Lab Grown Meat gets closer to see consumer plates

[The Owl]

One step closer to the walking dead

[Sauron]

3 hours ago, The Benjamins said:

So would you eat Lab Grown meat.

In principle, yes - provided it would taste about the same as the "real thing". It's also not quite the same thing to produce a lab grown burger as it is to make other meat based products; I live in an area where salumi are one of the main local industries and I have a hard time believing you can just as easily "grow" those as you can make them from a real animal. Then again, farming is generally pretty humane around here - it's more than just a meat grinder.

[Sauron]

24 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

More choice is good, but what about population control? If would be scary, where the number of cows outweighs to the number of humans. For every human on this planet, there is 100 cows.

Just by reducing forced breeding and farm space you can probably solve that problem within a single cow generation.

 

It's also not true cows outnumber humans, there are only about 1.5 billion around according to wikipedia (though the statistic is outdated). It's absolutely possible they outnumber humans 100 to 1 in certain areas though.

[Misanthrope]

If overcooked can it become a mild cancerous agent too? Because that would be kind of impressive mimicry actually.

[suits]

47 minutes ago, Syntaxvgm said:

He says, checking the hours of the local super market on his cancer brick, buying the meat in cancer-foam and wrap, cooking it after cleaning the grill with cancer cleaner, and later microwaving the leftovers in cancer-ware. 

 

(we need to cure cancer, not prevent it.) 

I do literally none of those things. lol. Don't even own a microwave either...

 

It would go a long way if we prevented as much as we can.

[mr moose]

14 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

If overcooked can it become a mild cancerous agent too? Because that would be kind of impressive mimicry actually.

Almost all overcooked food does that.  One of the biggest is potatoes that produce acrylamide when they go crispy.

 

 

 

[The Benjamins]

7 minutes ago, suits said:

I do literally none of those things. lol. Don't even own a microwave either...

 

It would go a long way if we prevented as much as we can.

It would be very ironic if you died of cancer then.

 

I don't think this lab meat would be any worse then the meat sold today.

[Misanthrope]

9 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Almost all overcooked food does that.  One of the biggest is potatoes that produce acrylamide when they go crispy.

Well yes and tbf it would be impressive of any synthetic food.

 

But well let it be known that I was trying to throw vegans a bone here (pun intended) but you correctly identified why that line of thinking is pointless (Other than the fact that industrial farming is a direct result of most modern economy systems and henceforth can never be remedied with personal choice no matter how much you make people feel guilty for dietary choices)

[Commodus]

I'm all in favour of lab-grown meat so long as it's tested properly and comes reasonably close to the real thing.  I'm not a vegetarian, but I'd like to avoid killing animals when there's a viable alternative.  And importantly, we're at a crucial moment where we should be trying to reduce emissions and farm land consumption wherever possible.  Since you're not going to everyone to stop eating meat, you might as well reduce the impact of that meat.

[FPSwithaWacomTablet]

8 hours ago, LAwLz said:

It is more humane.

Didn't the global horse population decrease ever since the introduction of the automobile? If we remove farm animals from our diet, it doesn't necessarily mean their populations and ecosystem would flourish. They won't be slaughtered just as you said, but there wouldn't be a place for the farm animals anywhere else in the world. Ecology 101.

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, FPSwithaWacomTablet said:

Didn't the global horse population decrease ever since the introduction of the automobile? If we remove farm animals from our diet, it doesn't necessarily mean their populations and ecosystem would flourish. They won't be slaughtered just as you said, but there wouldn't be a place for the farm animals anywhere else in the world. Ecology 101.

Population increase/decrease does not equate to humane treatment. The cow population would almost surely decrease, but those lowers numbers would live better lives because they wouldn't be raised in a concrete farm only to be slaughtered at 1 year.

[FPSwithaWacomTablet]

5 hours ago, mr moose said:

Population increase/decrease does not equate to humane treatment. The cow population would almost surely decrease, but those lowers numbers would live better lives because they wouldn't be raised in a concrete farm only to be slaughtered at 1 year.

Aren't zoos also quickly falling out of fashion as well? Not that I am against the OP but I see this as an issue that might persist.

[mr moose]

3 minutes ago, FPSwithaWacomTablet said:

Aren't zoos also quickly falling out of fashion as well? Not that I am against the OP but I see this as an issue that might persist.

They are in the 20th century concept of a zoo, but today they are more about education, research and preservation of animals than they are about showing them of to paying customers.  The later part pays largely for their environmental efforts. 

[BachChain]

4 hours ago, 1kv said:

Sure farming is not natural but at least the meat is 100% real imo. 

The point is that it is real meat. the only difference is that it was never attached to the rest of an animal

[FPSwithaWacomTablet]

I also wonder how much Wolbachia you could stuff into those things. Would make for promising gene therapy right there.

 

/s

[GoldenLag]

17 minutes ago, FPSwithaWacomTablet said:

Didn't the global horse population decrease ever since the introduction of the automobile? If we remove farm animals from our diet, it doesn't necessarily mean their populations and ecosystem would flourish. They won't be slaughtered just as you said, but there wouldn't be a place for the farm animals anywhere else in the world. Ecology 101.

fun fact. there is a correlation between the amount of horses in the world and the amount of people dying by bullet, stab and similar injuries. 

[GoldenLag]

id eat it, like its meat afterall. though a real deer steak will stay deer to regardless. 

 

i dont see how much different it is to regular ground meat at stores. people dont know where it came from. 

[poochyena]

4 hours ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I don't think I'll ever switch from real meat.

You sound like the type who buys straws just to throw into the ocean and modify's your truck for rolling coal.

[GoldenLag]

3 minutes ago, poochyena said:

You sound like the type who buys straws just to throw into the ocean and modify's your truck for rolling coal.

nah, he is the kinda guy who would be terrified if he got to know First Price, a cheap brand, in Norway had a scandal where their meat contained horse meat. 

 

sales of horse meat more than doubled the following weeks after people realized...........

[XR6]

25 minutes ago, BachChain said:

The point is that it is real meat. the only difference is that it was never attached to the rest of an animal

yeah true, it's just my opinion though. it just doesn't really seem real to me if it was made in a lab. 

anyway, as long as it tastes like meat and i don't get sick from it i don't see an issue at all.

[LAwLz]

3 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

I mean organic food is a trend for a reason. Some want things to be more natural. I don't see how there reason isn't sufficient. 

I don't think "wants to be more natural" is a valid reason though.

If someone decided to pour a bunch of oil into the ocean "because they felt like it" then I don't think that would be a sufficient reason either.

 

Both pouring oil into the ocean and eating meat contribute greatly to destruction of our environment, it is expensive and it does nothing but fill people with a false sense of accomplishment or something.

 

And don't get me wrong. I eat meat, and I love it. I eat meat like 12 times a week, if not more, and I am sure other people do it too. That's why I think it is important to find an alternative to our currently extremely inefficient method of producing meat (a problem that is only amplified by things like free range meat) with all of its drawbacks (like speeding up the development and spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria).

 

Once you start advocating against the solution to big environmental issues and health risks then you kind of need a better reason than "it's not natural".

Our current meat production is certainly not natural either. At least not the meat that 90% of us eat is, and things like "organic, free range meat" is way to expensive and wasteful for mass scale production to meet demands.

 

People need to realize that things like organic food is a luxury that not everyone can afford. And I don't mean that in the sense that I can't pay a couple of bucks extra to get some organic tomatoes over the regular ones. I mean that in the sense that if everyone switched over to only eating organic, our food production capacity would drop to somewhere between 50 and 80% of what we got today. Considering the fact that we already have millions of people starving to death every year, saying that we should cut food production in half (by some estimates) is kind of insane.

It's like saying you are OK with killing millions of people because you think eating salad sprayed with things like Rotenone makes you feel better than eating one sprayed with a synthetic pesticide. It's complete lunacy.

 

 

3 hours ago, ignaloidas said:

I've seen quite disagreeing opinions here. I think that this is neither good, neither bad development. Lab grown meet is cool and all, but if all the meat becomes lab-grown, then who's going to use the "lover lever" crops, that make up up to 50% of all grown crops? Currently such crops are used only by farms and considered not suitable for human usage. If farms cease to exist, then no one be around to use such crops. So who is going to eat them? You? Or should we just burn it? Currently farm sizes are mostly limited by the amount of feed it can get. If no one is going to use that feed, who's gonna pay to farmers for they crop, now that only 50% of it is usable and other goes to waste? There are a lot of questions about this stuff, and if we don't find answers, it's not going to end well. /philosophy

 

Still pretty cool.

Not sure what you mean by "lover lever" but I assume that's crops grown to feed things like cattle? If that's the case, then I think you got cause and effect confused.

We don't have a large meat industry because we happened to have a much of cattle feed lying around. We started growing more food for cattle because the meat industries demands have grown larger and larger.

If the demand for meat got smaller, the 50% of farm land you said is used for "lover lever" would be allocated to other things.

[dizmo]

4 hours ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I know quite a few people that have small farms where they raise, kill, and eat chickens.

Totally. Many small farms around here do the same with everything from chicken, to pork and even cattle. Plus there are many places to get game meat.

I usually pick up my eggs and such from small farms.

[Crunchy Dragon]

30 minutes ago, poochyena said:

You sound like the type who buys straws just to throw into the ocean and modify's your truck for rolling coal.

No, I throw away my straws like a regular person. My country is at number 20 on the list of countries that attribute to plastic pollution.

 

I don't have or want a truck.

[ignaloidas]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Not sure what you mean by "lover lever" but I assume that's crops grown to feed things like cattle? If that's the case, then I think you got cause and effect confused.

We don't have a large meat industry because we happened to have a much of cattle feed lying around. We started growing more food for cattle because the meat industries demands have grown larger and larger.

If the demand for meat got smaller, the 50% of farm land you said is used for "lover lever" would be allocated to other things.

 

4 hours ago, thorhammerz said:

Right, which goes back to the question of "why are we even growing garbage crops in the first place": If such farms are no longer economically viable (because nobody buys their yield anymore), then they will either grow something else of value, or shut down & have their land re-purposed.

Yes, there are some crops that are specifically grown to feed animals, but a part of, for example wheat, when grown isn't all that great - it might had some diseases, maybe some parasites, had worse growing conditions, and in the end ended up not tasty. And not particularly healthy. Humans don't wand bread made from such grain, but animals eat it fine. Meat industry didn't happen because there was some bad grain lying around, but they will happily buy such grain for lower prices, as it's not really usable for anything else. Try to imagine this with silicon. There are some great dies, from which all the i9s are made. But there are quite a lot of dies that aren't of that good quality, so they become Pentiums. And those Pentiums aren't made specifically for offices, but offices use them because they are cheap and good enough for the job. Now what you are suggesting is that we can just not get Pentium grade chips from those wafers, and only get i9 ones. Would be cool, huh? But what would happen, if the offices suddenly stopped buying Pentiums. No one else would want them and Intel would loose a lot of profit. Same with the farmers.

[Amazonsucks]

6 hours ago, Syntaxvgm said:

pushed by realists. Environmentalists are typically the no-evidence anti-gmo idiots. 

Imo this is the next step, and if it makes meat cheaper I'm willing to give it a shot, and if it's successful you wont be able to avoid it. It will be in fast food and likely mixed in with yo ur real meat as a filler. 

There is plenty of evidence that specific GMO food crops, and the concomitant use of pesticides, specifically glyphosate(finally listed as a carcinogen), causes harm to humans and the environment. 

 

Im sure there are unscientific people who are anti GMO, but there are plenty of scientists and researchers who speak out against the tech as it is being irresponsibly used to maximize profit.

 

I see a similar situation with lab grown meat. Youd end up with a situation where only massive corporations can produce meat, and smaller farmers will simply go out of business. You have undoubtedly seen the results of agribusiness on farmers. Its a monopolistic tactic.

 

And that seems like a really backwards way of looking at things from my point of view. Seems like so many people are happy with a race to the bottom in price, that they completely ignore quality. I realize thats just a product of marketing conditioning people to want the cheapest possible thing so they can buy more things, but personally i would rather have things grow up in quality, not simply down in price.

 

I guess thats just a sign of the times though.