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I watched a video (no source) on this stuff a while back and it compared the carbon footprint of plant based diets, meat alternatives and meat and came to the conclusion that the current way lab grown meat (not plant protein shaped like meat like planted, beyond etc) of the kind that article means can actually be more carbon intensive to produce than factory farmed chicken. (The least carbon intense meat). That said it is still better than free range beef, but one should consider the reason why one buys this. Vegans seem to not like it either because it resembles meat or because it contains the cells harvested from real animals and meat eaters don’t like it because its not real meat, not to mention it’s insanely expensive, just eat the plant protein, its not that bad lol. (Also put on a linear scale the carbon footprint of beef compared to plant based protein and fake meat is insane, thinking about that video alwqys makes me eat less meat)
It has 2 major use cases as I see it.
If they can lab engineer super premium cuts consistently and affordably people will come around. I dont buy A5 Wagyu because I cant afford it, not because I dont want it.
Or
If they can really pull the ass out of the price on meat destined for processing plants to make premade foods. People arent excited for the meat case and the steaks at the supermarket to be lab grown, but when fast and frozen food switches over to it almost universally people wont have a choice.
That’s partly because they fail to market it well. Meat alternatives never taste the same. Trying to replace beef or pork or chicken will always fail to entice people that already enjoy meat.
It’s better described as a new meat with new recipe/cooking requirements. You wouldn’t complain about how much the assumed pork ribs didn’t taste right if I told you they were beef ribs. You’d agree, because you wouldn’t expect them to taste the same.
I needed cheap protein that stores well for my disaster emergency plan and the best thing I found was peanuts. They can be stored for a long time before they spoil, they’re cheap, high in protein, and easy to grow. They grow well in hot weather, so if you can’t grow them where you live, wait a few years and climate change will fix that.
Doesn’t this mean that the tech just isn’t ready yet?
As in, they can’t sell it if it’s more expensive, is fake, and is worse for the environment.
No new technology ever starts cheap so I would expect to see reductions in carbon use with time.
There is also the added benefit of land not being used for cattle being regenerated. Looking at the cattle ranches in my state, a quick (very rough) calculation puts that combined size around 200,000km², or the size of Kyrgyzstan. If half of that was reclaimed thanks to ranches being closed, that would pay a huge benefit.
I wonder if benefits like these are calculated into the carbon footprint.
Well rn lab grown meat is even worse in terms of CO2 than animal farming, so don’t get your hopes up yet. Yeah, sure, it means less animals getting thrown into the torture and murder machine, but if you really want to make a difference it’s by convincing peoples to go vegan, at least in this decade
I was mostly thinking about taste and texture. I never even considered that the CO2 impact might be worse. That sucks.
From what I’ve read lab grown meat is mushy, like a chicken nugget, because it’s basically a paste that’s extruded into a steak like shape. Been a few years since I’ve read up on it though so maybe they have a new way of dealing with it
They’ve been making many strides in terms of texture. Last I saw, they were completely growing cell cultures that produced a ground-beef like texture and look.
Yeah exactly, ground beef or extruded/separated meat texture.
Same problem that companies like impossible and beyond can’t overcome. The structure of muscle tissue (eg a steak or chicken breast) is tremendously difficult to replicate and that texture is what people love
It’s still a great thing for animal welfare
Lab grown chicken is apparently fantastic, taste and texture wise
Is it because we already like chicken nuggets?
Co2 or Co2e cows are pretty damn farty?
I’m sure the CO2 output will go down over time, considering how new the technology is, relatively speaking.
When you think about how much water and feed is required to make a substantially smaller portion of meat, then this technology is highly likely to undercut the CO2 emissions of traditional meat production once it’s done on a large enough scale, considering that, at least based on what I’ve seen, the main expenditure of resources is just a pure nutrient solution, with the rest being electricity to generally operate the machinery, and maintain temperature (and of course, we’ve seen many advancements in heat pump-like technology in recent years making it insanely efficient at maintaining heat for a fraction of the electricity it traditionally costs.)
I must say, I don’t like lab grown meat in the future being the reason why omnivores don’t give a fair shake to already-existing vegan meat replacements today. Forever being out there on the time horizon can be misused as a long term excuse for not cutting down on animal exploitation.
Meat eating ties into a lot of people conceptions of masculinity. The idea that you might be eating something that didn’t have to die takes the power and dominance out of it - a sexual politics of meat if you will.
I’m not saying this is true of everyone who eats meat - but there is a certain type that this unambiguously true for. Think of the guys with the aviator glasses sitting in the truck pfp - eating dead cow is as American and masculine as fucking women.
(Think about how much the absolutely stupid “if vegs hate meat so much, why do they make fake meat?” sounds like “if lesbians don’t like mean, why do they use dildos?)
I don’t disagree with the fact that a lot of men obsessively eat meat and act like it is the only food worth eating is because of toxic masculine culture. I have met plenty of those type.
I do just want to add, in the context of this post, I think the motivation for the group being against meat eating is that it is a farming group, and I’m assuming, at least in some capacity, they represent animal farmers. They have a vested economic interest in stopping the push of lab grown meat. This is not me thinking they should, just thought I would point that out.
Like I said, my comment is not to take away from your post, just to add what I think is important context to the original post.
No Farmers No Food looks to be one of these right wing conspiracists outfits associated with this phenomenon.
“NO FARMERS NO FOOD: WILL YOU EAT THE BUGS?” is an Epoch Original documentary exposing the hidden agenda behind global “Green Policies,” the untold stories of farmers forced out of business, the disruption this will have on our food supply, and why edible bugs are suddenly being pushed to the fore as a “Global Green Solution.”
EpochTV program “Facts Matter” host Roman Balmakov travels around the world to investigate this next global food crisis that is being ignored by the world’s media.
Edit: the guy who runs it isn’t even a farmer.
I think that specific account strengthens my argument even more.
Interesting, yeah thanks for looking into that. Like I said, do it disagree with you
I think this also speaks to the fact that cattle farming (that’s for the US, but I think this also applies in the UK, where this group is from) is heavily monopolized industry. A lot of people claiming to “speak for small farmers” are bad actors who are advocating policies which actually benefit big Ag.
Citations Needed: Episode 80: Animal Rights as Media and Pop Culture Punchline
Episode webpage: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/citationsneeded/CN80_20190619_animal_rights_Gruen_Ko.mp3
The interviews on this episode are pretty good, Aph Ko talks about how meat eating is an integral part of the patriarchal white supremacy society we line in.
I will always upvote a reference to Nima and Adam’s fantastic work.
That’s… A theory, pretty sure it’s more that meat just tastes good though
If you start to look a lot of the advertising is highly masculinized. Meat is definitely masculine in Western culture.
Yes - it is that way for normal people. Notice the amount of qualifiers in my original statement.
There is a disturbing undercurrent to some people’s understanding of meat - to the point where people like Jordan Peterson (others too) have made themselves sick on “carnivore” diets.
I am talking about the kind of people mentioned in the OP that are upset that fake meat options exist. Part of the reason these people are upset - because any rational meat eater would be like cool, more food options - is that they view synthetic meats or even people choosing not to eat meat as an attack on their personal identity, which for these individuals is constructed around this weird patriarchal nationalist thing.
When I get a honey butter chicken biscuit from Whata, I’m doing it because I’m hungry and those things taste like crack. For some men, eating meat is something they have this complex about - you eat a steak because you aren’t a weak little soy boy.
You nailed it. I love a steak as much as the next dude but you put a piece of synthetic meat in front of me that looks and tastes near enough - I’d be happy to compromise to cut out the killing.
I hope to never meat the kind of people that you’re talking about. That’s pretty weird
It’s a strange phenomenon.
When I was vegetarian as a teenager, my mother would do things like secretly cook my fake bacon in bacon fat and then reveal the trick afterwards - “oh that tasted better than usually didn’t it?” The TTI facility I was at for a bit would only provide me with just plates of unseasoned canned vegetables, and then crow about how I didn’t care that much about being veg because I wouldn’t eat just a straight bowl of peas.
I think some of it is a weird discomfort/projection thing, because many meat eaters haven’t really seriously engaged with the ethics of eating meat and the existence of other people who have can be seen as a threat. Again - not all people who eat meat - but I think in a world where we are very abstracted from that process of killing the animal the existence of vegans/vegetarians and their food forces some folks to confront their own cognitive dissonance on the matter.
Sounds like you’ve unfortunately run into a lot of unkind people in general.
I suppose if I really think about it, I have faced some weird toxic masculinity when I’ve order salmon or chicken caesar salad instead of steak but mostly with older people. Similar to getting a drink with an umbrella in it instead of a pint of ale.
I’m sorry you had to go through that. Sounds awful
It’s honestly bewildering to me that people like you actually exist; the “straw man” people on the right like to belittle.
It does no favors for anyone to have and openly express this opinion.
It does no favors for anyone to have and openly express this opinion.
But is the opinion wrong? Do these people on the right you mention not have a slur for effeminate men based on the preference of meat and dairy alternatives?
What part bewilders you? The “sexual politics of meat” part, or that fact that they chose a conservative stereotype to demonstrate an example? Because their theory is absolutely a thing in our society, meat is unarguably and demonstrably tied into masculinity for a lot of men as the result of advertising and social conditioning. If their example is what bewilders you though I think I can empathize, because this phenomenon is not at all something exclusive to conservatives or the right. Maybe just more pronounced on that side of culture. Plenty of liberal men conflate meat eating with masculinity, to degrees.
Eating meat, especially steak, is very clearly a part of masculine identities in many western nations. That’s self evidently true. It’s well represented in media and if you’ve ever had to eat with men you must have noticed it.
I
dodon’t understand what there is to object to in OPs pointing out of a fact of our culture.Edit: don’t
I think that most rational people don’t think about it.
Lemmy is full of the fringes (both sides) from Reddit and it’s disconcerting.
Pointing out this simple observation will likely garner downvotes, further validating my point
It is an artificial politics though. As in we don’t naturally have this association with masculinity, it’s propagandized by the industry. If we somehow got to the point of society actually divesting from animal farming, I think we’d already have started tackling the masculinity propaganda to some degree. It’ll be a long hard fight though.
100% it is artificial and socially constructed. I don’t think Adam’s Sexual Politics of Meat has it all right but it has some interesting ideas about cultural messages about meat and masculinity and got me started thinking about it. (It was written for a Daly class, and Daly is the reason there’s a strain of radical feminism that things womyn are magical spirit beings that are tainted by being in any form of contact with an XY chromosome. There’s a reason Limbaugh attacked Dworkin and not Daly and Raymond cough)
I would absolutely eat this if it was the same price, or even slightly more expensive, than equivalent beef.
the only reason i’d have an issue with it is because of the markup on most items like this (looking in your direction beyond and morningstar).
if they can have a sustainable and ethical method of creating food then it should be free to everyone who needs it.
Potatoes aren’t even free so I doubt that is happening.
Cheaper food would be a good start, potatoes and rice are incredibly cheap foods.
At least in the US I’d say it’s because the government pumps billions and billions in subsidies to the different farm sectors (70+ billion a year for beef alone). The products you mentioned don’t get that funding and don’t sell the volume either.
IMO the biggest customers for this once it reaches parity with real meat for cost and quality will be companies like McDonalds, Sysco and other companies that manufacture foods in biblical quantities. Once they can save money by doing it, they absolutely will and once they start putting their level of investment into the tech, it will advance very rapidly.
They’ll still sell regular meat, the lab meat burger will just be ten times the price
Its possible they will open with that, “cruelty free cultured beef” or some buzz term that sounds better than lab grown. But beyond that think about it on a McDonalds level industrial scale. If they can make each pattie for just 1c less than real beef and they make 2.36 Billion burgers a year…
With real beef they are still at the mercy of weather, diseases running through herds, they have to move the stock, slaughter it, process the carcasses then process the meat. Shouldering the costs and losses the whole way in their margins.
If they can get it to work at sufficient scale McDonalds can build a “lab” with a pattie factory attatched, hell if they can they will grow it pattie shaped. They know “lab grown” isnt a selling point yet, they wont shout it from the rooftops.
I’m imagining the terrible they’ll have keeping the factory absolutely sterile, since it won’t have an immune system
On the other hand they’ll have to make some pretty good medical advances, for example synthetic blood, unless they can also grow bones and marrow
Milk factories already have this solved.
This will not hold anything back, keeping an entire production line sterile is not a big problem.
People get sick drinking raw milk
Large milk factories don’t generally output raw milk.
The tricky part of lab grown meat is you need to keep it from being infected.
Keep the factory perfectly sterile.
Any time a vat is colonised by fungi or bacteria or a virus its contents would have to be dumped and the equipment sterilised
That’s going to be expensive.
It will need feedstock. It will produce waste CO2
Meanwhile a cow has an immune system and eats low quality grass.
Lab meat will not be able to compete with field grown meat
I’ll bet dimes to dollars that it’s not that hard to turn grass into labmeat-consumable nutrients. Cows use bacteria to digest grass, anyway, and enzymes are usually pretty easy to make in a lab, too.
Lab grown food is legitimately super expensive to make though.
When I got a playstation 2, my stepfather was amazed it had a blue led. They were crazy expensive just a few years earlier and this console just used one for no real reason other than it looked good.
Yeah, and when that price comes we can have that discussion.
Just saying, don’t be so pessimistic. I’d definitely try it. Who knows what the future has for us
Oh I’ll eat it once I can afford it, I have no problem with that.
I probably wouldn’t eat it myself. Not due to “Muh meat. Muh masculinityh!” – but because i feel like, that everytime we mess too much with food, we end up making it bad for ourselves in some weird way. Processed foods and all that jazz.
So i’ll continue eating my legumes, greens and the monthly beef.
We’ve done SO much selective breeding to make our food hardier and more plentiful, that we now have so much that we’re complaining about it not being pretty enough, or that the tomato that grows three fruits a year is slightly less tasty than the plant that might produce one, or not.
Honestly, it’s a great time to be alive to eat stuff we couldn’t even imagine a century ago.
Agree - but i personally think there’s a huge qualitative difference between selective breeding over long periods of time – and then producing a fully artifical beef in a lab. One is a slow natural process with human intervention and the other is a fully synthetic process.
I just miss my wife
I also miss your wife
Processed food isn’t bad for you… GMOs aren’t bad for you… that’s the propaganda farmers use to keep you from making common sense choices.
“Processed” is anything that goes into a machine. You want your beef ground up? It’s now processed. What’s added in the processing is what you need to isolate and be weary of.
“Genetically Modified Organisms” includes bananas which have been selectively cultivated to provide more nutrition and reduce seed sizes. It’s a result of intelligent agricultural practices to maximize food production and minimize inedible waste.
Plant based meat has been an incredible substitution for meat making it cruelty free without compromising much on taste or texture, if at all.
Lab grown is the next step, making genuine meat without slaughtering animals. I’m not aligned with PETA but I think an ideal future is one where we don’t need to kill sentient life in order to have exactly what we do right now.
You can have your own opinion but at the very least be aware of the origin of your bias.
“Processed” is anything that goes into a machine. You want your beef ground up? It’s now processed. What’s added in the processing is what you need to isolate and be weary of.
I don’t disagree necessarily, but food that’s been ground up into a paste is essentially pre-chewed. It definitely makes it easier to gulp down more before your brain catches up to your stomach and you start feeling full. This goes for apple sauce as much as it does chicken nuggets.
I suppose but that’s not inherently unhealthy or even bad for you in the traditional understanding of the phrase. I understand not wanting to drink your calories as someone who struggles with significant weight loss, but the what about the inverse? I’m sure there are some people who need to drink profound amounts of calories just to survive.
If you want unprocessed applesauce, buy apples. They’re a choice no different than anything else.
I think when most people talk about “processed food”, they’re referring to ultra-processed food, and just grinding beef would not be enough to classify it as an ultra-processed food
Yep, my bad! I was referring to ultra-processed foods.
Stop doing agriculture. If you’re going to be anti-technology on food, then be an anprim.
Nope, agriculture has existed for a looong long time. With that said, i try to limit my intake of food grown in conventional agriculture with pesticides and all that shit.
I’m not anti-technology on food per se. But i’m very sceptical whenever we introduce new foods or stuff to put into our bodies. It feels like 30 years passes and then the article “X is super fucking bad for you actually” comes out. So i try to limit myself to ingesting stuff that have existed for a long time - because at least then we know the long term effects of them.
I agree. I remember when skim milk and margarine were supposed to be good for you. Beans and peas already exist, are cheap, store forever, and can be used in so many different ways. Fake meat feels like an overly complicated way to solve a problem that’s already solved, with the added bonus that they could cause horrific health problems that won’t be identified for decades.
WHERE’s NOLAN
Am I the only one that feels bad about how that guy feels about fucking up his marriage? Lol.
Nah that’s real
But in all seriousness I would love if lab meats became economically viable.
Imagine being able to have some lab grown mammoth. Enjoy something our ancestors did
I’m interested in the very conflicying reports about how the dodo tasted!
I’m curious what would happen to all the cattle. We’d only need a tiny fraction. So would some actually be released into the wild? Would probably be hard on them. Many would probably be slaughtered to sell off as “the last real meat”.
There would still be a market for “authentic, grass-fed” meat. It would become the fancy stuff, despite not tasting any different. There will also be a market for milk.
They would be killed, plain and simple. But that’s their fate anyway and in this scenario, at least we’d stop breeding more of them.
It’s sad to think about, but we’ve bred most of these animals to a point where their very existance includes suffering and their only path in nature would be extinction.
If some of them were simply allowed to roam free on some of the no longer needed land used for grazing they would live and recover for the most part. Animals, even domesticated ones, still have the insticts to survive and while they would struggle at first, each generation would filter out the negative traits of domestication until a healthy population is left.
Yes, this is even true for livestock. A few aggressive bulls being around the herd instead of separated will be a defense against a lot of predators, just like in wild cattle herds.
I don’t know how many factory-farmed animals can even live without human intervention. Sadly, they’ve been so selectively bred I’m not sure that living in the wild is an option anymore.
Pigs thrive when they get loose. Feral horses have successfully started breeding populations multiple times. Chickens frequently roam free on non-factory farms and just stick around for the easy food, but can find more on their own.
No, cows are far too domesticated to have a decent go of it in the wild. They depend on things like antibiotics and vitamins and constant vet maintenance to survive. They’d be pretty fucked in short order and until then they’d wreak havoc on native ecology.
They really don’t as a total population though, that is more about keeping them healthy while they are forced to grow faster than they did before farming. They only need vitamins when they are force fed grain that bulks them out with few nutrients.
It would require thousands for a diverse enough genetic population and maybe some protection from poachers, but even beef and dairy cattle could be as successful as the Yellowstone bison. There just needs to be enough for them to reproduce enough to overcome the initially high rate of death.
Fair points all around in your first paragraph. But the question remains… Why would we want to maintain a herd of large, non-native, probably ecologically destructive, post-domesticated animals in the wild? Seems like a very poor choice, and a treatment we’ve repeatedly failed to extend to most native species.
We wouldn’t necessarily want to release all of the domesticated animals, but we have lost a lot of native ecology and some of them could fill those missing niches. Like cattle could replace bison if we didn’t expand the bison herds, because large grazers is a niche and we already destroyed that niche in North America. We wouldn’t need to release turkeys since we still have wild turkeys. Chickens and pigs could probably go away too, since I’m pretty sure both are invasive.
But the mindset of them all just dying out in the wild is important to dispel, both because it is a bad justification to wipe them out by itself and a dangerous assumption for people that might want to keep some around as pets, not realizing they have a high chance of surviving if they run wild.
They’d be slaughtered right on schedule and just not replaced. It’d be like when cars took over for horses.
Um the same thing would happen to them that already happens to them: They’d be killed within a few years for people to eat. The only difference is that they wouldn’t be forcibly inseminated to have more babies. I must say though, yours is not at all the first time I’ve heard someone ponder this and the confusion over the scenario always baffles me. You know that we raise cows specifically to kill them and we have complete control over how many are born, yea? No they wouldn’t wander aimless into the ecosystem, they’d stay on the farm until slaughtered and we just wouldn’t raise more of them.
But I bet some environmental groups would try to get them released. Other environmental groups would protest against lab meat for being “unnatural”. Many farmers will protest and want to be compensated for lost income. Some farmers would take pity on their animals.
And of course it wouldn’t happen over a year but it would take longer for lab production to ramp up and the prices will gradually decrease. And all this time all the different groups with different interests would voice their grievances. And some governments would pass laws to free some cows, some would compensate or subsidise farmers.
I’m pretty certain that it will be a complicated process. Maybe kinda similar to electric cars. With ethical implications beyond climate impact on top.
i just want cheap blocks of TVP available in the store
we’ve had the technology to make TVP for decades, it’s a perfectly fine replacement for meat if you just marinate it a bit, why the fuck is it not bog standard?
They sell bags of TVP here in the US for not that much if you buy it in the Hispanic section of the grocery store. I’m a little surprised to hear that’s not available in (assuming based on your instance) Germany.
it is available in sweden (my brother in christ my username has “swed” and my icon is a swedish flag, i cannot make this more obvious) but for some insane reason the only normal place to get it is apothecaries and ONE normal brand that’s only carried in a scant few grocery stores. It’s a bit irrational but i’m not fucking buying it from a drug store and it’s bloody expensive anyways.
(edit: well never fucking mind, that one normal brand stopped making it, fuck me)
i want TVP sold next to the pork cutlets, with a comparable price, pre-marinated and ready to fry.
I don’t see user icons on Voyager ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Textured vegetable protein, so basically bacobits. Nothing wrong with that, I buy frozen veggie burgers that taste better then the ground beef ones.
Well it differs per country but in Europe the meat industry holds quite a foot in the door to keep profiting and growing. And tbh large cheap cattle farms have been showing obvious signs over overcrowding and diseases. And I’m not the type to buy more animal ingredients or else meat farmer gets loose. We got to think beyond our bonus.
right but like… i buy products at the store that contain TVP and taste and feel great, that’s why i’m so baffled by the lack of TVP just being sold on its own
if it was difficult to make i’d get it, but the whole point of TVP is that it’s really easy to make on an industrial scale, and since it’s clearly being sold as part of other products… It’s just absurd that no company has taken the step of selling the leftover bits on the side!
“perfectly acceptable”
You stay know the answer to this 🤣
I swear to god the month that I embraced TVP and started using it in my cooking, it all got pulled from Safeway and Fred Meyers store shelves. It’s like they fucking knew. It’s like… Come on you motherfuckers it’s literally a basic and highly available food product. Please just stock it.
Dodo birds went extinct for a reason, Galápagos tortoises are almost there too.
I reckon they must be delicious, cultivated meat is likely the only way we’re ever going to find out what the big deal is. If we can find out without slaughtering an animal then I can see no downsides.
Anything is delicious if all you ate was bread and pickled cabbage on long voyages.
I get the point, but, well… Have you tried bread!? It’s pretty bloody awesome and amazingly versatile! Pickled cabbage is alright, but BREAD! Come on! Discounting ethical considerations, I would 100% choose bread over meat any day.
Side note: apparently ships could keep a Galápagos tortoise unfed and unwatered in their holds for up to 6 months before they slaughtered them for food. This sounds like a truly torturous death, but from a practical view this would certainly explain why they are now endangered.
Have you ever tried hard tack? Even just researching a couple images and reading how it’s made shows pretty immediately that it’s not that similar to tasty, regular bread.
Fresh bread is amazing… but year old stale bread… not so much.
I have a feeling they didn’t exactly have the quality of ingredients we had now too. Also I’m sure it had to have less water to keep longer, thus being harder in the first place.
Bakeries exist for a reason after all
Wait a minute, what do dodos have to do with this??
Some companies (e.g. Vow) are focusing on producing niche deluxe products that are generally unavailable to the public. Dodo is one of the animals that are considered in cultivated meat because then they won’t be directly competing with the traditional meat industry.
They have already made a mammoth burger (sort of).
I just realized we coild eat the meat of endangered species
In Transmetropolitan where they can lab grow whatever they want, I think one of Spider Jerusalem’s favorites was polar bear eyes.
We even see a Long Pork food stand in the background in one issue. If I remember correctly, it was even advertising that they use 100% cloned meat.
Wasn’t it a major plot point that people meant for consumption were instead being used as sex slaves? (Been a long time - I literally read the series when I was 10. Not the best parenting decision there)
i don’t remember that bit, but i’ve only read all the way through it once, and that was a long while ago.
I don’t remember it being a major plot point, but I feel like something got brought up at one point after the Beast arc? Might have been in one of the odd-ball collections, or I might be mixing things up myself. Been a minute for me, too. Guess I know what’s coming up after my Spawn/Darkness/Witchblade read-throughs.
The moment corporations see they are cheaper, they’ll start pushing for them, exaggerating their benefits like environmental impact as a propaganda tool.
But there would still be slaughtered meats for as long as there are rich assholes paying for “the true experience” or just because it’s not something everyone gets to do and they like to feel unique and superior to the rest of humanity.
Knowing those out-of-touch monsters, they’d double down in ‘the experience’ by getting to slaughter the animal themselves or something like that.Honestly, that’s almost a perfect win. If farming animals for meat becomes something for the 0.01%, imagine how much better things would be. How much less strain we’d put on the planet, and how much animal suffering would be prevented.
And we’d be only a few guillotines away from a full solution.
You will always need farmers growing cows to constantly produce new ‘original samples’, tho. But they would have to focus on quality rather than quantity, and the animal would not have to be slaughtered for muscle samples.
So that would keep them from going extinct without humans.
rich assholes paying for “the true experience”
See also: “actually lab diamonds are too perfect, the subtle imperfections and discolorations really enhance the je ne se quoi of blood diamonds”
Yeah. All the things that make them worse at anything actually useful like cutting stuff or heat sinks, somehow make them better for them.
Don’t even want lab grown. Just get something else entirely.
Debeers feels threatened.
No one will bat an eye once taco bell and McDonalds switch to lab grown meat.
Nobody will bat an eye until something something prion contamination.
Never underestimate the ability of capitalism to murder it’s customers
No farmers no food!
lab grown meat joins the game
Oy! That’s not fair!
The thing is they spend so much time protesting, mostly about inconsequential things, I’m not sure they produce any food anyway.
Lab grown meat is so expensive and small in quantities that it is inconsequential alright
Starting to think a significant portion of rich people genuinely view suffering as an essential if not occult component to the value of their products. Like it means more to them when a thing suffers or dies to produce what they have.
Not just products but life as a whole.
Too many people have the mentality of “If I suffered, you should to”, or equate their value to their suffering “Suffering builds character”, “You only slept 6 hours? Try 4 like me”.
Humanity has an unhealthy obsession with suffering equating validation.
Yes. Hearing about how pre colonial Hawaiians worked like 9-12am and were so efficient they could spend the rest of the day playing, makes me deeply sad to see how far we’ve regressed.
diamond rings come to mind, i dont know why some people have a bone to pick with lab-grown diamonds, does the horrible labor behind mining make the “real thing” better?
Same. To some, yes.
No more farmers, lab grown food! Better for the environment, better for animals. Win win. Farmers in The Netherlands are seriously fucked up, going as far as threatening politicians with murder at their private home. So fuck meat, dairy and egg farmers. We only need fruits and vegetables, and lab grown meat is a nice addition.
I didn’t find an answer in my very limited search for what is actually used to grow the meat, so depending on what makes up the “stuff” that brings nutrients into the growing part, we may still need a lot of farmers for something like this. There’s also no way the growing environment, which seeks to create an artificial “animal”, is energyefficient.
I’ll celebrate the day we don’t need farmers, and I’ll celebrate the day it’ll be at least environmentally equivolent, but until I see evidence of those things, I’ll be very sceptical of this stuff.
There’s also no way the growing environment, which seeks to create an artificial “animal”, is energyefficient.
Why not, could you elaborate on this?
My thought process is that if you have to mimic a living environment, you still need to include most of what the natural environment needs. The one artificial meat I’ve read about had the meat growing in vats of some “solution” that mimics the natural environment of the meat (so like a body). Granted, the process in the post may not function like this, but if it does, that process would include:
- Heating, because the meat is actually meat, and the cells require heat to function, which still isn’t all that efficient.
- Getting rid of the artificial meat’s dead cells and natural waste.
- The “solution” itself I imagine is a funny chemical mix of some sort. So getting those chemicals extracted from their sources. (This one is a bit more iffy, I have no idea what the “solution” is, could be demineralised water with beef stock mixed in for all I know).
- I can’t imagine keeping the “solution” as clean as needed for food safety laws around the world is an easy feat coupled with the other points I’ve listed.
These are all just speculations, please feel free to prove me wrong on any of them, and be sceptical of my list. But this is what I’m sceptical about with the very lacking information in the post.
Cows right now isn’t even grass, they’re fed mostly grown crops. The trophic energy loss at each stage is generically 10% , so plants to cow to human you lose 90% of the energy each time. So for eating meat you only get 1% of that energy from the sun. If you ate wolves who ate cows it would be .1%.
For energy this will, once it’s at scale, be able to be more energy efficient pretty easily. Because for one cow you have to have the entire life of the parent animal then wait 2 years for the animal to grow up. It has to eat and move around and waste energy that entire time. Less than half of that animal has the desired final product, so you waste more there. So the idea is that with growing this you just start with some cells and then increase their size until you get enough and then package that.
The biggest challenge is the bio-reactors, they are hard to scale and require more delicate care than other cultured products because growing muscle, fat and tissue cells is a lot slower than say, getting yeast to reproduce. This a challenge but not a deal-breaker, there are some places already selling cultured meat but it’s still expensive (like, $40 for a burger) because of the scaling problems, which again, come from lack of funding and political pressure.
That said, most other challenges are either overcome or there are companies with solid methodology but no investment capital, and since many places are actually banning or outlawing the sale of cultured meat, we likely won’t see much actual progress until we get corporations out of politics, so maybe never.
I didn’t find an answer in my very limited search for what is actually used to grow the meat
If you’re referencing how cultured meat used to require amniotic fluids to grow meat, those days are long-since passed and there are multiple companies that have proven methodology for production, the only thing preventing large-scale cultured-meat operations is commercial investment and public sentiment.
Your skepticism here is a product of the pushback against lab-grown meat, they have injected endless lies and hyperbolic ideas into the public discourse because it threatens the beef industry, which is currently our least efficient protein source by far, so as the climate changes and as our tarifs turn into gulag-like isolation from the international market, you’re basically going to have to choose between $40.00 burgers and laboratory-grown beef that tastes the same but is healthier and cheaper.
Since humans are so easily swayed by the most pathetic arguments and propaganda campaigns, and are so incredibly to make scared, disgusted or hateful of literally anything, I don’t expect to see lab-grown meat in my lifetime sadly.
I mean, I hope I’m wrong, but my point is that without more information, I would have to see some actual data to compare this stuff. I am however aware that we won’t get reliable data until large-scale production is both possible, and profitable.
It’s the same scepticism I have when a new building material says it’s much better for the environment, but then it turns out it’s either not possible to upscale to the point that it’s actually environmentally friendly, because it uses a very limited by-product from a different production. Or it turns out they don’t count the materials needed for the underlying construction to make it possible to use, because it’s not directly part of the material.
I just want some proper articles about this stuff, with actual numbers and calculations made public, instead of a picture shared on some social media.
I just want some proper articles about this stuff, with actual numbers and calculations made public, instead of a picture shared on some social media.
It’s a commercial venture, so a lot of it is kept behind some level of secrecy because this is capitalism baybeeeee. That said, if you are actually interested in the numbers, you can probably look up organizations like The Good Food Institute who are giving millions in grants to scientific methods for alternative protein sources and they have a public outreach where you can read up on their science and scientists, but if you want technical specs… well, see every other technology like AI, microprocessors, the formulas for popular snacks and and sodas.
I reckon it doesn’t taste as well, but even if it tasted exactly the same, I would still prefer normal meat. It needs to taste better if you want me to eat it.
Just a serious question here because I’m concerned about public attitudes.
Why exactly do you assume it doesn’t taste as well? (Assuming we’re talking about current generation cultured meats)
It just seems like a natural way to think: an imitation is worse than the original.
But I never tried it, and maybe I will, but I would probably prefer normal meat anyway.
My vegan perspective: I’m uncomfortable with foods that continue to reproduce the aesthetics of exploitation and probably wouldn’t eat it myself. But because it’s affect on the world would likely include a sizable reduction in actual real animal exploitation, I’d welcome it’s introduction and maybe even promote it to some.
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Those are aesthetics
I love plant based food and will eat it rather than meat any day. I’m far from a vegan though. A couple of friends are vegan and refuse to eat plant based food which even resembles a meat product. Burgers which imitate beef for example. I personally think these products are great as it gives meat eaters something to relate to and try plant based food.
Lab meat though. I’m struggling to understand this. Unless the meat industry shuts down most people aren’t going to eat lab meat. And like you said it doesn’t offer a good enough reason to switch for most people. Some people might switch but it will have no impact on the meat supply chain.
Economics of scale, simple. If a sausage with lab grown meat is 75% of the regular sausages, or cheaper a big portion of the populous will switch.
The more people that switch the bigger the scale gets. Till it gets to the most efficient input -> meat like product.
Lab meat though. I’m struggling to understand this. Unless the meat industry shuts down most people aren’t going to eat lab meat. And like you said it doesn’t offer a good enough reason to switch for most people. Some people might switch but it will have no impact on the meat supply chain.
There’s a pretty large amount of people who are vaguely uncomfortable with the animal cruelty in the meat and dairy industries but can’t get over themselves to completely change their diet to a plant-based one.
I also expect lab grown meat to be both cheaper and more environmentally friendly once the technology is more advanced and mature. It doesn’t really make sense to compare an immature technology like this to conventional food right now.
Curious because you mention aesthetics being key - do you do black bean burgers, beyond burgers, etc?
Not usually, though I’ve been in situations where I’m at a bar and that’s literally the only vegan option on the menu. I’ve joked in the past that bean burgers are such a crumbly disasater that they fail to replicate the aesthetics of meat entirely, whereas impossible patties do it so well that I’m paranoid and examining the pattie over and over again and asking the barkeep if he’s sure this is the vegan one. Either way they’re not my idea of fun.
Haha those after my experiences with the products as well. Cheers!
Thats an interesting take. Most people don’t eat meat specifically because its exploitative, they eat it because its easier (relatively) to get the needed nutrients through meat, and because its taste and texture are hard to replicate. Lab grown meat manages to do this (hopefully) without any exploitation.
It’s quite concerning that something like 37% of the land on this planet is used for agriculture with most of it used for livestock. Biodiversity is being destroyed so we can enjoy a grilled ribeye.
So, I understand the enthusiasm for lab-grown meat. At the same time, I don’t trust big corporations and their captured government agencies to be truthful about the long-term health effects of something like lab-grown meat, and I also expect the positive environmental impact may get overstated to push for outlawing traditional livestock in favor of lab-grown meat for which a handful of big corporations will own patents. Patented seeds for plants that don’t produce viable seeds and lab-grown meat sounds like a good way for corporations to have complete control over humanity’s food supply, more so than they do already.
