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What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

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Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#61

Post by ericdykstra »

rickycook wrote: post #44
np422 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of us here on hacker news can afford to buy real food such as grass feed beef/lamb, forage egg/chicken, etc Seems like a more natural evolutionary correct way to get our food rather than some kind of franken-meat grown i lab. Every autumn I buy a lamb from the farmer living next to my father, I kind of like it when I can watch my food being happy before I eat it.

most of us in hacker news aren't most of the world. also, "natural" is a kind of ridiculous term. plenty of food additives are natural, but that doesn't make them good. also plenty that are unnatural aren't all bad. medicines are highly "unnatural", but they save lives. why is food any different? given how quickly we're heading toward a world in which we don't have the land area to be able to feed our population (and…

> medicines are highly "unnatural", but they save lives. why is food any different?

Many medicines also cause more harm than they provide help. Just look at the history of drugs that have had to be taken off the market due to crippling or deadly side effects just to treat some mild cold symptoms or something equally minor.

"Natural" is not at all a ridiculous term. It can be made ridiculous when things like "natural flavoring" aren't any different from "artificial flavoring," but I will take natural (or at least human incrementally improved over generations and generations) over artificial (top down diet science-ing) any day.

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#62

Post by beaconstudios »

pavlov wrote: post #39
SerLava wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Waiting for "fake meat" to fix the problem is like saying: "I can't wait until we can grow zombies to pick cotton, then all the slaves can finally go free." It's kind of like that... except that slaves were people - not chickens. Which certainly flavors the metaphor a bit.

Absolutely. That's the crux of the issue: do chickens' lives and feelings have any value? If so, how should society impose that value system on an enormous industry that optimizes to extract value from chickens' suffering?

I think the move to free-range farming has helped a lot to improve the situation. The majority of shops near me stock primarily free-range eggs and chicken due to consumer demand.

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#63

Post by ericdykstra »

Baeocystin wrote: post #48
omginternets wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here I was thinking "(true) free-range as the norm can't come soon enough". I'm very skeptical of fake meet insofar as nutrition involves highly complex systems. Surely the risk of a trans-fat-like health debacle is non-negligible ... tl;dr: fake meat isn't a problem per se , but I sure as hell won't be the first one to eat it. I'll consider it when there's >50 years of hard data on the record.

Cell expansion already has decades of science behind it. There isn't anything hard about it, either. You or I could expand cultures in our kitchens with minimal difficulty as it is. The hard part of 'fake meat' (which isn't fake, it's real muscle tissue, it's just grown differently) is that muscle alone doesn't taste good, or have a pleasing texture. You need connective tissue, fat, blood vessels... The whole lot, re…

I'm with omginternets on this one. On a spectrum of "herbivore that has roamed relatively freely and eaten a variety of vegetables according to it's nature" to "animals raised in factory farms, fed defect candy, and grown to 3x it's natural size before reaching physical maturity" to "lab grown muscle tissue" I'm sticking as close to the first one as I can, and I'm going vegetarian before making lab grown tissue a part of my diet.

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#64

Post by mjevans »

qubyte wrote: post #29
pavlov wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in how animals are treated. Industrial meat production practically runs its margins on increasing the suffering of animals in a manner that narrowly avoids this kind of visible anomalies in the product. As many others have noted in the past, slave labor and concentration camps operated on a similar industrial calculus of forcibly squeezing out value from living beings before puttin…

Not if we're talking about advances in textured vegetable protein. When I read "fake meat" I take it to mean that it's not animal derived. Otherwise it'd just be meat.

What would you consider synthetically produced 'meat' that wasn't part of an animal?

Are there any other salient variables for classification which come to mind?

In my opinion, structured growth of 'muscle tissue' disconnected from any animal is still "fake meat". Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, it is either still science fiction or too expensive (otherwise I'd have heard about it from places that aren't scifi).

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#65

Post by NLips »

andoon wrote: post #53
gambiting wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever seen chicken thighs? They are very fatty,you usually need to trim it off before cooking. Breasts aren't, but chicken has more edible parts than just breasts.

They are fatty, but it's fat you can eat (do you remove it when you roast a whole chicken?) Compare that to the fat of most parts of the pork, which is usually so tough you can't chew it (so you have to remove it with a knife as you eat it) or to a veal, which sometimes has that yellowish fat that even tastes acidic. It's awful.

Slow cooking makes most fat _very_ edible.

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#66

Post by golergka »

iopq wrote: post #4
bambax wrote: post #3

Brown meat is much much more delicious; why would anyone prefer white meat is beyond me. And the irony is that, in buying "heavy breasted chicken", customers pay for something they can't consume (assuming chicken is priced by the pound in the US).

This is true, in Ukraine we called imported chicken legs "Bush's drumsticks" (referring to Bush Sr.) This is because legs are not in as much demand in the US, so they would rather export them to countries where they are in demand!

I'm afraid you're mistaken. It's because Bush organized humanitarian help to post-USSR countries in tge early 90s, which risked hunger because of the awful economic conditions.

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#67

Post by kozak »

Devagamster wrote: post #2

This is kinda terrifying. I can't put my finger on why exactly but dang.

All living creatures occasionally get sick. You don't see a lot of health issues in your meat only because of quality checks on the way of the meat to you, and also partially because the animals that you eat are young.

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#68

Post by mjevans »

bambax wrote: post #3

Brown meat is much much more delicious; why would anyone prefer white meat is beyond me. And the irony is that, in buying "heavy breasted chicken", customers pay for something they can't consume (assuming chicken is priced by the pound in the US).

I like the taste (or maybe it's the lack there of) of white poultry meat more than dark; a lot more.

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#69

Post by mirimir »

doc_holliday wrote: post #55
pjmlp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless one is producing their own vegetables, industrial production of them is no different than meat. I know of local farms where getting above average cabbages, from little seed to the nice looking one on the market stands, takes little more than one month, thanks to the chemicals they get. It is nothing more than "I feel good" kind of thing.

How is that in anyway comparable to the suffering of an actual animal?

Well, there's Tool's "Disgustipated", about the carrot harvest. And some people do think that plants can suffer. Indeed, some Buddhists only eat food that would otherwise be thrown away.

But yes, the relevance of suffering seems proportional to relatedness with the sufferer. Or maybe the ability to identify with the sufferer, based on perceived intelligence and self-awareness.

Re: What is this colored fiber in my chicken?

#70

Post by idiot74 »

pjmlp wrote: post #51
batiudrami wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the meantime you might find vegetarianism surprisingly easy - I know I did. It is initially a bit of extra effort because you need to learn brand new recipes and depending on where you live you might have limited restaurant selections but I mostly gave up meat 18 months ago and was surprised at how easy it was. Plus it's way cheaper and you get to massively reduce your carbon footprint too. It's not for everyone b…

Unless one is producing their own vegetables, industrial production of them is no different than meat. I know of local farms where getting above average cabbages, from little seed to the nice looking one on the market stands, takes little more than one month, thanks to the chemicals they get. It is nothing more than "I feel good" kind of thing.

> Unless one is producing their own vegetables, industrial production of them is no different than meat.

This post lacks common sense. Processing and feeding animals uses far more resources than processing crops (especially since crops are often processed in order to feed animals...).

"The efficiency with which various animals convert grain into protein varies widely. With cattle in feedlots, it takes roughly 7 kilograms of grain to produce a 1-kilogram gain in live weight. For pork, the figure is close to 4 kilograms of grain per kilogram of weight gain, for poultry it is just over 2, and for herbivorous species of farmed fish (such as carp, tilapia, and catfish), it is less than 2. As the market shifts production to the more grain-efficient products, it raises the productivity of both land and water."

http://www.earth-policy.org/books/pb2/pb2ch9_ss4

> It is nothing more than "I feel good" kind of thing.

Seems like you would deny reality in order to continue to 'feel good' about eating meat.

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