Lab-Grown Meat is OK For Human Consumption, FDA Says (cnn.com) 142
The US Food and Drug Administration has given a safety clearance to lab-grown meat for the first time. From a report: Upside Foods, a California-based company that makes meat from cultured chicken cells, will be able to begin selling its products once its facilities have been inspected by the US Department of Agriculture. The agency said it had evaluated the information submitted by Upside Foods and it had "no further questions at this time about the firm's safety conclusion."
"Advancements in cell culture technology are enabling food developers to use animal cells obtained from livestock, poultry, and seafood in the production of food, with these products expected to be ready for the U.S. market in the near future," Dr. Robert M. Califf, the FDA's commissioner of food and drugs and Susan T. Mayne, director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN), said in a statement.
"Advancements in cell culture technology are enabling food developers to use animal cells obtained from livestock, poultry, and seafood in the production of food, with these products expected to be ready for the U.S. market in the near future," Dr. Robert M. Califf, the FDA's commissioner of food and drugs and Susan T. Mayne, director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN), said in a statement.
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And miserable, diseased, parasite-packed cows walking around in cowshit all day are bound to make better quality food than some sterile factory.
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https://www.peta.org/features/agriprocessors/
Mistreating animals in the name of some god is disgusting.
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Google it yourself FFS.
https://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Environment/Agriculture-Ministry-orders-installation-of-cameras-in-all-slaughterhouses-438657
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Obvious.
Silly me.
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"Require on the label "Lab-made Imitation" by Cultureofone ( 8969245 )
For consumers to have an informed chpice, labeling must reflect the distinguishing differences and most important y not encourage confusion between lab gunk, and livestock"
Consumers. In general. Nothing to do with what you prefer.
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Naming convention (Score:2)
Upside Foods had better call it "Chicken Little."
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You fat, bloated sack of protoplasm!
No, I was talking to the chicken blob
New Food - New FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
I was going to post and ask whether people thought lab-based meat would be subject to the same kind of health FUD as GMO foods, but I can see from the comments here already that the answer is yes.
Re:New Food - New FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
Lab meat, not so much.
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I disagree. There are valid reasons to oppose GMO, but they basically have to do with patent laws and increased centralized corporate control over food. (And with the seed companies being bought out it's already pretty bad.)
For lab grown meat the scientific reasons basically have to do with prevention of bacterial infection. These folks say they've solved that, and gotten the FDA to agree, but I'm less sure. If they're successful, I'll probably have the same concerns over them that I do over GMO foods,
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e.g.: "we conclude that the risk assessment of GE organisms able to persist and spontaneously propagate in the environment actually suffers from a high degree of spatio-temporal complexity causing many uncertainties."
https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-020-00301-0
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The U in FUD is supposed to be "uncertainty," but you can use "unknown risk" if you want. They both start with "U" and mean about the same thing. It looks like the article you quote from uses "uncertainty."
And also, there's certainly a more interesting conversation to be had about genetically modified animals (e.g. salmon) escaping into the wild than there is about genetically modified soybeans escaping to the wild. Most of the backlash against GMOs that I have seen are related to GMO grains and not the
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GMO foods are NOT optional for the human species.
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GMOs also put us at risk of disaster. We should not take that risk.
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Not the same for non-GMO crops. They produce less food per square meter, and there are only so many square meters of workable farmland on the planet. Yes, they have their effects on the ecosystem, but they simply are
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The food problem is not just acres of farmland, it is distribution. Like energy, that is a solvable problem, but the will is not there because GMOs are an easier - but horribly, existentially, risky - solution.
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You'd need to post real links to prove to me that non-GMO could actually feed the planet. From what I understand, "natural" varieties of the staple crops are FAR less productive than the engineered ones. More susceptible to a ton of pests and diseases, you can't use the modern he
One day we will be disgusted by real meat. (Score:5, Insightful)
I love meat, but can't wait for the alternatives to be good AND cheap.
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Possibly, but if Jesus Himself was cool with eating meat (cooking fish on the beach after His resurrection), then I can't see any inherent virtue in abstaining from it.
The said, the prospect of there being megafactories that are capable of churning out more lab meat than the world can even want is fascinating to me. (delicious economies of scale)
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Hmm. Will we get lab-produced Jesus-meat and -blood ?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation
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One day we will eat tons more meat and smoke up a storm when health issues are cured, and I mean cured, not people denying themselves like some ancient Spartan idiocy.
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I agree, the idea of imprisoning an animal, treating it like crap (dont act like farms are country clubs), for the sole purpose of self sustenance will eventually be realized as morally wrong. Humans can synthesize their own food, no need to rely on farmed animals for protein. No need to conquer vast swathes of land for food production.
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Likewise, lab meat just has to become better value than animal meat, and more and more people will switch, and more and more livestock farms will become uneconomical.
And what the heck will happen to the lan
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I don't think there will be any "realization" that it is morally wrong. [...] Likewise, lab meat just has to become better value than animal meat, and more and more people will switch, and more and more livestock farms will become uneconomical.
And then after we're all sufficiently accustomed to eating lab meat, it will become generally accepted that murdering animals to eat their flesh was always a barbaric practice, much the way we all decided slavery and serfdom were abominations after machinery and better economic structures made them uneconomical. Or the way we decided that cat burning [wikipedia.org] isn't okay, and even made it and similar animal abuses a felony in many jurisdictions.
Not a "realization", per se, but a general shift in attitudes and value
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If my memory is not totally off, Peter F Hamilton touched on that in his sci-fi novel Fallen Dragon.
In one chapter, the young male protagonist meets a free-spirited girl, hook up and then break up, because her "alternative" life-style doesn't really suit him. He got totally disgusted by her having served him what she calls "Real Food" that she had got from a museum farm.
"You made me eat WHAT?"
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But still, for now, I eat meat!
"If your user interface is an experience, you're doing it wrong"
Like!
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If ultraprocessed food (Score:3)
Can't be that hard (Score:2)
Even pigs can make bacon.
As predicted by Tony Seba (Score:3)
Tony Seba and his think tank "RethinkX" have been saying for years that agriculture is about to undergo a major disruption.
First, growing meat in a factory becomes possible. Then, it becomes affordable. Finally, it becomes the lowest-cost way to produce meat, and most meat will be grown in a factory.
This process already happened for insulin. Before the 80's insulin was only harvested from animals. Then a process to make it in a factory was developed, and now everyone has switched to the factory insulin.
It will next happen for milk protein. It's already possible to make milk protein without a cow and it's just about to become cheaper. Dairy farming is not doing very well financially already, and factory milk protein has the potential to take away 30% of the milk protein business. This will be hard on dairy farmers.
Tony Seba keeps releasing videos from time to time with little updates. Here's his latest on food:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6gZHbfK8Vo [youtube.com]
The most intriguing part of what he's saying is his prediction of "food as software". Once we have the tools to grow things in the factory with "precision fermentation" as he's saying, we will be looking at the ability to customize the food. He's predicting that when it becomes possible, it will happen.
Growing new kinds of meat in the factory is still a long way out. But designing new proteins will happen pretty soon.
I'm currently reading their report about this:
https://www.rethinkx.com/food-and-agriculture [rethinkx.com]
The report points out that new food formats become possible and could happen. It uses "Soylent" as an example: an engineered drink designed to provide protein, nutrients, and caffeine in a convenient drink form factor. Also consider "energy drinks" like Red Bull, a new product category. It's hard to imagine what it might be, but maybe a new food category will spring up based around inexpensive factory-made proteins.
In summary, factory proteins can become a big deal even before perfect steaks and chicken breasts can be made. First milk protein, then other proteins... but after a few years, all sorts of meat. He's predicting that dairy farming will be bankrupt by 2030 and meat farming in general by 2035. Even if he's off by a few years... this is going to be a big deal.
I think you will always be able to get real milk and real meat. But Tony Seba is predicting it will become much more expensive than factory products, and that most people most of the time will choose factory-grown meat products. I think many people would pay extra for a delicious steak that is "murder-free"; if it's delicious, murder-free, and costs less, preferences will switch pretty fast to the factory meat.
His predictions of custom meats are a little more out there. Growing a steak in a factory is not GMO, but designing a new meat and growing that is exactly GMO. There might be a lot of pushback on that.
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Soylent is a drink but was explicitly designed as a meal replacement [wikipedia.org].
Red Bull [wikipedia.org] is a drink that's more like a drug than food.
Some drinks are regulated [registrarcorp.com] as food.
I'm not sure what your point was, but I hope I have sufficiently addressed your concerns.
Like the Covid vaccines (Score:2)
Texture, and the lack of it (Score:2)
I think I'll pass.
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Already exists in the form of "pressed" chicken and turkey. I don't like it, but someone must be buying it.
better then the mystery meat of assorted horse par (Score:2)
better then the mystery meat of assorted horse parts?
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Wagon trian peeps took dogs along as a last resort food source.
Re:Manufactured Food -- What could possibly go wro (Score:5, Insightful)
And what are you talking about with "food", manufactured under what conditions with limits etc. etc.? I literally clicked the link, saw the company name they're referring to, went to their website to read about their science [upsidefoods.com], and read about it. It's literally meat. All they're doing is taking chicken muscle and tissue cells and culturing them in the exact same way that you culture cells in virtually every biolab for many decades. You end up with a bunch of living tissue cells from chickens, but it the meat itself didn't come from a live chicken that was killed, it's just tissue from one chicken and cultured so that it forms meat cell tissue you can eat.
Quite honestly that sounds a lot better to me than taking plant mash and creating small molecules that trigger your taste receptors so that plant-based "meat" tastes like meat. That's just plants with chemical additives to give it some protein properties and trick you into thinking it's meat. This is actual chicken cell tissue, but grown in a factory under lab standard cleanliness rather than raised in an unsanitary chicken coop. This honestly doesn't sound all that bad.
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Quite honestly that sounds a lot better to me than taking plant mash and creating small molecules that trigger your taste receptors so that plant-based "meat" tastes like meat. That's just plants with chemical additives to give it some protein properties and trick you into thinking it's meat.
I'm not shilling for Impossible or Beyond here, but that's not how current plant-based meat substitutes are made. They use plant proteins and fats that are already naturally close enough to tasting "meaty" that our omnivorous monkey brain has trouble telling the difference. Impossible's additional trick is that they use a plant-derived heme flavoring, which adds that somewhat metallic taste that beef has.
This is actual chicken cell tissue, but grown in a factory under lab standard cleanliness rather than raised in an unsanitary chicken coop. This honestly doesn't sound all that bad.
Even real chicken meat from actual chickens can be pretty terrible depending on how it was processed.
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Fake meat has the same problem as real meat, cell transcription errors [frontiersin.org]. In real meat if the error is serious it often kills the animal (or just makes it nonviable before it's even born) and then nobody is eating it. Fake meat isn't an animal that will die, it's just a tissue culture, so you could in theory have an error that invisibly produced a toxic product. I think it's more likely that an error would have visible results, but that doesn't mean there's zero risk.
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Cells die with errors, that would still happen.
Organs may fail if their cells die, that is N/A here.
Are cells turning into living poison factories an issue?
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Where they don't kill themselves or their neighbors?
You would need two mutations: production of poison, and resistance to it. Not very likely.
Re:Manufactured Food -- What could possibly go wro (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see, a private company set up to earn a profit wants us consumers to believe they will provide healthy "food" they manufacture from what, under what conditions, with limits of what amount of non-food and non-infectious items.
Don't ask me to eat it.
I'm guessing you've never shopped at a grocery story then?
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Don't ask me to eat any.
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Why would it matter except for eco reasons on how it became meat? It is still meat. You remind me of a Terry Bradshaw commercial where he's served sushi and in a stage whisper tells the chef it hasn't been cooked, except that was in jest.
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They can probably do so, but it would be a piece of meat separate from your body.
But then you'd be able to have your meat and eat it too.
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Since I commented and can't mod you up, I'll have to suggest an edit:
But then you'd be able to have your meat and beat it too.
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It's almost as if many of them are mentally ill.
Or were confused children when uncaring adults forced along this barbaric path.
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You're confusing Identity Politics and Economic Politics; not all Commies are Trans Rights activists, and not all Trans Rights Activists are Commies.
You left out: "But so far, ..." :)
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Seems to have worked out well for mankind from our beginnings up until, oh...say now.
I'm trying to shed as much heavily processed, man made foods as it is....I really don't want or need anything more from a "lab" in my diet.
Call me a traditionalist, but I like what's been done throughout history till the past few years.
As an aside...I've recently been watching documentaries showing just normal people, in large and small crowds i
Re: Meat is meat (Score:2)
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The public reaction to that was a bit of a disappointment to Sinclair. He had meant it to bring to light harsh working conditions but everyone just focused on whether their food was clean.
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If you research life expectancy over time, you might revise your view that living as people did 100 years ago is a formula for robust health and longevity. Personally, I will gratefully accept the additional 25 years of life. Of course, much of the modern diet is not optimum, but the information is out there to guide us (at least those of us who are financially well off) in avoiding the most unhealthy choices.
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Fast food. It's simple as that. No where near as many people were eating fast food as frequently as they do today. Today, it's very easy to find people who almost never cook a meal at home and if they do, it's heavily processed food that just needs to be heated up most of the time. Office/desk/sitting on your ass all day jobs is another one, we just simply move around less and eat easier to get low quality calories. Move more (just fucking walk 2-3 miles a day, it's at least 1.75 more than you're doing
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People used to walk a lot, have jobs which involved physical labour, had fewer labour saving home appliances, and, yes, mostly eat food prepared from raw ingredients. Another big thing is that before TV people would venture out for their pastimes but now there is a lot of entertainment to be had while sitting on the couch. Speaking from experience it's really hard to get unfit or very fat if you walk or cycle to work. I don't know if it's the nature of processed food that makes all the difference so much
Re:Meat is meat (Score:4, Funny)
I'll just stick with my old fashioned dead animal protein sources thank you.
Why the reluctance for new undead animal protein?
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Why the reluctance for new undead animal protein?
I'll have the zombie chicken sandwich with a side of fried crickets, please.
Oh and a large diet Coke.
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Yeah interesting observation. I think there are a few things that have contributed to it:
1) Processed and fast food. That stuff is laden with salt, sugar and chemicals.
2) General sloth. Back in the day people used to chop wood to build a fire. Today we push a button and a flame comes on.
3) Rise in two income families. Both spouses working and nobody wants to cook. Back in the 60's that was a lot less common. No time/desire to cook means another frozen pizza for dinner. See item #1.
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2) General sloth. Back in the day people used to chop wood to build a fire. Today we push a button and a flame comes on.
You are aware he was talking about the 1960s/70s and not the 1860s/70s, right? Stuff like electricity and pushing a button and a flame coming on was a thing then.
Re:Meat is meat (Score:4, Informative)
I'll just stick with my old fashioned dead animal protein sources thank you.
This is a dead animal protein source.
Call me a traditionalist, but I like what's been done throughout history till the past few years.
Like using lead acetate made by boiling grape juice in lead vats as a sweetener? Consuming rotten meat and covering up the taste with spices? That sort of thing?
As an aside...I've recently been watching documentaries showing just normal people, in large and small crowds in the 60's and 70's...
And you know what, you almost NEVER see people that are fat and heading towards obese.
Interesting, because obesity definitely was a thing in the 60's and 70's. You note that these are documentaries, but you don't specify what kind. Are you sure your analysis is not being affected by selection bias? For example, if you're watching lots of documentaries on outdoor sports of some kind, or hippie culture, etc. then you're going to see a lot of younger, more active people. Heck, even if it's just footage of city streets that's going to affect what you see.
Personally, what I've found interesting about old footage showing regular people - for example, old episodes of _Candid Camera_ - is just how very, very old and unhealthy people in their 60's or so look.
Maybe we need companies and scientists exploring more of what is killing us these days with overweight kids and adults all over the place, rather than growing chicken in a lab.
Growing chicken in a lab does not seem like a problem. Injecting chicken, whether lab grown or not, with sugary brine on the other hand...
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I'm not trying to say anything else on this subject but you don't know what you're talking about in regards to American obesity. The obesity rate in this country has tripled since the 60's https://usafacts.org/articles/... [usafacts.org]
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I'm not trying to say anything else on this subject but you don't know what you're talking about in regards to American obesity.
I think you're misrepresenting what I was saying. I certainly was not claiming that there is not more obesity in the US than in the 60's and 70's. I am simply saying that the poster's perception that obesity was virtually nonexistent in the 60's and 70's is wrong was well. Also, conflating skinniness and overall health is a problem as well. Like everything else in medicine and health, it turns out that there's a tradeoff. Skinnier does correlate pretty well to less heart disease, but it also correlates to m
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I think you're misrepresenting what I was saying. I certainly was not claiming that there is not more obesity in the US than in the 60's and 70's. I am simply saying that the poster's perception that obesity was virtually nonexistent in the 60's and 70's is wrong was well.
Ah, you took their figurative sentence literally. I think it's safe to say no one on this planet thinks obesity didnt exist at all in the 60's. The above poster was just making a figurative claim on the explosion in obesity the US has experienced in the last 50 years.
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Ah, you took their figurative sentence literally. I think it's safe to say no one on this planet thinks obesity didnt exist at all in the 60's. The above poster was just making a figurative claim on the explosion in obesity the US has experienced in the last 50 years.
I took it as it was intended. The post author was acting as if it was a revelation to them that obesity had increased since the 60's/70's when it's a simple fact that everyone knows. Remember, the whole point seems to have been to correlate it somehow to foods like vat-grown animal protein which are not even released to the public yet. Now, it certainly will be problematic if the eventual products from this vat meat are particularly unhealthy. Some of the newer vegetarian "meat" options like Impossible Meat
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Sure, let's go with that.
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Sure, let's go with that.
Yes, let's .
Re: Meat is meat (Score:2)
Most of these things have downsides that surface years even decades later. Example - experts swore up and down that leases gasoline was safe. Even as research was published attacking this conclusion, experts doubled down. Grains covered in glyphosate? Safe! Until they werent. This will go the same way. Best option is real unprocessed food. No crazy oils. No crazy starches. No crazy salts.
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People also used to suntan a lot because "it looked healthier".
Then National Geographic published two pictures, one of an Andes woman who spent much of her life outside, at 50 she was a leather bag. And a Japanese monk, who spent most of his life inside, at 80 his skin was smooth.
Overnight, Hollywood women turned into pasty vampires.
Death from cancer (Score:5, Informative)
Death rates from cancer peaked in the US in 1991. Since then, cancer deaths have dropped by about a third. Part of the reason for reduced cancer mortality, of course, is improved treatments. Also important is the greatly reduced incidence of smoking. As against that, life expectancy has increased from about 75 to 79, and the older population is more likely to suffer from cancer which is partly one of the diseases of aging. Less healthy eating habits are also a factor increasing cancer risk.
Re: Meat is meat (Score:2)
Re: Meat is meat (Score:3)
There is something unethical about packing so many chickens in cages that their beaks have to be cut off to keep from pecking each other. Or forcing cattle to live their lives shoulder to shoulder on feedlots full of manure and urine that kill off local waterways. Or chopping down Brazil's forests to graze cattle or grow corn and soy to feed animals (90% of which is lost in the conversion to meat). You could argue in favor of these if it were necessary for human survival. But if it's just because you like t
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I have faith that those processes will be improved over time.
Growing animals for meat is so inefficient and there is so much money to be made from cheap, good lab meat.
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Really, plant based fake meat is a much better candidate for this role. It's much more efficient to have the plants make the protein for you than it is to grow the plants, harvest and process them, ferment, hydrolyse, and refine the goop, and then use the goop to grow animal cells in 10,000 liter vats for weeks or months. The problem is a big part of the market for fake meat is anti-GMO. Changing the prote
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I don't think it's this simple, actually.
Our animal flesh industry is very much an interconnected web, as we've tried to monetize all aspects of it. But this means you can't just take one part of an animal and replace it with a lab grown version without impacting the whole rest of that web.
And a LOT of it is financial.
We make ground meat from the crap cuts that aren't good otherwise. It's a way to monetize what would otherwise be waste. If we replace that waste with cheaper factory made meat, that means a l
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So the scenario you describe is that lab meat might increase the cost of real meat.
And I count that as working in favor of lab meat.
Re:To the FDA... (Score:5, Informative)
don't see the need
Factory farms are one of the largest sources of environmentally harmful pollution in the modern day. Furthermore, their routine use of antibiotics is helping to create antibiotic-resistant diseases which are a significant threat to humans.
Lab grown meat, once the quality and price are right, presents a simple solution to both problems.
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As far as I understand it, plants seem to be the most efficient way of producing foo
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There is the choice to not buy from factory farms. Yes, the product is more expensive, and better, and you have to look for it. The choices are not just "factory farm created stuff" and "lab created stuff".
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Sure choice exists but obviously that hasnt solved the problems outlined above by a long shot as there are still plenty of factory farms out there still. The problem is that most people could give a toss about ethically raised meat and buy the cheapest option they have. The hope is that someday lab grown meat will be the option these people choose thus preventing the above issues.
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Are there enough rats in NYC to feed the population there?
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Are there enough rats in NYC to feed the population there?
There's an estimated 2 to 4 trillion rats in NYC, so the answer is probably yes. However, you've gotta catch 'em, and there's only so much pizza to use as bait.
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Wait, I meant to say billion, but even that has to be bullshit right? But I don't believe the estimates in the low millions either...
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Just make sure things are properly labeled.
This. So much this.
I'm allergic to Splenda (sucralose) and that shit turns up in foods that aren't even labeled as diet.
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From a purely hedonistic point of view I'd like to continue burning fossil fuel like my recent ancestors did too.
Predation (by proxy) as a cultural custom stands in the way of survival of human civilisation moreso than global warming. It ties us to memes which prevent cultural progress. As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields, nowadays our battlefields are capable of wiping out civilisation entirely.
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Not everyone wants to kill something to sustain their own life quality. I mean a serial killer can make the same excuse as you. Both of you see no problem in causing suffering for their own satisfaction.