person is
| responsible of the actions they make and though I am not
| responsible for those starving children I am responsible for
| many of the atrocities commited for the burgers I ate.
|
| It is not about virtue, it is taking responsibility of your
| own actions and checking your own ethic to decide if it is
| correct or not.
| Noos wrote:
| It's not partisan in the sense of right or left, the
| "starving kids in china" was pretty much the same thing on
| the right. Jellyby was definitely a moral conservative, and
| victorianism is surprisingly bi-partian. Usually its the
| fashions of the rich, if anything. HN in particular is
| unaware of how they imitate it, with the sudden rediscovery
| of Stoicism and Aurelius a bit much.
|
| I don't agree that easting meat is an atrocity. I think it
| devalues words to use them like that. I think a lot of
| veganism is the same reaction to the existence of suffering
| a lot of religions have had or deal with; it's a form of
| going to the desert as a monk or mystic to escape the
| contradictions of the world. That is up to everyone, but
| the difference here is the monks want to make the entire
| world the desert now.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I think it's going to be interesting simply because in order to
| ban killing of animals for food, we're going to have to almost
| genocide livestock in order to make their continued existence
| feasible.
| bserge wrote:
| People didn't seem too fussed about the mink mass killed
| because some were infected with Covid. "Had to be done" works
| every time.
| mdasen wrote:
| > eating animals will eventually be considered immoral. This is
| an extreme stance at the moment (hello PETA)
|
| There are a lot more vegetarians and vegans than just PETA. It
| looks like around 5% of the US and hitting 10% in many
| countries
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country). Many
| parts of India have very high vegetarian rates.
|
| > How long will it be between the introduction of lab-grown
| meat until killing animals for food is banned?
|
| I doubt that it will be about banning animal meat anytime soon.
| However, I think we might see many countries start to tax the
| environmental cost of meat which will make it quite expensive.
| This is unlikely in the US, but I could certainly see it in
| many countries whose politics are different.
|
| > Will we get to the point where statues of now-famous people
| are pulled down because they ate animals? Assuming some variant
| of "cancel culture" exists then
|
| I think this isn't a useful thought right now and just feeds
| into the "cancel culture gone mad" ideas. Few people have been
| canceled. Yea, Harvey Weinstein has been canceled...for rape.
| Kevin Spacey has been canceled...because of sexual assault
| against underage boys. Most people who seem to complain about
| being canceled are sitting on Fox News taking home giant
| paychecks. Tons of people encouraged riots at the Capitol and
| are making millions off it.
|
| Yes, at some point in the very distant future, we might decide
| that killing animals for food isn't an acceptable behavior. A
| hundred years ago, a man couldn't be guilty of raping his wife.
| 200 years ago, a lot of people owned slaves. 60 years ago we
| had racial segregation. 40 years ago, it was acceptable to say
| that gay people deserved to die from AIDS. Things change.
|
| But it's not like it's going to happen overnight. It's not like
| 2017 came along and Harvey Weinstein was like, "omg, is rape
| wrong now? Things change so quickly and I didn't know!"
| Attitudes will probably change over decades or centuries.
|
| Like, we've spent hundreds of years getting to the point of
| "Black people are equal and you shouldn't be racist" and people
| still often aren't getting canceled for racism. I've seen posts
| of police officers covering up explicitly racist tattoos saying
| that in the current climate they feel like they need to be
| careful. It's been over half a century since the Civil Rights
| Movement, but now they're like, "oh, I guess I might get in
| trouble for being explicitly racist in a position of power."
| The idea that someone would be canceled for eating an animal in
| our lifetime seems unlikely. It certainly won't happen as some
| surprise.
|
| > Will we see clever re-interpretations of religious texts
| dealing with the eating of animals?
|
| In Judaism, a lot of people hold the belief that we won't eat
| animals in the messianic era (when the messiah comes). People
| are only allowed to eat animals because Noah saved them from
| the flood. Before the flood, people weren't allowed to eat
| animals. Part of the messianic era is that it's supposed to be
| how the world is meant to be.
|
| This idea isn't a left-wing Jewish idea either. I would note
| that it's not widely known in the Jewish world and usually more
| known by orthodox people who do eat meat. Judaism often has a
| lot of things that might be a little less official, but
| nonetheless have some weight and resonance.
|
| I think we also see some of this in Christian stuff. I feel
| like Christians like Isaiah 11:6's "the lion will lie down with
| the lamb" (yes, I know that technically that's not quite the
| animals in the text, but it is how I often hear it said by
| English-language Christians). I think the idea that predators
| might not be predators in some world-to-come isn't something
| that has to be creatively reinterpreted.
|
| > Will we get religious divisions between different
| interpretations?
|
| Yes. I mean, we have religious divisions over really tiny
| things. This is certainly larger than a lot of religious
| divisions we've seen.
|
| > Will some people refuse to accept the general moral stance on
| eating animals because their religious text says it's
| acceptable?
|
| Do religious texts say it's acceptable? Jewish texts certainly
| do - and they have a lot to say on how. However, rabbis have
| modified it over the centuries. Chicken was once acceptable to
| eat with dairy and now it isn't. I think the big thing for the
| Jewish community would be that many rabbis would say that lab-
| grown meat is more in the spirit of how we're supposed to live
| combined with the fact that it's likely to be so much cheaper
| than kosher meat tends to be. Given the likely price
| difference, even people who might be in the "it's fine to kill
| and eat animals as prescribed" are likely to be buying the lab-
| grown meat simply because it will make meat accessibly priced.
| In fact, chicken was deemed to be "fleishig" so that people
| could have an affordable "meat" for Shabbat meals (the category
| of "meat" from a Jewish perspective is slightly different from
| "animal" and doesn't include fish...it's a long story outside
| the scope of this comment). I think Judaism also evolves around
| community standards that do change. The Bible condones all
| sorts of capital punishments, but the rabbis rid the religion
| of them all a long time ago.
|
| I can't really speak for other religions, but if lab-grown meat
| becomes available at a cheap price, has better food safety than
| the current system, can offer better consistency and taste, and
| causes slaughtered-meat to become niche and a lot more
| expensive...even if you don't have qualms about killing
| animals, do you want to pay for it?
|
| Manufactured goods are so cheap because we can manufacture
| them. Growing animals is hard. It requires a lot of labor, a
| lot of land, a lot of water, a lot of carbon emissions, a lot
| of food, etc. I'm sure there will be some market for "real"
| meat for a long time, but it will likely get expensive.
| Manufactured meat is likely to get pretty efficient and cheap.
|
| I think it's less about whether religions will continue to
| support killing animals and more about whether anyone will want
| to pay for it. "Hey, here's this $1 lab-grown burger that you
| know will be consistent and delicious and here's this $20
| bespoke cow-slaughtered burger." The fact is that most people
| aren't going to want to pay a premium for the cow-slaughtered
| burger.
|
| --
|
| Personally, I'm a vegetarian and have been for 15 years. I'm
| also Jewish. One thing I will note as a difference between
| semi-religious Jews and non-Jews is the difference in meat
| consumption. Many Jews, even if they aren't that religious,
| still won't mix meat and dairy and many won't eat non-kosher-
| certified meat. I have lots of friends who haven't been to a
| religious service in years, but still kinda do this out of a
| certain cultural thing or inertia. One of the things that this
| means is that they often don't eat meat with most meals. Meat
| is something they eat 2-4 times per week. By contrast, I'll
| have lunch with non-Jews where burgers, pizza with meat
| toppings, salads with chicken, etc. are the norm. Meat is a
| part of almost every meal.
|
| The difference isn't a moral one: my non-vegetarian Jewish
| friends don't think eating meat is wrong. Eating meat is simply
| _inconvenient and expensive_ for them. So they eat meat with a
| minority of their meals. The fact is that it 's likely that
| slaughtered-meat will become expensive and inconvenient
| compared to manufactured-meat. Taco Bell or your local pizza
| place isn't going to spend a lot more money on slaughtered-meat
| if they can get a wonderful, consistent product at a cheaper
| price.
|
| Regardless of whether slaughtered-meat stops being a thing or
| not, it will likely become a much smaller part of people's
| diets. This will be very important as we deal with global
| warming. Even if you're the type of person that's like, "I will
| always love a _real_ steak on a grill and that 's going to be
| every Saturday in the summer," the fact is that you're likely
| to also be eating a lot of lab-meat when you grab something at
| Burger King or getting deli-meat for sandwiches.
|
| I think people like thinking about "zero", but for me lab-meat
| is about the 90% of "well, I just wanted some meat texture and
| protein in my meal." I'm hoping it'll take off and we'll see a
| huge reduction of our dependence on slaughtered-meat and the
| environmental impact it causes. I think it'll take time, but I
| think it's hard to bet against manufacturing efficiencies.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Thanks for the essay :)
|
| > It's not like 2017 came along and Harvey Weinstein was
| like, "omg, is rape wrong now? Things change so quickly and I
| didn't know!"
|
| Within my lifetime (I'm in my 50's) it used to be acceptable
| to pat girls on the bottom in public, pressure them into sex,
| rape them if they were drunk enough to not be able to say no,
| and a whole slew of other nasty behaviours that we now
| rightfully consider completely unacceptable. The whole Jimmy
| Saville thing in the UK - the stories coming out of how his
| demands for young girls to molest as payment for gigs were
| met by "respectable" organisations - sounds crazy now. Yes,
| this has changed fast, and caught a lot of people by
| surprise. I'm not defending any of them; they deserve
| everything they got. It was always "wrong", and they knew it,
| but society tolerated it to a certain extent so they could
| get away with it. Until they couldn't, thankfully.
|
| > Jewish texts certainly do - and they have a lot to say on
| how.
|
| Thanks for the detail, it's really interesting. I'm don't
| have much knowledge of Jewish practices. I'm glad to hear
| that there's some adaptability there. In most of christianity
| there's a strong element of "god's word doesn't change" -
| morality is unchanging and immutable, laid down in the bible.
| There's a strong opinion that atheists cannot be moral
| because we don't have an objective moral code to follow. This
| is where I find the fascinating part of the religious aspect
| - what happens when society's morals change? To a certain
| extent we can see it with gay marriage - most of the vatican
| is gay but the catholic church still condemns homosexuality.
| But this is more about politics than morals - the majority of
| catholics live in countries where homosexuality is not
| culturally acceptable, and the church downplays the whole
| question in countries where it is acceptable. The anglican
| church faced this crisis a few years ago, kinda, the African
| bishops did not want to accept gay marriage, the European and
| American bishops politically had to.
|
| But I think the eating animals question is different, as most
| people publicly eat meat at the moment. It's not something
| you can be "in the closet" about and pretend doesn't happen
| (though I guess that will eventually happen - small groups
| getting together to kill an animal and eat it secretly).
| Which is why I think it's going to be more interesting to
| watch. It's possible that in 30 years we'll have the whole
| "have you ever eaten an animal?" thing going on, but I doubt
| it because the vast majority of people have eaten animals at
| the moment.
| Noos wrote:
| > I think we also see some of this in Christian stuff. I feel
| like Christians like Isaiah 11:6's "the lion will lie down
| with the lamb" (yes, I know that technically that's not quite
| the animals in the text, but it is how I often hear it said
| by English-language Christians). I think the idea that
| predators might not be predators in some world-to-come isn't
| something that has to be creatively reinterpreted.
|
| There's sort of a verse that deals with it. The context is in
| eating meat sacrificed to idols, aka immoral meat. It's not
| clear on what that means, where it's eating meat in a
| ceremonial service or buying meat in the marketplace that was
| resold donations to a pagan temple. Romans 14: 1-9
|
| >>Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over
| disputable matters. One person's faith allows them to eat
| anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only
| vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with
| contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat
| everything must not judge the one who does, for God has
| accepted them. Who are you to judge someone else's servant?
|
| >>To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will
| stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand. One person
| considers one day more sacred than another; another considers
| every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in
| their own mind. 6 Whoever regards one day as special does so
| to the Lord. Whoever eats meat does so to the Lord, for they
| give thanks to God; and whoever abstains does so to the Lord
| and gives thanks to God. 7 For none of us lives for ourselves
| alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live,
| we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So,
| whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this very
| reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be
| the Lord of both the dead and the living.
|
| I'm not Christian any more, but generally the spirit is more
| "your brother needs to be vegan, don't convert him or argue
| with him and do your best to strengthen his faith." Each
| person must do what he feels God has commanded him to do in
| his own way.
|
| The new heaven and new earth is a radically different
| experience. Its not just lion laying down with lamb, its that
| "we shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, and be like
| the angels" which Jesus said in answer to people disbelieving
| in a ressurection. It's a total break from humanity in a
| sense, and trying to emulate it has led to a lot of cults
| engaging in self-destructive behavior.
| wcoenen wrote:
| I suspect reality will be a lot more boring.
|
| Animals are a low efficiency method of converting plant
| material into meat, both in terms of calories and protein mass
| input/output. So with scale, eventually lab-grown meat should
| become much cheaper than traditional meat. At the same time, it
| will be higher quality. Sterile production will eliminate E.
| Coli, salmonella, antibiotics... Input nutrients will be
| tightly controlled. Environmental pollutants and parasites will
| be kept out.
|
| Traditional meat will still be available, but it will be an
| expensive and morally questionable luxury product, like "foie
| gras" today.
| awillen wrote:
| I think an interesting comparison is lab-grown diamonds.
|
| To me (and I suspect a lot of others here on HN), the idea of
| getting a mined diamond is just lunacy. Why on earth would I
| pay twice as much for something that is literally the same at
| the atomic level?
|
| And yet enormous numbers of people still do. I'm lucky to
| have a wife who is a scientist (she would've slapped me
| upside the head if I had wasted money on a mined diamond),
| but there are a lot of women out there who would be very
| upset to receive a lab-grown diamond.
|
| So while I very much agree with what you're saying here, and
| it just seems crazy to me that anyone else wouldn't, I do
| wonder what percent of folks will continue to demand "real"
| meat even when lab-grown is superior along all dimensions.
| DantesKite wrote:
| I like the idea that capitalism will just outweigh any
| questions of morality, because it'll be so much cheaper and
| better than anything else.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| You may be right.
|
| There's this weird thing with some speciality produce
| clashing with EU regulations on food prep at the moment. Not
| to mention unpasteurised milk. It could end up in that
| basket. Strange clubs of weirdos meeting up to butcher and
| eat an animal, and everyone else thinking that's completely
| disgusting.
| mildavw wrote:
| Don't forget that the flavors and textures will also be
| optimized along the way. It will taste better to more people
| than animal meat.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| And nutritional profiles! I read last year that beef
| engineered to have more B-vitamins starts to taste like
| fish.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Now it is less efficient but when we needed a hedge against
| crop failure it was essential. One large beast can be kept
| alive by eating scrub and can subsist a large number of
| people.
|
| What we have going on right now is killing us.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| It should be added that a large portion of the world already
| eats processed meat. That chicken in chicken broccoli isn't
| straight chicken. We've already shown we care very little of
| what is actually meat if you put the right sauce on it.
| golergka wrote:
| Artificial diamonds are cheaper and more pure than the real
| thing.
| iammisc wrote:
| Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food
| to edible nutrition.
|
| For example, goats eat almost any plant, including many
| natives. Unless you think humans are going to be able to eat
| chaparral.
|
| The fact is that modern edible agriculture is heavily
| dependent on fossil fuel and mined fertilizers. Until we
| solve that problem, it's better to stop growing too many
| plants, let native vegetation regrow and set loose the troops
| of goats and chickens.
|
| People have this idea that plants and vegetables are
| clean..they're not
| theptip wrote:
| I don't think your main points here are true.
|
| > Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible
| food to edible nutrition.
|
| Animals are pretty inefficient at converting plants to
| calories, e.g. see
| https://learn.uvm.edu/foodsystemsblog/2014/07/10/meat-vs-
| veg...
|
| Most of the energy spent getting grains to the table is in
| transport/processing. If you just compare the production,
| grains are way more efficient than animals.
|
| Even though I'm sure goats are better than cows, they
| aren't as efficient as plants at producing calories, and in
| all cases you still have to process and transport them.
|
| However if you've got some data showing otherwise I'm open
| to being convinced here.
|
| > Until we solve that problem, it's better to stop growing
| too many plants
|
| I think this is making perfect the enemy of the good.
| Plants use less water, produce substantially less GHG
| emissions, and so are still a net major win on
| environmental terms vs. the status quo.
| iammisc wrote:
| > Animals are pretty inefficient at converting plants to
| calories, e.g. see ...
|
| That is not what that graph shows. That graph purports to
| count all energy 'inputs' into the system, including
| human labor. This is not about 'how many calories did the
| cow / pig eat, versus what it produced'.
|
| Here's an example.
|
| Consider wheat grass. Both a cow and a human can eat this
| grass. However, the human can eat the seed, the cow / pig
| / goat can eat the entire plant. If you burn the entire
| wheat plant, and count the calories released you will get
| some number. Let's call it Y. If you count the calories
| in the seed that we eat, it'll necessarily be less, let's
| say X.
|
| Ideally, if we're going to produce Y calories in the
| grain, humans ought to be able to consume as close to Y
| calories as possible in order to get the total benefit.
| Since humans can only eat X, and X < Y. Then it makes
| sense to feed Y-X calories to a low maintenance animal
| (so not beef), and then eat the animal. This will yield
| some number N < (Y-X) that humans can consume. This also
| provides a complete protein, fats, and other nutrients
| not found in grain (B12, which is not found in plants
| period, for example, thus preventing yet another
| synthesis process).
|
| X + N < Y, but it is much closer to the actual amount of
| energy in the grain plant than just X. And then we'd need
| to count the energy expenditure getting the B12 and
| Vitamin D produced and distributed as well. And then the
| supply chain risk costs. All these things have costs that
| never get considered.
| eloff wrote:
| This is a laudable goal, but it can't scale to the level we
| require today, nevermind when we have 10 billion people
| later in the century.
| iammisc wrote:
| Um okay... Wel then we better get ethically okay with
| crowded pigs fed our food scraps.
|
| Humans eat like 5% of the actual plant matter we harvest.
| The rest is composted which just releases more greenhouse
| gases. If you feed it to a pig, then you at least get
| that car on released after feeding a human.
|
| The 'plant based' push is once again feelings without
| science.
| tfehring wrote:
| It's true that most of the food consumed by livestock isn't
| edible by humans - [0] says 86% - but livestock are _so_
| inefficient at converting food to edible nutrition that
| they still generally consume more than 1 human-edible
| Calorie per Calorie of meat produced. For cattle, _Diet for
| a Small Planet_ [1] cites 16 Calories per edible Calorie of
| meat and 8 grams of protein per edible gram of protein
| produced, other sources seem to be in the same ballpark -
| both higher than the ~7:1 ratio that 's implied by that 86%
| figure. The ratios for chickens are better, but they also
| generally get a much lower share of their feed from human-
| inedible sources.
|
| Also, even that 86% isn't "free" - it's not all pasturing,
| and it takes a lot of effort, energy, and equipment to get
| hay, inedible by-products of human-edible crops, etc. from
| the field to animals' mouths.
|
| [0] https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/fao-sets-the-
| record-s...
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Diet-Small-Planet-20th-
| Anniversary/dp...
| iammisc wrote:
| > cites 16 Calories per edible Calorie of meat and 8
| grams of protein per edible gram of protein produced.
|
| Two things. Firstly, those are 16 Calories that would
| otherwise quite literally go to waste. They would be
| metabolized by bacteria, used to grow a bacterial mat in
| a compost bin, and then be released into the air in the
| form of CO2.
|
| Secondly, I'm not sure what 8g of protein per edible gram
| of protein produced means. Ruminants like cows convert
| carbs and other compounds into protein by hosting gut
| bacteria. Without a cow or chicken or something in
| between, these amino acids would have to come from
| somewhere else. Same with B12.
| rapind wrote:
| Don't we grow food specifically for livestock though?
| That must consume a lot of resources (oil, water, etc). I
| think the argument is the cut out the middle man (beef /
| chicken) due to inefficiencies.
|
| I personally suspect the real ratio is less than what's
| being cited just because I'm a cynic, but there seems to
| be some logic to it no?
| frankus wrote:
| > Don't we grow food specifically for livestock though?
|
| I think that's the central point of this thread where
| folks are talking past one a other.
|
| In a hypothetical scenario where animals are more or less
| only eating food that humans can't, it makes a lot of
| sense (from an environmental if not ethical standpoint)
| to include animals in the mix of foods people eat.
|
| The impression I get is that in reality, animals grown
| for meat consume quite a bit of human-edible food (or
| food that could be trivially replaced with human-edible
| varieties), although I have no idea of the actual
| percentage.
| wcoenen wrote:
| > _animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible
| food to edible nutrition._
|
| I disagree. Average caloric and protein efficiency is
| 7%-8%. For beef specifically, it is only 3%. I don't know
| how efficiently a cultured meat factory could convert grass
| into beef, but I bet it could do a better.
|
| https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/
| 1...
| iammisc wrote:
| This article is not about converting land from meat to
| not-meat. It's about converting from beef to chicken.
|
| No one doubts that chicken is more efficient than beef. I
| have not argued that beef is the best animal.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Most steaks come from cows than never tasted grass.
| rendang wrote:
| Citation for this??
| djrogers wrote:
| That's not how cattle are raised. Yes, most cattle are
| finished on grain packed in a small area, but they're
| born and raised mostly to maturity grazing on grass or
| (eating hay where climate dictates).
| iammisc wrote:
| I swear half the people responding have never driven past
| a cattle ranch.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| That doesn't seem to be the norm any more. Feedlots
| outnumber grain-fed operation.
| gruez wrote:
| Source? I know CAFOs are a thing, but AFAIK they're
| typically only used in the latter half/third of a cow's
| life.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Having eaten goat a few times I'd say a goat is still
| pretty near inedible so there is no realized gain. Tastes
| may vary though.
| iammisc wrote:
| You don't like goat? Most cultures / people love it.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| If you want meat at the scale we eat it at now, let alone
| the one we'll eat it at when China and India have twice
| their current incomes, free range isn't going to cut it.
| iammisc wrote:
| I don't disagree. I understand arguments for less meat.
| What I don't understand is abolition...that's just silly
| and a huge environmental catastrophe.
| analog31 wrote:
| How is it a catastrophe? Why does the environment need
| domesticated livestock? Why does the food chain need us
| to be a predator?
| iammisc wrote:
| To be able to produce the calories currently made by meat
| using relatively meh land, we'd have to heavily increase
| our fertilizer use and deforestation to be able to grow
| enough human edible plants (grains or legumes really,
| since tubers are difficult to transport).
| analog31 wrote:
| It's been my impression that eliminating meat consumption
| would produce less need for farmland and fertilizer, not
| more.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| > Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible
| food to edible nutrition.
|
| And survive in a very complex and hostile environment,
| adapt to changing conditions, procreate, and build all the
| structure and tissues and organs that requires. That's a
| lot of energy that bioreactor-grown steak doesn't have to
| expend. At scale, and with some genetic optimization thrown
| in, can we do better? I don't know for sure, but I don't
| think it's an impossibility, given that most of the current
| meat supply is already grown in factories.
| iammisc wrote:
| Organs are edible. You should try it sometimes. They are
| not waste products. No wonder Americans find these things
| wasteful. In my experience, even something as simple as
| chicken. People do not actually eat the whole thing. Half
| of it is thrown away, just like everything else.
|
| It's very strange to me, because growing up, we'd eat
| everything. But I married into an American family, and
| I'm often picking stuff off the bones they throw out. We
| were raised to eat everything, even the marrow.
|
| > That's a lot of energy that bioreactor-grown steak
| doesn't have to expend
|
| Sure, but the bioreactor is (1) heavily affected by
| supply chain issues, (2) dependent on an external source
| of energy, (3) requires complex chemical inputs that have
| to be synthesized themselves oftentimes. No one takes
| into account the whole thing.
|
| Also, monoculture is always going to be less resilient
| than an actual population of cattle, or pigs, or
| chickens. But, I guess this is a problem that affects the
| whole industry.
| paulirwin wrote:
| This is spot on. (I'm a long time vegetarian, so I've thought
| a lot about this.) Hunting, fishing, and even specialty
| slaughterhouses will likely continue. The economics will
| cause mass meat production to go out of business, though.
| Beef first, probably. Engineering can evolve much faster than
| cows and chickens and fish can.
|
| No politician, at least in the U.S. mainstream, is going to
| commit political self-destruction by going after farmers and
| making animal meat illegal. What will likely happen though is
| once the big restaurant chains and grocery stores start
| selling lab-grown meat that is better quality and cheaper
| than animal meat, the market for cheap animal meat will dry
| up. We'll have politicians trying to "save beef jobs" just
| like they are trying to save coal jobs today, due to more
| efficient and environmentally-friendly alternatives taking
| over the market. But unlike coal, consumers can still choose
| animal meat (you can't exactly choose your power plant), so
| it might be a long transition due to that market demand.
| Expect the Arby's and ilk to continue to tout how they use
| "real meat" with hypermasculine advertising for a long time
| to come.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| The ironic counter-ads will be viscious: "Be a real man!
| Risk getting sick from one of our real burgers! Each one is
| made from the hormone-pumped flesh of a real baby cow that
| never knew its real mom!"
| akoncius wrote:
| "back in my days, salmonella wasn't a big deal anyway,
| these younglins are too fragile in modern times"
| gowld wrote:
| Meat advertisting/propaganda uses "Eat natural whole
| foods (ignoring all the unnaural things they do to the
| animals and meat), not processed fake meat foods".
|
| And to some extent, they have a point. But of course they
| don't invite you to eat natural whole plant foods instead
| of meat.
| BTCOG wrote:
| Here's where I'd like to insert the friendly reminder
| that all plants are living beings. You, as a living being
| must eat other living beings. Plants are intelligent and
| pass information to eachother via the web of mycelium and
| other unknown ways. Morality about eating only living
| plants, vs eating meats has always been flawed. As were
| the arguments about eating pescatarian and only eating
| fish because they "are not intelligent and can't feel
| pain." Don't fool yourself. You are eating living beings
| and you are not on some goofy moral high horse.
| hervature wrote:
| While I agree that not eating meat for moral reasons is
| pretty low on the list, (environmental and health reasons
| are so much more important) your argument reads like a
| pro-life argument. There is a clear distinction between
| having a nervous system and "passing information" with
| regards to intelligence. There's a reason why we send
| people to jail for murder and not mowing their lawns.
| nmz wrote:
| So basically White Castle?
| henrikschroder wrote:
| "Think smaller. More legs."
| bart_spoon wrote:
| Sounds closer to Raw Water
| Bancakes wrote:
| Naturally, this will instill a dependency on labs and their
| patented technologies.
|
| I'm surprised I don't need a Monsanto license to bake bread
| at home.
| sireat wrote:
| As Gibson wrote in 1984 (a few years earlier actually):
|
| "`Jesus,' Molly said, her own plate empty, `gimme that. You
| know what this costs?' She took his plate. `They gotta raise
| a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't
| vat stuff.' She forked a mouthful up and chewed."
| ericmcer wrote:
| There will also be a visual sterility on top of the practical
| one. For some of my friends, the idea of eating a chicken
| drumstick with its bone and dark veins and bits of cartilage
| makes them shudder, but they will put away a dozen processed
| sterile looking chicken nuggets with no hesitation.
| justinmchase wrote:
| Another question is, if its banned to kill an animal for meat,
| for various animals, how long until they go extinct? Many are
| co-dependent on humanity for their survival at the species
| level... Or at the very least how will it affect their
| evolution?
| falcolas wrote:
| Good question. Another: How will the ranchland dedicated to
| their raising be used? In Montana, where the cows outnumber
| the people, the land they occupy is considered unfit for
| farming, largely because it's not friendly for combines.
|
| There's also the whole infrastructure and supply chain
| dedicated to the breeding and raising of various meat
| sources. What will happen to them?
| tomjen3 wrote:
| The businesses will be shot down when they are no longer
| profitable. If the land has no other use it would seem
| obvious to convert it into parks or other wild
| preservations.
|
| The big issue is the slaughterhouses, which would obviously
| die out but which also may be the only big employeer
| around, kinda like the steel mills used to be. The farms
| raising feed are not likely to employ a lot of people.
| WJW wrote:
| Seems fairly straightforward to predict, since this has
| happened dozens of times before as technology marched on:
| with no more business for them, they'll go bankrupt and the
| workers will eventually be assimilated into other
| professions. Maybe there will be a small remaining industry
| tending to hobbyists, similar to how horse shoeing and
| buggy whip manufacturing are very much a niche professions
| these days.
| falcolas wrote:
| Have we had one of these "industry extinctions" in the
| last quarter century, particularly one at the scale of
| the meat industry?
|
| Our economy and workplaces are significantly different
| from what they were when horses were replaced by cars.
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| Manufacturing and textiles, though they might have
| happened slightly more than 25 years ago.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| The fraction of the population employed in agriculture
| has continued to decline precipitously over the last few
| decades as automation technology improves, continuing the
| trend that began with the industrial revolution.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture
| akiselev wrote:
| _> Our economy and workplaces are significantly different
| from what they were when horses were replaced by cars._
|
| The 21st century isn't special and we weren't born a
| quarter century ago. The economy and our workplaces will
| continue to evolve, as they have since the beginning of
| time.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| The 20th century may have been special. In a hundred
| years we went from riding horses to landing on the moon.
| If the 21st century is to advance on a similarly
| breathtaking scale we'll need some astounding changes --
| immortality, say, or true AI.
| akiselev wrote:
| About 27% of the world still works in agriculture, as of
| 2019 - the vast majority as subsistence farmers - down
| from 44% of the world as of 1990 [1]. That's over 200
| million people that just began the transition from _pre-
| industrial agriculture_ to a modern market based economy.
| Modern technology is so unevenly distributed that over
| _two billion_ people are still fed without the benefit of
| industrialized farming.
|
| I think you're vastly underestimating how much work there
| is left to do.
|
| [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| You're right. I was thinking about the technological
| frontier. In terms of improving the average or the floor,
| rather than the ceiling, we've got our work cut out.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Well, down from 80% farmers in the Middle Ages. So we've
| come a long way.
| extrapickles wrote:
| Consumer film cameras are extinct as they have been
| replaced by digital. They are only carried by specialty
| stores now as people only use it as a hobby.
| [deleted]
| erwald wrote:
| humans have kept dogs and cats and horses around even though
| many of them aren't used for their original purposes anymore,
| so I'd be surprised if some sentimental folks didn't keep a
| few cows or sheep or whatnot around just for fun.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Especially with cows, sheep and chickens, I suspect the
| market for their non-meat goods (milk, wool, eggs) will
| persist (perhaps in a progressively more artisanal market)
| for far longer than the killing-animals version of the meat
| industry.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I don't know about wool, but outside of artisanal
| situations the industry for milk and eggs is cruel from
| birth to death, not just at death.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| For sure, my thinking is that those industries are likely
| to survive more in the "I have a coop with a dozen
| chickens in my back yard" sense.
| jhauris wrote:
| Domestic animals are already going extinct[1] as agriculture
| standardizes on the most profitable, most stable, or lowest
| maintenance breeds. Most domestic breeds wouldn't survive
| transition to wild living, survive by outcompeting native
| wildlife. That's why we don't have flocks of wild chickens
| roaming North America but there feral pigs are a menace.
|
| Based on this, I would bet that our current domestic meat
| animals would go extinct relatively quickly. There are some
| people who try to preserve various breeds in what are
| essentially zoos, but I can't imagine them operating in
| perpetuity.
|
| 1: https://www.livestockconservancy.org/index.php/heritage/in
| te...
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| I would expect to see pockets of domesticated animals survive
| in captivity across the world for various non-meat purposes.
| Even if all captive breeding is banned, I would still expect
| allowances for governments or organizations to maintain
| breeding populations as a living reminder of where our
| civilization came from.
| zazen wrote:
| Right. I've seen some zoos that already have a little
| "farm" section showing off some local heritage livestock
| breeds. I'd expect that sort of thing to take right off if
| it started to look like there was real risk of extinctions.
| hirundo wrote:
| If humans only existed as mindless stock animals, bred for
| food, I'd prefer extinction. But I wouldn't care to make that
| choice on behalf of Bovideae Bovinae Bos taurus.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Many are co-dependent on humanity for their survival at the
| species level
|
| Can you list them?
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| It's a hard problem. I'd like to imagine factory meat will
| free up land for use as wild nature preserves, which are the
| only real way to, well, preserve nature.
|
| But land has many other alternative uses. Until we value
| _every one_ of those alternative uses less than we value
| preserving nature itself, we 'll tend to use the land for
| something else.
|
| Of course it depends on the land in question. Any land that
| is currently good for grazing and nothing should immediately
| be freed up once grazing stops being economical.
| Unfortunately, the land like that is not the most biodiverse
| -- it's rocky scrub, not forest -- but I'll be happy to see
| it added to the set of lands we don't want to mess with.
| smogcutter wrote:
| > Will we get to the point where statues of now-famous people
| are pulled down because they ate animals? Assuming some variant
| of "cancel culture" exists then, will that act retroactively
| and currently-lionised people get cancelled because they are
| carnivores, even though the current culture that they exist in
| considers it acceptable?
|
| Perhaps, if those statues were originally erected in honor of
| their diet, and to remind the vegetarians of the time who was
| in charge.
|
| I know the false equivalency isn't really your point, but come
| on.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| We're busily pulling down statues of various slave owners,
| none of which were erected to honor their slave ownership.
| psychometry wrote:
| Well, no. Many of those (Confederate "heroes") were more
| principally known for treason, sedition, and waging war in
| defense of slave ownership rather than their personal
| predilection toward owning slaves.
| waterhouse wrote:
| Thomas Jefferson statue pulled down in Portland:
| https://www.opb.org/news/article/thomas-jefferson-statue-
| pul...
| gowld wrote:
| Which ones? Most of the statues were specifically erected
| decades after the Civil War, by KKK and friends, as part of
| an intimidation campaign against black people and in
| support of Jim Crow -style laws and resistance to the
| progress of equal rights legislation.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I wasn't really referencing the US statue-pulling-down
| because that's a lot more fraught and convoluted. It was more
| the thing with Cabot in my home town of Bristol (UK).
|
| But fair criticism, it's not an equivalence. I was struggling
| to find a decent example.
|
| Though I can totally see a PETA stunt of pulling down a
| statue of Elvis because he ate meat.
| Bancakes wrote:
| The western world hasn't had a famine in decades, mainly eats
| for satiety - not survival. No hunting necessary. If we are in
| a position where we are starving and have animals at our
| disposal, morals will fade.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Given the concerted media push for lab-grown meat over the
| recent years, i think the powers that be have made the decision
| already.
|
| There is no need to fight a culture/moral war - they will
| simply raise the prices of meat and add some nice marketing
| around the benefits of lab-grown alternatives.
| growt wrote:
| A quick google search told me that 12 US presidents where slave
| owners. So far I think none of their statues have been torn
| down because of the fact although slavery is almost universally
| outlawed and condemned. For shorter term analogies I think
| something like gay-marriage fits. "Progressive" countries allow
| it, while the more "backwards" or religious countries fight it.
| I guess it will play out something like this (And you habe to
| factor in that in case of lab-meat it will probably more
| expensive at the start, so people and countries have to be able
| to afford their morals - or eat vegetables I guess).
| jon_richards wrote:
| Woodrow Wilson's name got removed from a Princeton college
| and they stressed it was because he was particularly
| abhorrent even for his time.
|
| Maybe the same will happen with meat. Veal, foie gras, shark
| fin, octopus, endangered animals, etc. Most of the blame will
| fall on producers, but "carnivorous" over eaters like Ron
| Swanson from parks and rec might age poorly.
|
| Whenever people bring up gay marriage legality, I think it's
| also important to show this graph. https://xkcd.com/1431/
|
| Expect live meat to be overwhelmingly abhorred before you see
| a ban.
| gowld wrote:
| Andrew Jackson is being cancelle^Wremoved from the $20.
|
| It might not be a coincidence that he was targetted as being
| perhaps the most racist genocidal President.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_twenty-
| dollar_bi...
| TecoAndJix wrote:
| In reading up on this I had a good laugh when i discovered
| the URL for the "Bureau of Engraving and Printing" is
| https://www.moneyfactory.gov/!
| InitialLastName wrote:
| His (undoubted) role in the Trail of Tears aside, it's not
| at all clear why Andrew Jackson belongs on money anyway. As
| far as I've read, it's not even clear how the decision to
| put him on the $20 was made, except that one fan of his at
| the mint thought he should be.
|
| All that not to mention, it's ridiculous to be putting
| someone who didn't think the US should have a central bank
| on the US's money.
|
| Statues, money, and the like are how we communicate to the
| world and ourselves reminders of those whose lives we find
| worth emulating. As our morals change and we start to find
| things like slavery, forced death-marches and ethnic
| cleansing abhorrent, is it really wrong for us to update
| our imagery of whose lives we should emulate? At least to
| stop idolizing those people who were most notable for, or
| even raised arms in insurrection in support of, those acts?
| erichocean wrote:
| > _it 's not at all clear why Andrew Jackson belongs on
| money anyway_
|
| He's the reason the Democratic Party exists, sure that's
| worth something...
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I'm hesitant to praise anyone who helped congeal us into
| the political duopoly we live under.
|
| It's also not clear to me that, its whole ~200 year
| lifespan considered, the Democratic Party has put its
| average in the green relative to historical atrocity
| (nor, for that matter, have the GOP).
| salt-thrower wrote:
| > So far I think none of their statues have been torn down
| because of the fact
|
| Even Abraham Lincoln's statue got torn down in Portland, OR
| last year. Not because he was a slaveowner but because he
| oversaw expulsion of Native Americans from their land and
| executed 36 Native prisoners. I would not assume that any
| president's statue is safe from public ire.
| vidarh wrote:
| To be honest, I think what will happen _first_ is a multi-
| pronged marketing assault on "natural" meat from an
| environmental, animal rights, cost and quality angle.
|
| E.g. producers of lab-grown meat has an interest in:
|
| * Pushing for taxes or reduced subsidies on "natural" meat with
| environmental reasoning. This will get easier the more people
| switch.
|
| * Pushing a "our meat never had a face but is still real meat"
| angle.
|
| * Undercutting on price.
|
| * Providing "impossible" meat. E.g. cuts that are impossible,
| compositions that are impossible. Species that are impractical
| or annoying (e.g. quail and many other birds have so little
| meat relative to bones that while they're tasty they're a
| nuisance to eat - lab-grown meat can potentially be "better"
| than natural meat that way), or meat with other ingredients
| embedded directly _in_ the meat. Marketing "old meat" as "old
| fashioned", boring and lower quality.
|
| * Pushing a "do you know where their meat has been? We know
| where ours has been" angle.
|
| I don't think a ban will happen until a ban is mostly
| pointless. That is, I think lab-grown meats have to succeed
| first, and _then_ when most people have stopped caring because
| they mostly eat lab-grown meats, it 's possible a ban would get
| sufficient support.
| mmazing wrote:
| Why does everything have to be a slippery slope?
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| It's a pretty binary decision (eat animals or not). What does
| the slope look like?
| mprovost wrote:
| Eating whales. Or dolphins. Or dogs. Or chimps.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| True, I hadn't considered that. The "should you eat
| horses?" question.
|
| So if there is vat-grown pork but they never manage to
| get the beef quite right, will it be acceptable to eat
| cows but not pigs? I guess that's the slope.
|
| So yes, this has to be a slippery slope ;)
| mmazing wrote:
| Your version: Lab grown meat -> everyone agrees eating
| animals is immoral -> various extreme examples of society
| completely changing
|
| It's also entirely possible that lab grown meat becomes
| prevalent and simply coexists with raising animals for food
| for the foreseeable future.
| billti wrote:
| I've considered stuff like this a lot lately, as there seems to
| be a lot of hypocrisy amongst commonly held positions
| (including mine).
|
| I find it odd that people who truly believe in evolution, and
| that humans are just smarter animals, and that animals are also
| capable of sensing pain and emotion, can be deeply concerned
| (rightfully) about things such as trans rights, gender
| discrimination, etc. for humans (that are very high on
| "Maslow's hierarchy"), and yet are perfectly content to pay for
| meat they know was the product of an industry which is pretty
| horrific in its treatment of billions of cows, pigs, etc. a
| year.
|
| Similarly, I have friends who regularly rail against the
| "wealthy" and how it's immoral to have so much money when
| people are suffering in poverty. Then the same day will go
| spend $200 on a handbag or $20 on a cocktail or $1000 on a
| weekend getaway to Hawaii without blinking, knowing full well
| those unnecessary purchases cost as much as several meals or
| vaccines for those less fortunate people that the "rich" should
| be taxed to help.
|
| How do so many people act contradictory to their stated
| positions? Are they dishonest with themselves? Haven't thought
| it through? Or do people just want the world to be a better
| place... as long as it's not an inconvenience for them
| personally?
| ttt0 wrote:
| > are perfectly content to pay for meat they know was the
| product of an industry which is pretty horrific in its
| treatment of billions of cows, pigs, etc. a year.
|
| If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it
| make a sound?
|
| What do you think happens to animals in the wilderness? Do
| you think they live a happy life, retire and have a peaceful
| death among the loved ones? The answer is no, they get
| brutally murdered by a bigger animal. Did you ever have a cat
| and witnessed how they can torture a mouse?
|
| That's just the world we live in. I can't change it, and no
| one can, it's just how it works. Am I supposed to cry in the
| corner about this unfortunate reality? So yeah, I'm perfectly
| fine with killing animals for food, as long as it's not done
| in a dumb way ie. making them go extinct, or in some sadistic
| manner.
|
| So I guess the answer to your question is that I try to have
| a realistic worldview and not just what sounds nice. The
| universe doesn't care about hypocrisy, morality or
| principles. It's really good to organize a society around it
| and it's good to have principles, because we have to somehow
| live with each other, but that's not what it's about.
| shadilay wrote:
| Objective analysis is proportional to the distance from the
| observer.
| bckr wrote:
| > Are they dishonest with themselves? Haven't thought it
| through? Or do people just want the world to be a better
| place... as long as it's not an inconvenience for them
| personally?
|
| All of the above plus performative outrage / signaling. I'm
| definitely a healthier person after getting off social media
| and honestly just caring a lot less about my stances on
| things and whether they're perfect and holy.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| > I'm definitely a healthier person after getting off
| social media
|
| This. So much. Facebook was destroying my mental health.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I don't think eating "from animal" meat will become too
| controversial within the next few decades yet.
|
| However, there will be a few shifts. Any meat that is
| unrecognizable as cuts of meat - hamburgers, sausages, etc -
| will be 'cut' with factory meat as a means to cut costs
| (assuming factory meat will become cheaper than livestock,
| which I'm confident it will with scale), similar to how it's
| now filled with water, MRM and other fillers, or how a few
| years back there was a big controversy in the UK when it turned
| out ground beef contained horse meat.
|
| It'll be awhile before legislation catches up to make it
| mandatory to indicate the source of the meat.
|
| But, if this scales up, I think total meat consumption will
| only increase.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| OK, but hypothetically, assume it does become immoral, and
| then illegal.
|
| If you eat a burger now, with lab-grown meat not really
| available, are you behaving immorally?
|
| If you eat an animal in (say) 10 years' time, when lab-grown
| meat is readily available, are you behaving immorally then?
|
| If you eat an animal in (say) 20 years' time, when that
| involves quite a lot of effort (finding a butcher who sells
| it, paying the price premium, etc). Are you behaving
| immorally then?
|
| If you eat an animal after they ban killing animals for food,
| is that immoral? (i.e. is it the law that makes the action
| immoral?)
|
| At what point does our (presumably moral) action of eating
| meat become immoral? Is that up to us as individuals, or is
| it up to our churches, or government, or what? Who makes this
| decision, and how is that communicated, and is it
| retroactive?
| ragazzina wrote:
| (Disclaimer: I am not a vegetarian)
|
| I see it as immoral now, and immoral in twenty years. It is
| just socially accepted. Most of the meat-eating people I
| know don't even try and justify from a moral standpoint.
| They usually say "I know it's wrong, I just like meat". So
| in twenty years they will say "I knew it was wrong, it was
| just how life was back then".
| noduerme wrote:
| Switch meat-eating for slave-owning and you're starting
| to justify tearing down those statues of Washington and
| Jefferson.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Let's consider that cultured meats are okay as future
| historically-correct delicacies. We are religiously-attached to
| meat agriculture now, but we must kick the habit because it's
| killing us and going to kill us: resource utilization, climate
| change, antibiotics resistance, and pandemics.
|
| How about we design a specific protein product that is healthiest
| first? And then second: how to produce it as efficiently as
| possible?
| [deleted]
| notdang wrote:
| How far are we from real meat texture as opposed to this minced
| meat for burgers?
| bionhoward wrote:
| Does lab-grown meat have a lab-grown immune system to prevent
| lab-grown contamination?
| ethanbond wrote:
| > Future Meat Technologies says this facility requires 96-percent
| less freshwater than livestock production, as well as using
| 99-percent less land and producing 80-percent fewer greenhouse
| emissions.
|
| Even accounting for PR hyperbole, it is so apparent at this point
| that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at
| the mercy of those who do. This is a national security issue. We
| can choose to curse our younger generations with a warped sense
| of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security
| indefinitely into the future.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm all in favour of this for climate change and animal welfare
| reasons, but I don't see how it's a _national security_ concern
| in e.g. Europe and America, given they already encourage
| farming overproduction specifically because food is so
| important, and that almost everywhere could already be more
| effective in how many people a given unit of land area or fresh
| water can support, both by encouraging vegetable-based diets
| and separately with more poly-tunnels, greenhouses, and
| aeroponics.
| Retric wrote:
| Overproduction is based on assumptions around how variable
| farm output is. Climate change increases variability.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Climate change isn't the weather.
|
| Climate is the average.
|
| We are in a global warming emergency and no one is doing
| enough about it.
| Retric wrote:
| Climate isn't the _average_ weather it's the _expected_
| weather. X hurricanes every Y years for example doesn't
| change the average significantly, but their a major
| climate concern in areas at risk from them.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Climate change is literally the weather.
| ben_w wrote:
| Long term average weather. But yes, IIRC, climate change
| is causing more extreme variability, and that variability
| itself is a problem.
|
| Though I do disagree with @airhead969, as the literally
| exponential growth of PV by itself looks to me to be
| enough to make us net zero in a decade or two (probably
| two, given exponentials are often sigmoids in disguise).
| ethanbond wrote:
| Well one mechanism by which this becomes a natsec concern is
| food scarcity in other parts of the world might
| simultaneously cause domestic instability as well as mass
| migration to more food-secure locales.
|
| We should also do all of the things you mention here.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| > We can choose to curse our younger generations with a warped
| sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein
| security indefinitely into the future.
|
| A false dichotomy if I ever saw one.
| ethanbond wrote:
| It is a false dichotomy currently because the in-between area
| is largely occupied by "do the economics make sense." That is
| very clearly trending in one direction (towards "yes"), so at
| some point in the future it will largely boil down to
| something akin to this dichotomy. My framing is definitely
| dismissive of one side, but it does strike me as a set of
| arguments that are largely aesthetic on one side and the
| reality of food security on the other.
| bttrfl wrote:
| Every time I read stats like this I wonder what are the
| externalities the PR team decided to omit. One day you hear
| that farmed fish are eco, the next day you find out that
| gigantic trawlers are depleting Antarctic oceans for feed.
|
| I tried to google the possible environmental downsides of lab-
| meat (taste/health aside), but couldn't find anything. Any
| suggestions?
| frankus wrote:
| There's the question of what sort of feedstocks they're using
| and where they come from.
|
| I would assume that it's something like what the animals
| they're replacing eat, but presumably in smaller quantities
| since they're only growing muscle tissue and not an entire
| animal.
|
| There's something to be said for a device that transports
| itself around marginally-arable land eating grass and pumping
| out fertilizer while creating edible protein. Especially if
| the alternative is intensively-farmed row crops like corn and
| soy that tend to require tons of fertilizer and herbicides.
|
| IMO an equally exciting area of research is taking something
| like algae that only need water, sunlight, and some minerals
| to produce food. Which could then be further processed into
| lab-grown meat or be eaten as is.
| tomp wrote:
| > with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can
| choose protein security indefinitely into the future
|
| I think you're confusing a few things.
|
| I'm very pro lab-grown meat, and I don't see why it would be
| either "icky" (if anything, it could be much more "pure", able
| to grow in controlled conditions without any pesticides,
| hormones or antibiotics) nor less "masculine" (a steak is a
| steak is a steak).
|
| I'm very much against plant-based "fake" meat, because they're
| usually far from natural (tons of chemicals) and full of
| propaganda ("red meat is unhealthy" but conveniently conflating
| pure red meat with highly-processed stuff like sausages and
| salami, or "red meat is unsustainable" while we keep burning
| coal and importing plastics from China... don't get me wrong, I
| strongly support carbon tax, but want to be able to _what_ to
| consume (drive car vs. eat steak) myself).
| jamincan wrote:
| I don't think you can dismiss the sustainability of meat-
| substitutes just because we as a society continue to use coal
| or import plastic. A bean-based veggie burger has a much
| lower environmental footprint regardless of those things. The
| major difference is that choosing to buy a meat-substitute
| instead of the real thing is a decision that people can
| individually make, even if just for one meal a week, while
| most of us don't have the ability to choose to close down a
| coal plant.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Not confusing those things, this is just a different argument
| against a different thing (plant based meat).
| [deleted]
| baud147258 wrote:
| > a steak is a steak is a steak
|
| would lab-grown steak be remotely similar to a good cut of
| steak? I'd guess for sausage (and other processes meat) lab-
| grown won't be different, but I don't think lab-grown will be
| able to reach real-steak level anytime soon
| cdelsolar wrote:
| i don't see why not
| vidarh wrote:
| It's more complex, but it's a matter of how soon, not if.
| And how soon, not if, lab-grown steak will be _better_ than
| real ones, because you 'll be able to tinker with the
| composition in ways you simply can't currently.
| yaseer wrote:
| > they're usually far from natural (tons of chemicals)
|
| I really object to marketing use of the word 'natural' and
| 'chemicals'. I don't mean to single you out - these concepts
| are widespread in marketing.
|
| Plenty of 'natural' things are bad, like small pox, the Ebola
| virus and salmonella.
|
| Plenty of 'unnatural' things are good, like antibiotics to
| treat infection.
|
| All matter is made from chemicals. Whether a chemical like
| penicillin or salt is synthesised in a lab, or extracted from
| the ocean, holds no baring on whether that chemical is good
| for you.
|
| - EDIT - Generalised the penicillin example.
| [deleted]
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Penicillin is a natural product of fungi against bacteria.
| tomp wrote:
| When it comes to food, I use the following criteria: could
| I make it myself in my kitchen? (Some "minimal processsing"
| like fermentation and curing therefore fall under
| "natural".)
|
| I'm pretty sure the answer is "no" for most of the plant-
| based fake meat. It's also "no" for McDonald's burger so
| I'm not just hating on plants.
| distribot wrote:
| I understand this conversation is about Beyond Meat kinda
| stuff, but it's isn't no for the two oldest and most
| popular fake meats--tofu and seitan. And yet tofu
| especially gets beat up in terms of fake vs natural.
| jayparth wrote:
| You can definitely make seitan in your kitchen, I am not
| disagreeing with anything you're saying though.
| tomp wrote:
| Tofu and seitan get "beat up" because (1) tofu is soy and
| seitan is gluten (many people dislike those, for various
| reasons), (2) they're often used to _mimic_ (fake) meat,
| not made into creative meals of their own, and (3) for me
| personally, tofu is extremely bland.
| telotortium wrote:
| As an omnivore, I love seitan - it's pretty common in
| Chinese and Japanese cuisine. I wish more vegetarian
| places in the US would use it, but it seems that only
| tofu has crossed over, which is a shame, because tofu
| generally doesn't have the texture and bulk of meat, but
| rather of soft, non-meltable cheese, and is not even as
| filling as that.
| impreciouschild wrote:
| Lots of veg places in the US -do- use seitan. It may be
| your location that doesn't. It's very popular for vegan
| chicken sandwiches, fingers, wings, curries etc. I'm in
| LA tho which may be the current veg restaurant capital of
| the world.
| yaseer wrote:
| It's definitely true highly processed foods correlate
| with poor health outcomes. This correlation is mainly
| because ultra-processed foods often contain added sugars,
| excess sodium, and unhealthy fats (source:
| https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/processed-
| foods...).
|
| There's an (open) question here of what the cause is; is
| this inherent to all food processing?, or is it the
| nutritional content of the food?
|
| I would argue eating home-made potato chips, cookies and
| ice cream may lead to worse health outcomes than plant-
| based burgers with better nutritional benefits
| dariusj18 wrote:
| I wouldn't say Penicillin is 'unnatural', there are
| probably better examples out there.
| yaseer wrote:
| That's true, I just picked penicillin and salt
| intentionally as they both can be synthesised in a lab
| and in nature
| actuator wrote:
| > it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses
| not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do
|
| This is hardly the only solution though. We can also shift to
| just plant based diets from crops which are not water
| intensive. Vegetarianism has been present in many parts of the
| world from a long time and those parts have also done fine with
| surviving.
|
| We have a plethora of recipes as well which we can import from
| those parts of the world and add it with other highly
| nutritious vegan recipes. At least I have been far more
| impressed with eating those cuisines than eating fake meat as
| such.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| You're foolishly projecting ideology and personal beliefs into
| somewhere so far removed from the consumer that it simply won't
| matter.
|
| Commodities buyers don't care who's corn is ethical or who's
| corn is unethical. They don't care who's ground beef is manly
| and who's isn't. It all comes down to cost per results at the
| end of the day. Resource usage is just a part of that
| calculation. No different than the cost of shipping.
|
| If McDonalds and Walmart can cut their existing beef with fake
| plant beef or lab beef without hurting their bottom line (by
| making their products less attractive to consumers) they will.
|
| Will there be people who try and capture the high end market
| with some ideologically themed marketing in the meantime? Of
| course. But make no mistake, the long term goal for these new
| synthetic meat (both plant meat and lab meat) producers is not
| the high end market. It's the thousands of reefer cars that put
| that house brand 80/20 on a store shelf near you. Pandering to
| whatever the premium consumer wants to hear until you can make
| your product cheap enough and good enough to make real money is
| just a necessary part of bootstrapping that.
|
| Putting the McDouble back on the dollar menu with the help of
| synthetic beef is what societal progress looks like.
| ethanbond wrote:
| I agree with everything you say here and if I communicated
| that the arguments against lab meat are durable, that was the
| opposite of my intention. What I mean to say is that it's a
| foregone conclusion and we should be expediting its arrival
| and gaining an edge in that future.
| devy wrote:
| The greenest protein factory is the one that we don't have to
| build - even if it's 99% less land or 80% fewer greenhouse
| emissions than the traditional farming of cows, sheep and
| poultry. It's actually this:
| https://interestingengineering.com/the-explosion-of-insect-p...
| ethanbond wrote:
| We should do that too
| justinmchase wrote:
| Just eat the bugs...
| kwere wrote:
| dont forget to be happy...
| Noos wrote:
| It's always fun with these kinds of posts, because people
| never think what their total progressive future will be like.
| No cars, no pets, eating bugs for protein, taxed to shit to
| provide a social safety net, forced to clump up in cities for
| efficiency. Probably a lot more than that. Being an eco-serf.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| This is the kind of sentiment that watching too many Alex
| Jones documentaries will give you. It's funny that you
| think places like America, which can't even manage to
| legislate _sensible_ climate-saving policies, would ever
| get to an extremist state of banning cars and pets, or
| forcing you to eat bugs for protein. You are laughably out
| of touch with reality.
| [deleted]
| exabrial wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
|
| Good try though.
| shadofx wrote:
| Maybe eventually eating plant matter won't be considered
| efficient either, what with the massive expenditure of
| fertilizer and ecological damage of pesticide and herbicide
| runoff.
|
| We will need to figure out to bio-engineer edible plant matter
| as well. Then once we've mastered that, we can start bio-
| engineering ourselves to photosynthesize from the sun directly,
| to cut out all middlemen from the food chain. Then we can bio-
| engineer a vacuum-resistant carapace and launch ourselves
| toward the sun to exist as truly self-sufficient organisms.
| Then we blot out the sun with our flesh, and find some way to
| go to a different star.
| koheripbal wrote:
| I think what the comment above is missing is that these are
| the metrics that the PR team chose to publish.
|
| The lab meat might also use 100x the CO2 in other production
| materials. It might be more labor and energy intensive. The
| cost might be 10x higher - even at scale.
|
| You cannot trust the PR numbers from a company looking to
| normalize their product.
|
| This is why 3rd party analysis is required.
| genericone wrote:
| Depending on the capital requirements and cost of these
| facilities, and imagining them as semiconductor fab type
| facilities, a nation would really be putting all their eggs in
| one basket if their protein security relies on just a few dozen
| such facilities across the country. This major centralization
| could be done in by one ransomware attack or activist employee
| , whereas the decentralized protein production by tens of
| thousands of producers today is far less susceptible. Once food
| security becomes tech-driven, its something to worry about.
| everdrive wrote:
| >ickiness or masculinity,
|
| How is this related to lab-grown meat?
| sidlls wrote:
| There's a certain squeamishness some have about eating
| something labeled as "lab-grown", as if it's somehow tainted
| with "unnatural" origin.
|
| At the same time, there's a certain machismo, bravado,
| "manliness" associated with eating meat from an actual
| animal, mainly a vicarious association with hunting, but also
| by demonstration of some certain kinds of "alpha male" traits
| (access to resources to afford it, dominance, etc.). Lab-
| grown meat wasn't hunted or butchered, so may be viewed as
| "easier" in some sense--less manly, in other words.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| I agree but also "protein security" reminds me of "mineshaft
| gap" from Dr. Strangelove
| hcknwscommenter wrote:
| It is of course impossible to verify either way, but I am very
| sure these statistics of 96% savings in freshwater are total
| nonsense. Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can
| attest to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of
| washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc.
| Moreover, we have seen time and time again, the reporting of
| extremely high numbers for water usage in beef and milk
| production, but it turns out they are counting the water that
| falls as rain on the pasture land, or the rain/ground water
| used to grow the alfalfa. Should that be counted? Rain seems to
| be fairly renewable, but I admit that (in the extreme) society
| can harm ecosystems by diverting too much rain water (see
| Colorado River). Ground water renewability is a bit context
| dependent.
|
| If the water savings is mostly nonsense, well then I also
| question the savings in GHG emissions. Land savings? Sure,
| fine, that makes sense... but farm land is orders of magnitude
| cheaper than land that has a fully functioning cell culture
| factory on it.
|
| In the end, we will know if this works by what price it can
| sell at and make a marginal return. The jury is out on that
| one.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest
| to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of
| washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc.
|
| Given that this is all happening in a lab, is collecting and
| filtering for reuse an option?
| hcknwscommenter wrote:
| Sure. But then you have to spend way more energy on the
| "filtering" part. It typically makes a lot more sense in
| terms of energy usage to just take tap water and run it
| through a polishing step (deionization and/or reverse
| osmosis), than to take the comparatively "dirty" water
| coming out of your process (dirty but not toxic) and try to
| clean that up.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| An autoclave requires distilled water and an enormous
| amount of energy to operate. You could save the water but
| you'd potentially need to distill it again after. They use
| an enormous amount of energy and water overall.
|
| The feed for the cells still has to come from somewhere
| too, and the growth of the cells is aerobic and generates
| CO2. That said, artificial meat is supposed to hit market
| parity price by 2026 and probably below parity after. [1]
| We will probably see a rapid transition to cultured meat
| within a decade. There are a very large number of these
| companies competing right now. [2]
|
| [1] https://www.mitsui.com/mgssi/en/report/detail/__icsFile
| s/afi... [2] https://cellbasedtech.com/lab-grown-meat-
| companies
| hcknwscommenter wrote:
| "supposed to". I am hopeful but I think we are very early
| here and it is going to be very difficult to actually
| meet these targets. We shall see.
| trainsplanes wrote:
| I imagine a lot of the freshwater savings involves not
| needing to feed an animal. What they drink and eat takes
| large scale agriculture and processing operations which will
| be cut drastically.
| hcknwscommenter wrote:
| But you have to feed the cells. And you can't just grow
| some plants and feed it to the cells, you have to
| manufacture a very precise blend of chemicals (amino acids,
| sugars, surfactants, antioxidants, etc.) at >99% purity for
| each one. Often extremely nasty solvents are involved in
| the production process. Usually, some sort of petroleum
| product is a feedstock. Those chemically synthesized
| materials are hardly green.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| >but it turns out they are counting the water that falls as
| rain on the pasture land, or the rain/ground water used to
| grow the alfalfa.
|
| Can we use that pasture-land (and the rain that falls onto
| it) to grow more useful crops? If so: I don't understand why
| that wouldn't count.
| hcknwscommenter wrote:
| Pasture land is not, usually, crop growing land. Moreover,
| the rain falls regardless. You could grow no crops, and
| your "water usage" would be exactly the same. Why would you
| count it?
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Regarding the weasel-worded "less land usage", most of the
| land that livestock use for grazing is unsuitable for
| conventional farming anyway. Only ruminants can properly
| utilize it.
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| > most of the land that livestock use for grazing is
| unsuitable for conventional farming anyway
|
| Ah, but are most cows in the world actually grazing on
| pasture unsuitable for arable farming? I wasn't able to
| find an estimate of that number, but am willing to bet good
| money it's pretty low, considering that the number one
| driver of tropical deforestation is converting land to
| raise cattle, and the number two driver is soybean
| production mostly to feed said cattle: https://www.worldwil
| dlife.org/magazine/issues/summer-2018/ar...
| c618b9b695c4 wrote:
| >Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest
| to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of
| washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc.
|
| There is an enormous difference in scale and efficiency
| between a lab scale process and an industrial one.
| Researchers (myself included) do what gets the job done
| quickly, not necessarily balancing the budget at the same
| time.
| hcknwscommenter wrote:
| Yes there is an enormous difference in scale. Efficiency?
| In cell culture? In terms of GHG or emissions or energy
| use? I find that hard to believe. In my personal experience
| (not data, but relevant), none of the manufacturing scale
| processes were particularly optimized in terms of
| GHG/energy. Rather, yield was the primary target and
| consistency was the very close secondary target. Sometimes,
| vice versa. I 10x improvement of yield can very easily lead
| to higher GHG emission intensity, or no effect at all, e.g.
| andscoop wrote:
| I used to feel similarly, but now, I'm not so sure. What
| worries me is that lab-grown meat will allow big ag practices
| to continue, which will do more harm to our co2 emissions and
| world's soil health.
|
| To expand on this further, there is active research and
| practices into sustainable farming practices that show diverse
| crop rotations along dense but short grazing across the land
| has the ability to rebuild top soil 10x than previously
| thought. Most importantly this top soil serves as a MASSIVE
| CARBON SINK.
|
| Using this proven methods, we can leverage the world's farmland
| to sequester carbon while improving the health of our soil and
| the nurtition density of our food.
|
| The catch is that we need the animals to restore soil health
| and presumably we need the business model of selling the meat
| to make this practice sustainable.
|
| Further Reading:
|
| Dirt to Soil - Gabe Brown
|
| Alan Savory's Holistic Management Practices -
| https://youtu.be/q7pI7IYaJLI
|
| https://www.marincarbonproject.org/
| jurip wrote:
| How many animals are we talking about in a scenario where all
| the animals were being used for crop/grazing rotation? I've
| heard about this and it sounds good to me, but without having
| looked into it at all, it sounds to me like something that
| probably wouldn't support the number of animals we're using
| right now for meat production?
| greenonions wrote:
| Even if you could convert all the corn/soybean land in the
| United States to more regenerative methods, you probably
| wouldn't be able to meet the current demand for meat.
|
| Additionally you have a logistical problem with the animals
| being distributed across an enormous area vs concentrated
| in a CAFO.
|
| Now, you would easily be able to grow enough food for the
| country and possibly the globe, but meat demand cannot be
| sustained.
| me_me_me wrote:
| > sense of ickiness or masculinity
|
| If they can keep the cost lower (2/3 or better 1/2 price) than
| animal meat, all of the stigma will just poof out of existence.
|
| This is very exiting, but its a not solution to global warming
| (only small factor).
|
| >> Methane has a large effect but for a relatively brief
| period, having an estimated mean half-life of 9.1 years in the
| atmosphere, whereas carbon dioxide is currently given an
| estimated mean lifetime of over 100 years
|
| Still very exiting to possibly live through end factory
| farming.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Totally agreed - competitive flavor at superior price will
| make those other arguments disappear. That's why I think we
| should view this as a foregone conclusion and get positioned
| to simply own the future, or at least not have our future
| owned by someone else.
| Noos wrote:
| ...sure, like Carob was a foregone conclusion to replace
| chocolate:
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-
| gastronomy/how-c...
|
| As someone who actually had to eat Tiger's Milk bars as a
| kid, good luck at it.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I love this project for the simple reason that it makes me think
| of the possibility for large crewed long distance space flights
| with onboard protein producing capabilities. Would also go a long
| way towards making life on mars more realistic.
| watertom wrote:
| This still won't fix the fundamental problem facing the
| environment, which is over population, it also won't fix the
| problem that the environment is already locked into a number of
| positive feedback loops driving climate change.
| [deleted]
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| Although global population is still increasing, the _rate_ of
| increase has been declining since the 1960s, so that 's
| acceleration in the right direction:
| https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth
| sharikous wrote:
| Actually it fixes exactly that. A more efficient way to get
| food allows for a larger population with less strain on the
| Earth's resources.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I'm curious how healthy this is compared to grass fed animals.
| dharmaturtle wrote:
| They don't produce beef yet:
|
| > At this point, the facility is already able to produce lamb,
| chicken, and pork products without using genetic modification
| or animal serum. Future Meat says that it will soon also be
| able to start production on beef, too.
| aurora72 wrote:
| A key benefit of cultured meat is its minimized impact on the
| environment => And the key danger is its maximized impact on the
| body.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| What impact?
| airhead969 wrote:
| Diverticulitis, gout, hyperlipidemia, halitosis, ...
| kazen44 wrote:
| how so? as far as i am aware, this is actual meat, compared to
| a substitute.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| This is a great concept and likely to be the only way to
| continue to eat meat in a long-term future.
|
| However, applying a cautionary principle, I would really
| prefer to find a detailed description of what ingredients are
| these meat cultures being supplied with during growth.
|
| For example, cow meat is theoretically healthy but the
| previous outbreak of BSE started with cow feed that included
| other cow parts.
|
| In the same way sea fish is theoretically healthy, however
| aquaculture fish feed includes a large portion of fishmeal
| which is again grinded dead fish guts and bones. The
| nutrional value of this (lower omega fatty acids content?) is
| to me not clear and the impact of this is perhaps
| insuficiently studied (Happy to read any sources others may
| suggest).
|
| I am not arguing that a lab grown muscle cell is different
| from a muscle cell appended to a chicken. But I would very
| much like to see more detail on the supply chain of how that
| muscle cell is provided with nutrients.
| starfallg wrote:
| Implying that natural products are always good for us, while
| synthetic ones are always bad is intellectual laziness. There
| is an abundance of toxic compounds found in nature that are
| unequivocally bad for us. Take bracken for example, a
| ubiquitous plant containing the carcinogen ptaquiloside, which
| is used in cooking in different parts of the world
| traditionally. It can also be absorbed up the food chain
| affecting milk that humans consume, and it is known to affect
| the water supply, increasing the rate of stomach cancer.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Perhaps, but suggesting that processed foods (which factory
| produced meats essentially are) tend to contain less
| (potentially important - we have no idea) micronutrients is
| not, and is a very reasonable concern to have.
| sebringj wrote:
| I wonder then if "vegetarian" will be expanded to include lab
| grown meat or possibly a newer "labatarian"? "I like green eggs
| and ham." has a new meaning now.
| cvg wrote:
| Lab grown pork from an Israeli company! Is this kosher?
| ginko wrote:
| Some rabbis seem to think so: https://www.newsweek.com/cloned-
| pigs-kosher-rabbi-yuval-cher...
| koheripbal wrote:
| Kosher certification in Israel is a process, but it's entirely
| possible that they'll be able to get certification because it's
| not "really" from a pig.
| cout wrote:
| The article touches on water and emissions; I wonder how these
| products compare on electricity usage (and whether that's counted
| in the emissions estimate).
| koheripbal wrote:
| Cows don't use a lot of electricity, so it's got to be higher
| emissions. ...even considering the cow methane.
| ykevinator3 wrote:
| Still high cholesterol but a good idea
| mattwest wrote:
| This post sparked nice discussion, but let's also acknowledge
| that slashgear is just regurgitating a PRnewswire article. I
| would take the statements with a grain of salt.
| eloff wrote:
| I'm not sure vegans would touch this, but they've always been
| more akin to a religion than a diet. Vegetarians would largely go
| for this I think.
|
| I'd be very happy if could get meat that was cheaper, safer,
| cleaner, and didn't have animal cruelty issues. This is the
| future.
|
| Also does anyone else here remember the beef vats in Call to
| Power, the civilization knockoff game? It really feels like I'm
| living in the future when I read articles like this.
| koheripbal wrote:
| I really dislike the notion of throwing entire swaths of people
| into a single bucket.
|
| Some vegans will eat it - others won't. I don't think you can
| say with confidence what portion of them will until there's
| some data.
|
| Many are vegan on ethical grounds - which don't apply here.
| eloff wrote:
| > I really dislike the notion of throwing entire swaths of
| people into a single bucket.
|
| Because there are always exceptions to the rule? Or because
| you think you can't generalize about any diverse group of
| people (yes you can, knowing that it obviously doesn't apply
| to every individual)?
|
| > Some vegans will eat it - others won't. I don't think you
| can say with confidence what portion of them will until
| there's some data.
|
| Yes that's fair. But remember the backlash against beyond and
| impossible burgers because they're grilled on the same grill
| as meat - as if meat were an infection. Some vegans are a
| special bunch.
| koheripbal wrote:
| > Because there are always exceptions to the rule?
|
| No, because the exceptions are the few times they are
| correct!
| eloff wrote:
| It's a pretty bad generalization if it's generally wrong
| then.
|
| I'd say the problem is with the flawed generalization
| then, not being able to generalize about groups in
| general.
| Falling3 wrote:
| Veganism is neither a religion nor a diet; it's a philosophy
| that impact various areas of consumption and usage beyond just
| food.
|
| As a vegan, I'm thrilled about the prospect of this. This is
| the only realistic route to anything resembling the cessation
| of large scale animal farming.
| eloff wrote:
| Question though, would you personally eat it? Do you think
| other vegans might?
| Falling3 wrote:
| I know lots of other vegans would. I'm far more excited to
| be able to give my cats a cruelty free diet. I just hit 16
| years and I'm honestly not sure that I'd want to go back to
| eating meat at this point - even ethically produced.
| Animats wrote:
| Pricing is a big issue. This is a complicated process. They're
| pricing their chicken somewhere around $30/lb.[1] This isn't a
| competitive product yet. This is a press release about a pilot
| plant.
|
| Impossible Burger's process, by comparison, is simple and cheap.
| It's mostly soy and potatoes. The only complex component is heme,
| and that's a meat flavoring used in small quantities.
|
| [1] https://www.foodmanufacturing.com/consumer-
| trends/news/21259...
| hnthrowaway2 wrote:
| As a vegetarian, I always have a moral dilemma when choosing
| dietary supplements. Perhaps I don't have to face these dilemmas
| if I can include lab grown meat in my diet therefore obviating
| the need for supplements. But having been a lifelong vegetarian,
| it still feels odd. Objectively looking at it, lab grown meat
| seems to be a good idea. I'm not entirely sure of the "morality"
| or ethics of it. Will take some getting used to, but if this
| gives rise to innovations in the synthesizing of supplements such
| as collagen then I'm all for it.
| shafyy wrote:
| Note that they are not yet "pumping" out anything. Their plan is
| to start selling next year, which means that it probably will
| take another few years.
|
| I think that it makes much more sense to make meat and cheese
| directly from plant proteins, without going through the trouble
| of growing meat in bioreactors.
|
| Assuming that both will have a similar endproduct (and Impossible
| shows that it's possible), making from plant proteins directly
| will always be cheaper, faster, require less resources and be
| healthier.
|
| That said, I'm not against companies going in this direction. I
| think it's worth exploring. It's just a bit sad that this "high
| tech" gets much more press and hype than the more boring
| alternative, which is already here and reducing greenhouse gas
| emissions TODAY (which is the key). This is very similar to
| direct-air-capture technologies, which some day might be viable,
| but there are plenty of things that we can today that are just
| not as sexy and therefore don't get hyped in the media.
|
| To be clear: I see a future where most meats and cheeses will be
| made directly from plants, and a small minority made using
| cultured cells.
| i_haz_rabies wrote:
| There are amino acids you can't get from plant protein.
| shafyy wrote:
| No, all essential amino acids can be found in plants. We have
| a long way to go if even people here on HN (which I would
| consider more educated than the average person) gets
| something as basic as this about nutrition wrong.
| thehappypm wrote:
| From first principles, how is this possible? Food animals get
| their amino acids from eating plants.
| shafyy wrote:
| Of course there are amino acids that don't exist in plants,
| but they are not essential (i.e. can be synthesized in the
| human body and don't need to be taken from external
| sources).
|
| From first principles, it's possible because e.g. cows
| could make amino acids that are not found in plants, but
| those are not essential (I don't know if cows make any non
| essential amino acids that are not found in plants, this is
| just an example)
| insaneirish wrote:
| Clearly plants get them from eating animals.
| tofukid wrote:
| All essential amino acids are found in plants, and some plant
| proteins (soy or hemp for example) contain all the essentials
| in a single protein.
| shafyy wrote:
| I don't know why you're being downvoted, this is true.
| Leherenn wrote:
| Is it in a "reasonable" amount? As in, is the concentration
| comparable?
| mdorazio wrote:
| > making from plant proteins directly will always be cheaper,
| faster, require less resources and be healthier
|
| This is not clear at all. If you look into what goes into
| making something like an Impossible Burger, it is basically
| none of those things.
| shafyy wrote:
| Which part is not clear?
| djrogers wrote:
| For one thing, plant based meats require a ton of
| resources, and for another there's no clear evidence that
| it's any healthier than vat grown meat.
| detritus wrote:
| I know we've got to start somewhere and I'm all for this
| direction, but wake me up when we're making synthetic meat
| products based on beef or pork cell lines.
|
| Chicken's the one meat I don't feel too guilty about eating,
| especially in emission terms. Yet, anyway...
| nicoburns wrote:
| Have you seen the conditions that (most) farmed chickens are
| raised in?
| detritus wrote:
| Yup, and they live for about two months with a level of
| cognizance and culture that I can just about live with having
| killed on my behalf.
|
| Such things are horrors to our eyes, because we know better.
| They don't.
|
| Not saying it's right, not saying that I wish it weren't
| thus, but here we are.
|
| - ed
|
| Also, I'm in the UK, where we still have _slightly_ better
| farming standards and access to free range /organic produce
| than some other first world countries. For the moment,
| anyway... .
| wccrawford wrote:
| >At this point, the facility is already able to produce lamb,
| chicken, and pork products without using genetic modification
| or animal serum. Future Meat says that it will soon also be
| able to start production on beef, too.
|
| So, they're not producing it commercially, but they _can_ do
| pork. I 'd say the day is inevitable at this point.
| detritus wrote:
| That's interesting - I thought that fat was the trickier
| element to replicate, which is a more important dimension in
| pork and beef.
|
| Now then, the interesting question for an Israeli-company -
| would producing and then consuming synthetic pork be Kosher?
| wccrawford wrote:
| I wasn't surprised to see that beef was left out initially.
| Even without the religious objection, they aren't likely to
| have much of a market for vat-beef locally because cow-beef
| isn't desired locally.
|
| But once they go more global, there's a really big market
| for vat-beef.
|
| And I would love to know of the religious implications of
| this as well... Both for cow and pig, for various religions
| and other beliefs, such as veganism.
| edanm wrote:
| Why do you think that cow-beef isn't desired in Israel?
| We eat plenty of beef.
| paraschopra wrote:
| I'm surprised at the claim that it does 80-percent fewer
| greenhouse emissions.
|
| The recent research suggests that lab-grown meat may not be
| better than conventional meat (at least for beef) because a part
| of cows emissions are methane related that dissipates fast while
| majority of emissions for lab grown meat is CO2 that stays in the
| atmosphere for long.
|
| From
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.0000...
|
| >We conclude that cultured meat is not prima facie climatically
| superior to cattle; its relative impact instead depends on the
| availability of decarbonized energy generation and the specific
| production systems that are realized.
| yboris wrote:
| How do you reconcile your claim that "methane ... dissipates
| fast" with this:
|
| > Methane is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at
| trapping heat in the atmosphere.
|
| https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane
| wavefunction wrote:
| It seems like a faulty way to analyze the problem in any
| case. Atmospheric methane devolves into CO2 in about eight
| years, "on average." CO2 emitted into the atmosphere appears
| to stick around for 300-1000 years. The heat-trapping of
| methane is obviously much greater during that eight years but
| then it devolves into CO2. I guess the only way to draw a
| real conclusion would be comparing the amount of
| Methane+subsequent CO2 resulting from traditional animal
| husbandry with the amount of CO2 produced by this lab
| process.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > a part of cows emissions are methane related that dissipates
| fast while majority of emissions for lab grown meat is CO2 that
| stays in the atmosphere for long.
|
| Methane "dissipates" into CO2. It's strictly worse in terms of
| its affect on the climate.
| Aqueous wrote:
| Article contains virtually nothing on what it is or how it's
| grown.
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| > Article contains virtually nothing on what it is or how it's
| grown.
|
| Maybe because it's grown in freshly squeezed aborted calves:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum
| jimdavenport wrote:
| Maybe don't use the verb "pump"?
| davidivadavid wrote:
| How much research is being done into exploring "exotic" new
| invented fake-meats with different textures / tastes / etc. ?
| bckr wrote:
| Slow down! I'm not ready for Meech Munchies
| aaron695 wrote:
| > World's first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per
| day
|
| If this was true billion $ industries just ended. The stock
| market would collapse.
|
| What they are really doing is amazing. But it's all a while off
| yet.
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