I think lab grown meat will radically change how we as humans consume food and its going to taste way better than any animal grown meats we eat today. Animal breeding and husbandry right now is so crude, and there are so many inputs and outputs to optimize, and while meat taste is part of the equation, others factors are meat yield, byproducts, animal health itself (all factors that are important, but are often times in conflict with making the "tastiest" meats). Stage 1 is going to be recreating crude meats like ground beef or sausage, stage 2 will be recreating true single flesh meats like a chicken breast, or a steak, and stage 3 is going to be "designer" meats like a kobe beef recreation, and stage 4 will be "meat insanity", creating "meat like" foods that nature would never be able to produce but that taste incredible (steak balloons, cotton candy like fried chicken, foie gras & tuna marble). Imagine going to a sushi like restaurant where the food is all nigiri style small meat cuts but the meat is all this wild bespoke artificial meats that no animal could ever product, but are wildly tasty.
My first thought was that some company will immediately start pumping this fake meat full of growth hormones because ... why the hell not?
"We can make it cheaper, more readily available for the many, for the poor, with the same growth hormones we use on real meat"
And they'll lobby that through ... and people like cheap ... and people will get used to eating absolutely fake meat ... and they'll forget what the real thing actually tasted like.
It'll "taste like chicken" ... but they won't really know what chicken (real, healthy, decent chicken) tastes likes ...
And ... there's a Matrix offshoot here somewhere ...
Yes, and there is precedent! We still have Government Cheese [1], which is just barely related to real cheese. Perhaps Government Meat would be an improvement?
Except in countries with a real food safety authority we won't suffer from this problem, so it is up to us to assist third world countries and the US in creating an agency that does its job right.
Me too. Except for the part where unscrupulous companies then get on board, take it to regulatory limits and beyond ... and make fake meat ... well ... even faker, and dangeorusly so.
Then presumably those same people will look with discust at Moroccans still raising goats/cows/sheep/chickens and killing them for mundane mealtimes and for Sacrifice Day[1]. What will we as a global society do about such a divide in culture as far-reaching as this? Gay marriage requires basically no life-changes from the average person. Why would this not be far more divisive?
Attempting to impose control over where people get their food is the sort of thing that starts wars.
I'm genuinely curious why my comment is harmful rather than helpful (that is, why the downvotes?) to the goal of having an insightful conversation about the societal effects of artificial meat. The parent comment points out the possibility for the existence of lab-grown meat to lead to it becoming an enforced norm in some wealthy cultures. My comment points out that such an enforced cultural norm is going to clash sharply with cultural traditions that are a significant part of their lives. Among the questions that follows are:
1) Is there a way for lab-grown meat to become prevalent without it leading to such a clash?
2) Are there things we can do to prevent such a clash from becoming violent?
3) Are there ways for lab-grown meat to be developed in a way that small-scale poor herders in mountains with moderate infrastructure can own its means of production?
4) Is there a way to go into a culture which currently eats meat with every meal[1], take away their means of producing meat, and have it not result in a violent backlash agains whichever organisation is trying to do this?
[1] source: two separate conversations with Moroccan men in March of 2019, one of whom was helping teach a cooking class in Fez and another of whom was leading a food tour of Marrakesh
Sometimes in forums, when someone says something is bad, someone else argues against them calling it bad because it would be hard to make that something illegal, despite nothing about legality having been said. It's a frustrating argument because it implies laws are the only moral standards one should adhere to, and it disregards any possibilities between something being good and 100% legal or bad and 100% illegal. Usually I downvote that kind of response because it just encourages a polarized discussion that embraces a false dichotomy.
ngold's post was ambiguous about whether he expects meat production to become illegal, so I don't think you were wrong to bring legality into the picture and I didn't downvote you, but I can see how someone could think your reply fit the above pattern.
If anything, the energy optimization would be beneficial, since you wouldn't need to grow bones, organs, etc like you would need to do so for regular livestock
That's the thing - when I eat cuts of meat, I prefer "bone in". If I have the choice, I'll take a chicken drumstick over a nugget, and a bone-in rib-eye over a fillet.
That said, I do like prime rib - but that's actually closer to a slice of roast beef than anything else.
Oh - and bbq brisket - no bones there.
They will also have to figure out how to grow the fat in with the muscle, too. That's where most of the flavor in meat comes from, not to mention texture and tenderness.
As far as organs...well, I do enjoy some tripas every now and again in a taco or burrito...
I tried some Quorn for the first time recently and that already seems to cover your stage 1 & maybe 2 ("beef" lasagna and "chicken" schnitzel) and it was surprisingly good. The chicken in particular was not really distinguishable from cheaper fast food or frozen schnitzels I'd had in the past (probably says more about them than the Quorn).
Roast chicken with crispy skin seems a while away though.
Quorn tastes nothing like an actual chicken. On the other hand I have never tasted fast food chicken nor frozen schnitzels.
I am not saying it is bad, but it has a very particular taste that is definitely NOT related to chicken.
I haven't found any "meat-like" product that would taste even remotely like the real thing. ANd I have tried all the ones available in France and Sweden, which is already quite a lot (my girlfriend is vegetarian so we eat mostly vegetarian).
Most "ground beef" vegetarian equivalents are super dry and taste much more soy than meat, which is OK in itself but when you cook meatballs well.... it is really not the same.
IMO we are not at all at stage 1, and I am not sure we will get there anytime soon. It is not so dramatic though as there are still plenty of things to cook without it, but I'm a bit tired of some people insisting about how vegan alternatives are equal or better than non-vegan product.
It had some cheese included which definitely helped. I was comparing it to frozen schnitzel or other processed chicken (nuggets), which I usually don't choose to eat these days but I've had plenty over the years.
I'm not at all convinced it's healthier either given the length of the ingredient list, but I'll leave that to the experts.
when there are 1000s of companies out there that produces fake meet, I don't think it will be tasty or safe as regular meat and if later killing animals for meat gets banned, people won't have anything to compare it to.
> if later killing animals for meat gets banned, people won't have anything to compare it to.
Well, that shouldn't matter in my view. Do we need to keep human slaves around to compare their effectiveness with that of modern robots? If enough people in society see something as "wrong," then the alternative doesn't need to be superior in every way.
> If enough people in society see something as "wrong"
But not enough people do, and I'm not convinced that will change. Also, I would say there's a great difference between human slavery and animals being killed. There are a whole lot of people who probably won't want to switch over to fake-meat, because it's perceived as creepy and weird. Lab grown food (and the idea thereof) just rubs people the wrong way. It's like the people who promulgate insect consumption in the West: it's a cultural issue, and demonizing people because of their culture is not right.
I don't dare guess about a specific schedule, but I'd expect the end state to be meat that is safer, tastes better, and is less expensive.
Safer because it can be grown in sterile conditions, which greatly reduces the risk for contamination by pathogens.
Tastier because it can be more directly engineered for flavor, with fewer constraints. Take a look at how crazy things have to get in order to produce foods with the flavor and texture of veal or foie gras using current technology. Not having to worry about how you're treating an actual animal, or even having to do what it takes to keep the whole animal alive, isn't just going to improve those processes, it's going to open up a lot of other options as well.
Cheaper because it'll be infinitely easier to engineer waste out of the process.
"Grown in sterile conditions" and "cheaper" are two completely contradictory features.
Most agriculture is still done in the field, not indoors, because that's the most efficient way to do it. A large part of the inputs is "just there". Waste doesn't really happen in production, almost everything is put to some use. Real waste happens on the store shelves.
You really have to ask yourself, what are the inputs to the "lab grown" process and what are the requirements towards purity etc. It's an open question.
You are mixing up "waste material" with "material waste". The parent was making a point about cost. It's cheaper not to feed male baby chicks. It's cheaper to raze the forest. It's cheaper to let cows fart.
There are externalized costs to these things, but they don't really affect the prices that people are going to pay for the produce, at least not directly. I guess you can charge a small markup for being "green" (or pretending to be).
Now maybe a cow is only "3% efficient" in terms of calories, but the calories it takes in are really cheap and the calories it puts out are prized. It's a profit deal! In engineering, higher efficiency generally is more expensive and the economic optimum is never the efficiency optimum.
Most large-scale food processing, like baking, or sausage / bacon / ham production, or dairy production, is happily indoors. When you don't need to work with entire large organisms, like a cow or a corn plant, things become easier to turn into a factory environment.
Because technically meat paste is packaged and sold as burgers, depending on how you legally define burgers, meat, and paste.
The world around you is rife with people pushing the quality of goods to the point the market will accept, and then moving the market to accept even worse.
Because fundamentally, morals don’t exist in a market. They are imposed.
And good / bad are subjective. People buy cheap protein. This will be cheap protein.
And even if it is tasteless, texture less and nothing any human will call meat, it will sell as long as it’s opportunity cost is lower than the alternative.
Yeah, you can definitely buy some real cheap, garbage "meat". But you can also buy really high quality, really good meat. It's not like "markets" means everything is of horrible quality.
I think the whole point of GP is that lab grown meat makes it cheaper to produce much higher quality meat. That would actually mean at every price point, you get better quality than you do today. Your comment comes off as aimless pessimism rather than anything actually related to this thread.
What about hunting for meat as a method to responsibly manage deer populations for example? Austin, Texas is having a huge wild boar population explosion because the county instituted a no-kill policy. Also, hunting is a big part of some cultures. Why does one person outside that culture get to decide that's wrong?
We pull two deer a year if we're lucky on my farm, we don't grip and grin but we relish in the ability to eat something that shares the land around us.
re: managing deer populations. There will always be some harm. We can strive for outcomes with the least harm.
Hunting is as not much the issue as the billion-plus animals we kill everyday for food. If more people had to look an animal in the eye as some hunters do, perhaps more people would connect the animal flesh they eat with the sentient beings the flesh came from.
> if later killing animals for meat gets banned, people won't have anything to compare it to.
In the United States, I suspect that a combination of the 1st amendment and at least one religious tradition[1] would prevent any federal or state prohibition on killing animals for meat. Therefore, there will be people who have the experience to compare the two.
EDIT: Actually, I'm probably wrong, based on the precedent that a state may institute a generally-applicable ban on peyote and the 1st amendment doesn't protect individuals who use it in religious rites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Division_v._Smith#M...
Almost all the safety issues with actual meat are around the fact that, well, animals are involved. Contamination on slaughter, which is the big one, wouldn’t be an issue. It should be far easier to make this sort of process safer.
I doubt livestock farming will be banned, but if this works out well it may be economically unviable.
Meat production is such a big contributor to climate change that I’m all for this kind of research. But, I also think more people will simply go some form of mostly vegetarian / vegan in the coming years (optimistically).
I stopped eating meat about four years ago. Like cutting out anything, it was hard for a few weeks but no longer. I have no desire for meat anymore and fully enjoy my diet. I’m technically pescatarian, but only very occasionally because overfishing is a huge problem as well. I also have gained muscle, and leaned out at the same time. Lots of factors at play, like exercising more, stressing less, etc — but I mention it because a lot of people think that being vegetarian or vegan means giving up on fitness goals like getting more muscular.
If there’s some aspect of you that wants to try cutting down on meat, give it a shot. Give it a few weeks, and go easy on yourself.
Addressing climate change will likely involve making personal choices about how best to decrease your footprint. If you can switch to a vegetarian diet, you’ll be making a pretty substantial move towards that goal — and there’s the bonus of not contributing to the morally questionable system of industrial slaughterhouses.
I still think meat vs not meat is the wrong approach when addressing the climate: is eating a chicken you raised on your land worse for the environment than consuming the equivalent number of calories from fruits and vegetables imported from another continent? My hunch is no. You can be an environmentally conscious omnivore or an not-so environmentally conscious herbavore. The meatiness of what you eat has absolutely nothing to do, necessarily, with your actual environmental impact.
The ethical issues of consuming animals are another can of worms.
> is eating a chicken you raised on your land worse for the environment than consuming the equivalent number of calories from fruits and vegetables imported from another continent?
Out of the universe of possible alternatives one could present, this pair seems rather carefully chosen.
I live in a temperate zone. During the colder months there are not a lot of options for local plant based foods. They are for the most part shipped long distance from somewhere else. Local animals are available year round though.
I attended year round "local food" potlucks in Indiana. People had local food available year around. During the winter it kept in cool storage (like onions), or had been frozen, dehydrated, canned, or grown in a greenhouse.
If year-round local plant-food was more of a priority for people, more could be produced.
Besides, where are the local animals getting their food during the winter? The options are basically the same: either they have local food that's been preserved or their food is getting shipped in too, making a rather inefficient way to deliver calories to humans.
I was with you until your position that animals eat the same food humans do (because if people can't find local food, how can animals?). This is very, very wrong - even in pretty bad climates where nothing edible will grow for humans it isn't impossible to raise some sort of cattle that grazes. That's more or less the point of cattle: to take a thing you cannot eat and turn it into something you can.
This isn't entirely unrelated to how many marginal ecosystems are currently being destroyed by domesticated grazing animals, which are typically invasive species that will overpopulate the area either because of lack of predators or because humans are protecting them from predators.
This maybe wasn't such a big deal centuries ago when natural forces also placed stronger limits on the size of the human populations in those areas. Nowadays, though, I think we very much have to think about the possibility that, regardless of any romantic notions about traditional ways of life, using livestock to live in places we otherwise couldn't is not something we do to respect nature, it's something we do that's destroying it.
This is the sort of black and white rhetoric that I think does not do a service to the reality involved. Of course you are correct that overgrazing is a problem, but to go from that to "using livestock to live in places we otherwise couldn't is something we do to destroy the environment" is plain wrong. I would instantly concede your point if you could moderate it to "we need to stop overdoing things", which I think is compatible with what we both see and still has merit.
Sure thing, but if you look at the first example I found regarding meat consumption by type [1], what you claim seems disconnected the reality, because only 1.1 percent of all meat consumed is lamb or mutton. And I'm sure most of it is produced in ways that pay off (that is big scale operations, same as with all the other meat on the market).
You are replying to statements I have not made. Even if what you say is technically true, I have not made any claims about percentages or majorities - I was merely pointing out a configuration of reality that exists and was not kept in mind when the person I was responding to wrote his comment.
I also don't understand why you are bringing up lamb and mutton, as those are far from the only animals you can keep in the conditions I mentioned. It's not unthinkable that you are making a point of some sort there, but without elaborating on it further the reader is left guessing.
If you read the research that indicates that climate change is conributed to by eating meat there is a very wide variation in the contribution within each industry. Most of them had a +/- of 50% based on the individual practices of the farmer, and butcher/processing plant.
It is a contrived example but also a realistic example. While there was no situation in the article I can remember where the best farming practices produced less green house gases than plant based food, it was a pretty wide spectrum.
It’s an interesting question. It’s not only how local the farm is, it’s also the type of farming practices. Not every small farm is going to farm sustainably. However, most big farms today do not farm sustainably. Farming meat at the scale demanded by consumers today means lots of derforestation and soil erosion, which means more carbon in the atmosphere. Of course, there are ranchers out their who farm sustainably — but again, exceptions to the rule.
My guess is that this level of consumption can’t be sustained, environmentally. Buying from small farms would likely be more expensive, which would in turn lead to a decrease in consumption.
> However, most big farms today do not farm sustainably
Is this true in the West though? It's not like we have a lot more forest to destroy... Soil erosion is definitely an issue, but AFAIK it primarily applies to growing plants (with e.g. artificial, fossil-carbon-based, unsustainable fertilizers), not animals.
The problem here is that a huge amount of the plants grown go towards feeding animals. [1] That’s probably one explanation for why estimates regarding the carbon impact of meat production vary widely.
Obviously it was a cherry picked example, but to me the falsity is in the claim that “if you are eating vegetables you are necessarily more environmentally conscious than those who eat meat”. There are degrees of environmental friendliness on both sides and, certainly,
I think most people would agree that most meat-eaters do not appropriately weigh the effects of their consumption. But I think the same is true of many vegetarians who just assume because they are eating vegetables they are definitely making more environmentally aware choices than all omnivores.
I have neighbors that used to raise chickens. When they went on vacation, I used to care for them for a week or so at a time. It's a lot easier than you might think. They are fairly low-maintenance, as animals go. And if you just eat eggs, it keeps things simple.
Also, the eggs were way better than anything you get from a supermarket.
Someone concerned about the environment can consider both plant-based food and more local, seasonal foods. There's no need for the two approaches to be considered at odds.
But if you care to, you can check out a ranked order of top solutions to climate change. We need to work all items on the list, not just the top ones, but you'll find "Plant-Rich Diet" as #4 on the list:
Improving transportation doesn't even show up until #25 on the list.
Consider that 3% of calories that go into beef production end up as calories that a human consumes. The practice is so inefficient that about 50% of the land in the US is devoted to grazing cows:
Imagine how much more local food we could grow across the country if we weren't so inefficiently filtering our calories through cows, adding cholesterol and saturated fat in the process.
I just read an article saying that owning a dog/cat was a huge contributor to climate change as well.
My dog died a few months ago and I'm just considering not getting another one.
EDIT: I'll take the downvotes on this topic, but it's kinda hypocritcal to go after people for not eating meat because of green house gasses but to ignore the fact that that our pets also contribute.... I don't mind being wrong but I prefer a good discussion to down votes.
And yes, my dog of 14 years really did die, and this is a factor in me not having another dog already.
EDIT 2: I also want to make clear that eating meat can be more-wrong because it has multiple dings: green houses gases, modern practices, you don't like eating animals, etc. But you shouldn't use that argument in one place while ignoring it in another.
That's interesting. When my wife had a smaller dog, she walked it around the neighborhood. Now she has a bigger higher-energy dog, she sometimes drives it to the dog park so it run off leash more. (And still walks around the neighborhood some, too).
That's a really good solution. Food waste is a huge problem. I think we can all agree that eating food we purchase is way better than wasting that same of food.
>> Meat production is such a big contributor to climate change that I’m all for this kind of research.
How big is the contribution of meat production on climate change? The following page has a pie chart of global emissions by gas (the site is the US Environmental Protection Agency):
I don't know when the data is from. Methane, which as I understand it is the primary emission from livestock, makes up 16% of overall emissions (CO2 is, unsurprisingly, the largest contributor with 65%).
Another chart a bit further down shows emissions by sector. Agriculture and forestry and other land use takes up 24% of that (another quarter+ is energy production). The text accompanying the graphic states that most of it is from crops and livestock, without further clarifying the contribution of each. I also can't tell how much of the contribution of farming is due to methane produced by livestock and how much from CO2 emitted by transportation etc.
Overall, I'm none the wiser about exactly how much meat production contributes to climate change. I have to say I remain very skeptical that farming is a heavier burden on the environment than transportation and energy production, not mention deforestation and desertification by urban sprawl etc.
What the EPA defines as 'agriculture' in that chart isn't really the same as what we'd consider the entire 'food system'. For instance, they include the emissions from ammonia used in farming – but the agriculture sector of that chart doesn't include the emissions that come from producing the ammonia in the first place. That figure is incorporated into the industrial processes and product use category. Ammonia is near the top of that section’s list, which accounts for 5% of emissions, and farming is one of the biggest commercial uses of ammonia. [1]
Same with transportation. 28% of the total pie. 23% of that is from medium to heavy duty trucks. How many of those trucks are hauling food? Airplanes bringing cherries from across the world in December?
The section on land use and conservation shows our biggest carbon sink. Land that's healthy, not eroded, growing perennial plants, trees, etc. Alternative farming is all about restoring damaged land to be a carbon sink rather than emitter. While that graph shows how much agriculture practices contribute to climate change, it doesn't show how much we would swing things the other direction if instead of growing endless acres of mono-crops – largely to feed animals in industrial feedlots – we transitioned to sustainable farming practices that build and repair soil, and sequester gigatons of carbon in the process.
I think this is easier to do depending on where you live. For example, being a vegetarian in California is far more practical than in Korea or Vietnam.
I say that because your environment depends on how difficult this transition will be, don’t put too much pressure on yourself.
Nitpick, but given how widespread Buddhism is in East Asia, I would not be surprised if it were also quite practical to be vegetarian in both Korea and Vietnam. I do agree that there are locations where being vegetarian would be more difficult - more rural, meatcentric towns in America come to mind for me.
If you care about environment impact, even switching from beef to pork and especially chicken helps a lot. I haven't been in rural American towns but I think both should be available without any difficulties.
Yet swapping from factory farmed beef to locally sourced free range chicken will help with both.
Neither caring about the environment, nor caring about non-human pain and suffering are binary choices. What is better for animal well being may be worse for the environment (plastics in lieu of leather), and vice versa (forest clearing for Palm oil plantations). It's important to care about both and to do what _you_ believe is the most important.
You should strive to make better choices, even if they are imperfect.
> You should strive to make better choices, even if they are imperfect.
Definitely. If some unachievable ideal of perfectionism is preventing us from doing anything at all, it's quite harmful.
> What is better for animal well being may be worse for the environment (plastics in lieu of leather), and vice versa (forest clearing for Palm oil plantations).
This claim is often used as an argument to stay away from soy products even though the amounts of (mostly GM) soy used to feed livestock are larger by an order of magnitude.
It’s more difficult than you might imagine. I find Hindu countries are much easier as like others have suggested, not all Buddhists take vegetarianism as seriously as people think.
In Japan there is a type of vegan cuisine which monks eat, however it’s considered a kind of fundamentalist diet and it’s difficult to find outside of certain temples.
Buddhists aren’t restricted to vegetarianism. A friend of mine was a monk in Thailand for years and ate what was given during alms rounds. Tibetan monks will often consume meat as well, as the plateau isn’t great for fresh veggies all year round.
It’s often just cultural whether the local Buddhist lineage will eat meat or not. My acupuncturist, who is Chinese, always tells me I should eat meat at least occasionally. Personally I have no desire to after going vegetarian and really don’t miss meat at all. The idea of lab grown meat has zero appeal to me, even if it’s ethical and not horrible for the environment.
The best place to travel as a vegetarian is India. It’s so nice to have pure veg kitchens and to not have to worry if a restaurant will have an option for me on the menu.
I’ve lived in Vietnam for nine years. Good Buddhists will forgo meat for at least two days every month so there are loads of vegetarian restaurants around. If you don’t mind cooking at home it’s even easier.
> Meat production is such a big contributor to climate change that I’m all for this kind of research. But, I also think more people will simply go some form of mostly vegetarian / vegan in the coming years (optimistically).
Even with a fairly optimistic time frame, by the time lab grown meat is replacing a significant number animals it will be way to late climate change wise, at least a 3-4 degree rise will locked in by then.
As fake meat gets better, I have to do more double-takes as a vegetarian at restaurants. Are they pulling one over on me? Once it's lab-grown I'm not sure what I'll do, unless it's a vegetarian restaurant.
> Once it's lab-grown I'm not sure what I'll do, unless it's a vegetarian restaurant.
As a religious person I've been curious to read up on what religious scholars of various faith traditions with dietary restrictions have to say about lab-grown meats. Sadly, very few seem to have very settled opinions about it. And it's really only the Catholic Church that has the infrastructure to actually consult credentialed scientists to consult on these issues.
Most of the Hindu sources I've seen maintain that meat is bad on two levels. One is the ethical dimension of committing violence to things that feel pain. The other is an internal spiritual dimension where they believe meat is intrinsically not Sattvic. So it's less bad than real meat, but still not good.
The little I've seen from Jewish and Muslim sources suggests that they don't really see lab-grown as being any different from regular meat with regarding kashrut or halal food.
I have the same experience, especially as I don't really want my food to be 'meaty' - it's been decades since I ate meat. I am excited about the implications of lab-grown meat though, not because I want to eat it myself, but because it should mean a huge decrease in the amount of resources we channel into producing meat, and a huge decrease in animal suffering. Of course, what I don't see being discussed too much is that we would still expect the health implications of eating a lot of meat, from whatever source, will continue to be serious - people should still only have a couple of vat-burgers a week...
> The little I've seen from Jewish and Muslim sources suggests that they don't really see lab-grown as being any different from regular meat with regarding kashrut or halal food.
What qualifies as a pig? What if it's a hybrid? What if it has only a little bit of pig DNA? Could be interesting times ahead!
At some point you have to accept that relgious scholars can’t answer everything. There is simply no premise for this in texts written thousands of years ago.
There are religious groups that take a literalist stance on scriptures and interpret the rules therein as checklists of arbitrary codes to adhere to because reasons, but that's not really how most serious theology or religious thought works.
Generally religious scholars are scholars because they're trained in an intellectual tradition that involves understanding the underlying logic behind the rules so that they can be applied to the changing times and evolving contexts. That's the whole point of having a clergy in the first place. If it was just rote memorization of a rule book you wouldn't need them.
Talmundic law has managed to continue updating itself based on extrapolations of the underlying logic behind restrictions in the source text. Here is an example: http://www.kashrut.com/articles/buffalo/
And in Hinduism, the dietary restrictions are based on practical considerations around how the food is produced and its perceived metabolic impact on the body and mind. There is an established framework for evaluating any food by these standards.
> Talmundic law has managed to continue updating itself based on extrapolations of the underlying logic behind restrictions in the source text. Here is an example: http://www.kashrut.com/articles/buffalo/
Isn't the ban on pig products thought to have been based on it being a disease vector? Considering that this is no longer relevant with modern sanitation and medicine it would seem they're using it as a checklist rather than applying any sort of logic.
The disease vector is more modern speculation/post-hoc rationalization for the rules. It's not really anywhere in the text itself aside from references to the animals being 'unclean.' It's likely that a variety of factors went into the rules, not least of which were probably just wanting to maintain some social and cultural separation from the communities around them.
People draw analogies to things present at that time to derive rulings today. I read somewhere that way before the advent of flight, Muslim scholars thought about how would one pray if they were flying. Today, rulings about how to pray on a plane are derived from rulings about how people used to pray when they were traveling in caravans, riding camels or horses etc.
I apologize, but this is quite an ignorant thing to say. The way rulings are deduced can get very specific and intricate. There is a system and methodology behind how people arrive at rulings, how texts are interpreted and meaning derived from them.
Seeing how there are many reasons to be vegetarian, there's bound to be some confusion as some people consider cultured meat vegetarian (due to it not infringing on animal welfare), and others not (due to others not eating meat for other reasons).
That confusion already exists, plenty of people who are vegetarians for animal welfare reasons also don't want to eat fake meat. People are complicated.
I look forward to the fake meat getting cheaper than the real meat so it's economically less attractive to pass off real meat as fake, however unlikely someone doing that would be in the first place.
You should avoid fake meat in general as a vegetarian unless you can personally verify the source, or otherwise accept the risk that sometimes you will eat real meat.
I went to a party once where a vegetarian was told a fake meat was used for some chili, but it really wasn't.
Some establishments lie. I've had a cynical attitude in the past. But then, I've had enough places actually come back to me with a correction about their menu that they could have gotten away with not making, or checked on something that I didn't even think to check on, that I have faith that people aren't total scum out there. Parties though? If people disrespect me like that at a party, those are not people I ever want to party with.
I'm only going to go so far to verify. I accept the risk, and at a certain point the blame is on them for lying to me.
While I'm excited at the all the possibility that lab grown meats can provide - ethically produced meat, less environmental impact, "cleaner" food - my judgement will have to be reserved until after leave scale production begins. What the definition of "clean meat" is today may not be what I agree with tomorrow.
It does promise a huge change though. Ideally, you keep a few cows and bulls reproducing, making tastier stem cells for further replication.
In essence, you could feed a huge population of humans using only a few individuals, although it would still be wise to keep those "stem" cows in case sickness or something else strikes them.
That being said, I'm afraid at some point the economic incentives will just go onto making a bunch of embryos mature and harvesting them completely for stem cells.
Regarding "ethically produced meat" - I have the sense that if we can arrange for livestock conditions better than their typical experience in nature, then animal experience is overall improved to some degree. If that is arranged then the more animals we can do that for, the more gross experience is improved over the natural level (which due to extant harshness is not all that hard to better) We should also for animal keepers own feelings and experience at work, regulate that animal suffering is reduced to a hard minimum.
Its paradoxical that we can't try arrange this for actual wildlife which is often as much in conflict with its neighborhood as it is at peace, or the wild systems will break down, by removing pressures, saving young from predation etc.
"In conclusion, substantial scientific progress is still required to determine whether clean meat from single myogenic cells will be environmentally friendly and commercially viable. In the meantime, progress on the development of more mature skeletal muscle tissue in vitro may find other medical applications29, including the repair of volumetric muscle loss."
The cancer arm of the World Health Organization has some serious concerns about some of Americans’ favorite foods. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies processed meat as a carcinogen, something that causes cancer. And it classifies red meat as a probable carcinogen, something that probably causes cancer.
The cancer arm of the World Health Organization did a disservice to World Health by using such a poor study as an excuse to link cancer and meat consumption, in my opinion. To the point it makes me question if the WHO motives are honest or driven by other reasons (opposition to animal consumption out of ethical reasons or ecological reasons, which are absolutely legit but not health-related).
Some of the reasons why I say this:
- It puts consumption of red meat and curated meats under the same category as smoking. According to that study, it increases relative risk of colorrectal cancer by 18%. That puts the average 50yo man from 1.8% to 2.12%[1]. A bit different from the 2.500% increase of lung cancer risk in smokers.
- These studies always have a self-selection bias. In Western countries, people that eat read meat also have worse habits and don't follow other health recommendations. This is a known effect [3], and other studies won't find higher risks associated to meat unless there are other factors (obesity, alcohol consumption) [4]
- Diet was self-reported, which makes results very unreliable.
- Colorrectal cancer and meat consumption are not linked in other countries. It's not the cause in Europe [5] and certainly not in Asia, where the opposite correlation is found [6]. There must be other factors at play.
- "Of 22 members who voted on its conclusions, seven either disagreed or chose to abstain."[7] And yet, the WHO made recommendations based on a single, not particularly conclusive study. Hum...
- Under red meat, it puts things like a sausage or hamburger and a grass-fed filet mignon steak. A strange thing to do, as if processing and quality were not factors to account for.
I could probably continue, but hopefully I made my point.
The link between meat consumption and colorectal cancer has been shown to be almost entirely mediated by two primary factors: nitrosamines and transition metals.
Nitrosamines are not naturally present in meat. They are produced when peptides (dietary protein) are heated a lot in the presence of oxygen. Nitrosamines are generally not produced when the protein is intimately mixed with large amounts of carbohydrates, because these act as antioxidants. So the line is "vegetable proteins do not generate nitrosamines", but if you were to extract those proteins into a meat-like product, common sense says that frying this like chicken will generate nitrosamines. The nitrosamines are just generated when organic nitrogen is oxidized to nitrogen dioxide, which reacts with peptides to generate nitrosamines. (Many vegetarian meat substitutes contain a lot more carbohydrate than real meat does. But there is an easy way to mix carbohydrates with your meat; that is left as an exercise to the reader.) (Also, the amino acids lysine and arginine generate more nitrosamines than other amino acids. These tend to be poorly represented in most plant proteins. They are also essential amino acids, and lysine in particular has been the object of serious investigation in the search for "complete" plant proteins.)
Transition metals are naturally present in meat. The most important carcinogenic transition metals are iron and copper. Both iron and copper are carcinogenic. Both iron and copper are necessary nutrients. In fact, iron and copper are two of the most important nutrients available in meat which require some planning to incorporate into a vegetarian diet!
In a very real sense, the same nutrients that would motivate you to eat meat are also the ones which cause it to be correlated with cancer. Red meat is a particularly dense source of iron, so of course it has the strongest correlation with colon cancer. (High iron titers in many vegetables report insoluble iron complexes which are neither nutritive nor carcinogenic. Iron in meat is highly soluble, nutritive and carcinogenic.)
This is not surprising when you consider that cancer is made of the same cells that we are and have (mostly) the same biochemistry that we do. When vegetarians talk about meat causing cancer, they always try to make it sound like God is punishing us for eating animals. Nothing could be further from the case.
But most importantly: the odds ratios are small. So I had a chicken sandwich for lunch.
Completely serious. I am not sure I am in the mood for another long post sourcing my claims, so feel free to question any of what I say:
- The idea of limiting salt and fats in the diet comes from very misguided health recommendation based on bad science from the 70s motivated by commercial reasons.
- Bacon actually has quite a healthy lipidic profile even with those recommendations (50% monounsaturated rich in Oleic acid, like olive oil; not that saturated fat is actually unhealthy...)
- Same for nitrates; bacon doesn't even have that much, nitrates are not proven to be harmful and most of nitrites/nitrates are endogenous (70-90%) anyway...
I wouldn't go that far. IGF-1 which is released due to the consumption of protein (particularly leucine) has been shown to be responsible for increases in mTOR signaling which is a nutrient sensor responsible for initiating cell growth in some forms of cancer, see this study for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4392529/.
In effect, leucine and IGF-1 increases mTOR signalling which is responsible for growth, the opposite effect of calorie restriction (which turns off mTOR and has been shown to reduce the growth of cancer).
That NCBI study (which I am 100% was not scientific) was funded by the Winkler Family Foundation. Yep, the guy who produced the movie "Rocky" funded this. And the Winklers have direct ties to the evil Monsanto Corporation: https://usrtk.org/tag/winkler-family-foundation/ Monsanto (now Bayer) wants to eliminate meat eating. So, no thanks... I will pass your "tip."
Not that there isn't progress. There certainly is. You can now buy actual products (albeit quite overpriced, considering the average American can't really afford to spend 200% of their food budget on a whim). However, it's important to keep in mind how much meat people eat, especially in the States. I think the average consumption is somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 lb/year. Here's a graph from 2012
Let's set a reasonable goal of 10% of that being converted to lab grown meat. We'd need 5 billion pounds (10% of 2012 level) of lab produced meat every year. How close are we to that amount of commercial production? How much more efficient is it in terms of fossil fuel use? 50%? 75%?
It's a great initiative, but simply reducing the amount of meat we eat (imagine having 1 meat-free day/week) is likely to be more effective than this, at least in the near future.
Is there a reason such research often works bottom-up, from cells to meat? Would it not also be possible to go about it top-down, starting from an existing animal species (pig, chicken, etc.) and modify it via breeding or genetic engineering such that what remains is mostly a walking muscle that can be used for meat production in a more ethical manner?
In the end, true lab meat might be "cleaner" or the better solution. But in the meantime, reducing the cognitive abilities of such farm animals by breeding or gene-tech also seems like it could be an ethical alternative to reduce their suffering.
I would not be surprised if we find that in 200 years each vitamin has a unique profile based on it's source and putting supplements in something fake does not make it the same as real.
It probably won't matter, however. Biology adapts.
We already know there are synergistic effects with certain nutrients. But what we're just as likely to find is that there are more beneficial combinations of nutrients than are found in nature. There's a strong possibility that (eventually) we'll be able to create better foods instead of worse ones.
Yes, unfortunately the top result isn't very good...
To start it uses 3.5 oz (100g) as its serving size, which is (according to its own nutritional source) about 13 slices of bacon... Not exactly a "typical" serving.
Do we want/need it to be? As long as it's "optimized" (for some definition of the word), that's good enough. Just like we optimize our salt, rice, eggs, ...
I think the main problem with space colonization is the whole nutrient cycle - using and/or recycling every part of food that is grown and consumed, including human excrements and other organic waste (skin, hair, blood, etc.). I don't think that terrestrial farming practice focus on that, no matter how technologically advanced or futursistic.
I don't want see meat mass produced in this manner. But if WOOL would be produced this way - that would be a lower risk way develop an industry and gain experience of what kind of diseases might result from such unusual factory conditions.
Leather is another option for initial development which doesn't involve people actually digesting large amounts of the novel produce. Perhaps there is a weaker business case for producing wool and various custom hair fibers, while synthetic alternatives have become so cheap and competitive for feel and performance.
I hope the days are not too far off now, that use of non-biodegradable materials are taxed or otherwise limited enough to avoid them accumulating and potentially harming our environment, which has not included such materials over evolutionary epochs of natural development.
I'm a vegetarian for ethical reasons, but have always considered wool to be fair game. The sheep is shorn, and frolics off unharmed. What's the guilt aspect? Would like to reassess my position given whatever info you can share.
I think the life experience of farmed sheep tends overall to be a little milder than wild mountain goats, although they are herded up several times a year which they don't much like - they are bred to be quite cool. Most seriously their lambs are separated and sent to slaughter, and eventually the adults are too if they don't fall ill outside. The slaughter operation is the most problematic and the stress could be reduced alot if it could be arranged on site. In the wild predation on herds and flocks is routinely very traumatic as well.
My major concern with sheep farming is that it is done at an intensity which keeps their ranges quite barren of flora. Tree and bush saplings and many native plants cant withstand grazing levels so ranges which could reforest and be more fertile wild or semi-wild habitats, end up tundra-like despite having much more potential for diversity, conservation or sustainable productivity.
Is nobody else seriously worried about the safety of lab grown food in general?
It took us decades to realise that cigarettes are in fact harmful. Medicine takes years to get approved. Who really understands the long term impact of fake meat on human body? Why aren't regulators requiring long term trials of these products before allowing them to market?
As a complete outsider looking in, this trend is very worrying. Am I missing something?
My guess is they are slipping in under the guise of "on a molecular level we already know what all these things do in the human body and eating protein is safe" and they will argue on a molecular level yes that is just protein matter. I am undecided on the matter. I think responsible farming practices is the way to go.
If you only create a fruit without a full grown plant to have produced it, yes.
If you want to prove that eating fake meat has no additional adverse side effects to real meat, there would need to be studies. Have there been studies? No, there haven't. You can't assert that the two are the same because of a lack of evidence if there has been no attempt to find evidence. Until you have controlled experiments where people are exclusively fed both (preferably for at least a year, IMHO) you can't just conclude that 'well they seem the same so they must be'.
but trans fat is more harmful than naturally occuring saturated fat.
It really depends on the compound/molecule. I imagine that if we need to "fortify" meat somehow, i.e. unless we're able to grow everything from a single stem cell + natural substrates (i.e. plant amino acids, fats, vitamins), we're very likely to get something wrong with such a complex product as meat.
I once watched a talk by someone running a startup creating artificial cheese and it sounded like the FDA was very interested in what they're doing and they hat a close look on the safety. You can expect that this stuff won't go into supermarkets without some testing.
The comparison to smoking is a poor one, because this was in another era with a lot less developed scientific methods. The comparison to medicine is closer, but you're looking more to something like testing generics. If you have lab-grown meat that's chemically almost identical then the concerns are much smaller.
I am, but I'm more worried about the direct unnecessary cruelty applied to millions of animals today. To me, it's easily a risk worth taking, though I understand that not everyone would agree with that assessment.
I worry about this with gene editing. You could possibly be affecting something else that doesn't even get triggered until later stages of life.
I also worry about GMO foods in the same way.
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Oops, we're sorry! When we changed this gene to be able to make certain people be able to see again, we didn't realize it would also cause the recipient to contract ALS by age 30. We studied it for 5 years with human trials and there were no adverse reactions! None! /s
I'm surprised how many people in the comments automatically assume that fake meat will be safe to consume. Sure it appears identical but so does a clone of a sheep, and yet they live a fraction of the lifespan of the original animals. I think a little agnosticism, especially given the lack of research and testing on animals/humans would be welcome here.
How much energy and water does it take to grow the cells? Are there any environmental benefits here or are the benefits primarily ethical? The article mentions the potential for decreased emissions but I've yet to see hard numbers about how much waste these products produce.
It's probably less efficient than regular livestock now but will be more effecient later, since when you are optimizing for meat instead of meat plus legacy biological life form, you skip the energy that goes into bone, brain, etc.
"First lab-grown burger, created by a team in the Netherlands at a cost of €250,000 - largely due to the time and labour needed to turn millions of tiny cells into meat". I understand there is a cost to research, but still, I'm speechless at the costs of this burger.
>or using a population of "immortalised" cells, that will keep on dividing. "Which means that you don't kill any animals; you have this immortal cell that can be used forever."
Another term for "immortalised" is cancerous or pre-cancerous. I wonder if in 15-20 years, we will find out that exposure to these artificial meats can lead to cancer?
No, of course not. Intact cells have a really hard time getting into the bloodstream. If they do (say, from handling it with an open wound) the immune system might complain about being bored by such an easy challenge.
Cancers can theoretically be transmitted via transplants, but those derive from humans and are therefore much closer to the body's own cells. And even there, immunosuppressives are required to prevent rejection.
There are some cancers that originate from viruses. HPV is the most prominent, and whatever is killing the Tasmanian Tiger. There's some speculation others may as well (the red meat -> colon cancer link comes to mind). But that's not really relevant for the topic at hand.
I would not eat any meat that has been grown by a human.
Logic tells me fake meat is not the same as real meat. It must lack something real meat has. Otherwise, it would be real.
I think the word fake is the issue here. It's fake in the sense it's not from animals is my interpretation, not that it's lacking in vitamin, nutritional value etc.
The way I understand it, you refuse to eat lab-grown meat simply because you dismiss it as "fake," thus lacking in something compared to livestock meat. Why, though? There is no intrinsic, special value in livestock meat -or any food, for that matter- besides taste and nutritional properties. The day these two attributes, together with cost and environment footprint, become on par or preferable to livestock meat's, all other considerations should fly out of the window.
Biochemistry has come a long way in the last decades by explaining how food powers our body and interacts with it at every level. There is no magic involved! Surely many questions remain unanswered, but nothing prevents us from applying what we already know to food engineering.
If this reaches mass scale, is this ethical? What about all the pig, chickens and cows that will never be born because they won’t be reared anymore? We’d have no use for them, we’d take over farmland with meat factories and wipe out 99% of the species.
Is that more ethical than rearing & killing the animal instead?
I sincerely hope that this is satire. You can't possibly advocate for the rights of unborn animals while we keep torturing and killing billions of living ones each year.
That is no different to what might happen if the whole population became vegetarian. It is something people have to decide for themselves as a consumer and it will be influenced by other factors like pricing, health, culture etc.
Of course small scale food production is something that a lot of people enjoy and find worthwhile. I have kept chickens and grow vegetables. If land became available it may be bought up by those kind of people. This could become much more common in a world of automation and basic income. The world is full of people who would love to spend their lives growing high quality food inefficiently.
I don't think you can make this an argument against people who are coming to this from the perspective of animal rights or animals having feelings, because without other considerations the logic "it's better for an individual animal to be born for the purpose of being slaughtered than for it to not be born at all" would seem to apply to homo sapiens as well.
