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Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015)

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Re: Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015)

#91

Post by snovv_crash »

grzm wrote: post #42
CamperBob2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll probably change your mind. If/when synthmeat becomes both economical and palatable, it will rapidly become socially unacceptable to eat real meat.

I'm not sure about the social aspect of it, but I can see it becoming more of a "real meat for special occasions or if you're rich enough". Demand for real meat, especially for processed meat products, will drop.

It will probably be similar to having real fur coats, vs faux fur. Distasteful in some social groups, but other people still do it.

Re: Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015)

#92

Post by roel_v »

KitDuncan wrote: post #83
roel_v wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of choices for more 'organic' and 'animal friendly' and 'cruelty free' and what have you milk. While the cheap milk is indeed farmed at high intensity and not very animal-friendly to put it mildly, it doesn't have to be that way. Whereas a burger - well you have to kill the cow to get one.

Don't kid yourself. There is no animal friendly way to produce milk on any economic scale. Even if "organic" farms didn't forcably impregnated the cows (which most of them still do), they still take away the calves and hand them over to the veal industry.

Yes yes there's always a true Scotchman argument to be made about how something isn't 'really' animal friendly, but between being butchered for meat or being milked when living on a pasture, using butter to fatten up artificial meat would be a huge improvement in animal welfare.

Re: Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015)

#93

Post by wcoenen »

spraak wrote: post #88
charlesdm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one here who probably wouldn't buy artificial meat? I'm not a massive meat eater, but when I go shopping, I tend to buy better quality stuff without caring too much for the price. I'd give it a try, but would probably still buy "the real deal". > Suddenly we have huge swathes of land that, perhaps naively, I hope can be reforested. Those plots would still be owned by farmers, and planting trees on them…

I'm with you. I too don't eat it often but would rather buy organic, grass fed, local. I also wouldn't buy synthetic meat for spiritual reasons: I actually want to consume a real dead animal that had a soul. It is much more nourishing for me to eat animals than be vegetarian, and I don't just mean physically nourishing.

> I actually want to consume a real dead animal that had a soul.

I can't tell whether this is sarcasm or not.

If not, do you also apply this principle to other things? e.g. do you prefer your clothes to be made from baby seal furs? Perhaps toilet paper made from the wood pulp of ancient sequoias?

Re: Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015)

#94

Post by truth_sentinell »

wcoenen wrote: post #93
spraak wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you. I too don't eat it often but would rather buy organic, grass fed, local. I also wouldn't buy synthetic meat for spiritual reasons: I actually want to consume a real dead animal that had a soul. It is much more nourishing for me to eat animals than be vegetarian, and I don't just mean physically nourishing.

> I actually want to consume a real dead animal that had a soul. I can't tell whether this is sarcasm or not. If not, do you also apply this principle to other things? e.g. do you prefer your clothes to be made from baby seal furs? Perhaps toilet paper made from the wood pulp of ancient sequoias?

Probably some religious non-sense.

Re: Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015)

#95

Post by mrob »

I predict synthetic meat will be hugely successful simply because it avoids all the gross parts of dead animals. No blood, no connective tissue, no risk of abscesses or parasites, no worries about cross-contamination, the exact same size every time. If I can buy a sterile and perfectly uniform slab of synthetic muscle and marbled fat, to me that's a better product than natural meat. I don't even care if it tastes slightly worse. Put some ketchup on it and it'll be good enough.

"Inferior" technology very often wins because of convenience. People preferred LCDs to CRTs long before they'd caught up with CRT image and motion quality. Touch screen phones are more popular than those with physical keyboards. More people use ballpoint pens than fountain pens despite the higher writing pressure and lack of flexibility in ink choice. Synthetic meat can be the ultimate convenient meat and that's enough to make up for a lot of other flaws.

Re: Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015)

#96

Post by Retric »

Hupriene wrote: post #82
Retric wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A factory is not going to produce a states worth of meat. Possibly a small city's worth, but Americans eat 1 billion pounds of meat per year an this stuff is going to take at least hours if not weeks to grow.

I think you are off by quite a bit on how much meat Americans eat. 214.8 lbs per capita per annum * 318 million people = ~68 billion lbs per annum See: http://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/sta...

There are 50 states. So, a states worth of meat should be around a billion pounds. Granted, some states have a relatively tiny population.

Re: Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015)

#97

Post by jonathanstrange »

mrob wrote: post #95

I predict synthetic meat will be hugely successful simply because it avoids all the gross parts of dead animals. No blood, no connective tissue, no risk of abscesses or parasites, no worries about cross-contamination, the exact same size every time. If I can buy a sterile and perfectly uniform slab of synthetic muscle and marbled fat, to me that's a better product than natural meat. I don't even care if it tastes sli…

I'm not so sure. The problem is that any kind of processed real meat, like almost all other processed food, tends to be absolutely horrible from a culinary point of view and is often bad from a health-related point of view, too.

It seems unlikely to me that lab-grown meat would fare better in that respect than, say, processed compressed chicken remains that are sold as an ingredient in a vast variety of processed food.

I also don't think that lab-grown meat will have substantially less potential for biological contamination.

Re: Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015)

#98

Post by jonathanstrange »

robbrown451 wrote: post #70
charlesdm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one here who probably wouldn't buy artificial meat? I'm not a massive meat eater, but when I go shopping, I tend to buy better quality stuff without caring too much for the price. I'd give it a try, but would probably still buy "the real deal". > Suddenly we have huge swathes of land that, perhaps naively, I hope can be reforested. Those plots would still be owned by farmers, and planting trees on them…

But people who refuse to eat lab meat will eventually die off. I mean, there are still people buying newly harvested fur, but they seem to be few and far between. Real meat will probably carry a social stigma as soon as fake meat becomes just as good or nearly as good.

I doubt that. Thousands of years of cooking tradition will not disappear any time soon. If it's cheap enough, lab grown meat will mostly occur in heavily processed food because the consumers of that food don't give a shit about what they eat anyway.

Re: Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015)

#99

Post by charlesdm »

robbrown451 wrote: post #70
charlesdm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one here who probably wouldn't buy artificial meat? I'm not a massive meat eater, but when I go shopping, I tend to buy better quality stuff without caring too much for the price. I'd give it a try, but would probably still buy "the real deal". > Suddenly we have huge swathes of land that, perhaps naively, I hope can be reforested. Those plots would still be owned by farmers, and planting trees on them…

But people who refuse to eat lab meat will eventually die off. I mean, there are still people buying newly harvested fur, but they seem to be few and far between. Real meat will probably carry a social stigma as soon as fake meat becomes just as good or nearly as good.

People are still using real vanille, whereas in most products a sort of vanilla essence is used. I think it might turn out the same with meat; the people who can afford it will get it, others will get the lab grown meat?

Re: Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015)

#100

Post by mrob »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #97
mrob wrote: post #95

I predict synthetic meat will be hugely successful simply because it avoids all the gross parts of dead animals. No blood, no connective tissue, no risk of abscesses or parasites, no worries about cross-contamination, the exact same size every time. If I can buy a sterile and perfectly uniform slab of synthetic muscle and marbled fat, to me that's a better product than natural meat. I don't even care if it tastes sli…

I'm not so sure. The problem is that any kind of processed real meat, like almost all other processed food, tends to be absolutely horrible from a culinary point of view and is often bad from a health-related point of view, too. It seems unlikely to me that lab-grown meat would fare better in that respect than, say, processed compressed chicken remains that are sold as an ingredient in a vast variety of processed foo…

I'm confident contamination won't be an issue for consumers because AFAIK no current or proposed synthetic meat has an immune system. This means it will have to be grown in sterile conditions. Contamination will be a huge problem for producers, but they'll have to figure out a solution because the cost of losing whole batches would be too much if they don't.
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