Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 152 posts

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#111

Post by bananicorn »

torpilla wrote: post #106

That they and their families will never eat. This is just like when the British Parliament approved GMOs in the UK and on the same day officially forbid GMO foods from being served in the Parliament restaurant. BTW I know the guy who was the head of the team who invented the GMO technology. He and his family and relatives only eat the cleanest, best quality ORGANIC food they can find.

Why did the other comment down here get downvoted? Is there anything wrong with it?

He states fair points, as far as I can see.

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#112

Post by grondilu »

It's great but if it really works, isn't there a concern about the existence of our beloved domestic animals?

All domestic cattle nowadays descends from the Auroch, which is extinct. The Auroch disappeared because we did not need it as it was. It was hunted down as tend to be all large animals that can not be domesticated.

If we don't need cows, pigs, sheep and whatnot, isn't there a risk they will fade away?

When we invented cars, the domestic horse kept existing because it still has recreational use. Is there a recreational use for cows?

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#113

Post by fredsted »

grondilu wrote: post #112

It's great but if it really works, isn't there a concern about the existence of our beloved domestic animals? All domestic cattle nowadays descends from the Auroch, which is extinct. The Auroch disappeared because we did not need it as it was. It was hunted down as tend to be all large animals that can not be domesticated. If we don't need cows, pigs, sheep and whatnot, isn't there a risk they will fade away? When we…

People would still want to eat 'real' meat, I'd venture. It would probably be a luxury thing, like shark fin soup, is my guess.

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#115

Post by [deleted] »

ggreer wrote: post #92
mmisu wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assumed "clean" referred to the fact that lab-grown tissue would have a much lower risk of disease. Animals have digestive tracts full of bacteria, and farms aren't exactly pristine. Every year in the US, meat-borne pathogens kill thousands and sicken millions. OK, let's check the numbers. According to the CDC https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/attribution/attribution-... from 1998 - 2008 from the total of foodb…

A couple of points: 1. The percentages you cite aren’t useful on their own, as one also needs to know how often each kind of food is consumed. Only then would we know the relative risk of eating each kind of food. 2. Most food plants are grown outdoors (often near livestock) and many aren’t cooked before eating. Cultured meat is grown in sterile environments and is typically cooked. These differences mean that it wil…

[deleted]

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#116

Post by coldtea »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #79
maxerickson wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well what's the definition of meat? A typical simple one is "animal flesh". Cells grown in a vat aren't flesh, they are a tissue culture. Note that I'm not particularly animated by the issue, I just don't agree that it is as simple as "claiming that meat is not meat".

This seems like a particular definition of "flesh" that's not particularly germane to meatness. Lab meat is made of the exact same animal cells that regular meat is, the tissue just happens to never have inhabited an animal. When we eat meat, we don't value the fact that the cells we're eating were once part of an animal, we mostly value the taste. It seems to me that this isn't a necessarily property of meat but a c…

>When we eat meat, we don't value the fact that the cells we're eating were once part of an animal, we mostly value the taste

You'd be surprised. We even have different names and preferences for different age stages of the animal, different varieties of the animal (regional etc), etc.

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#117

Post by jhbadger »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #75
colordrops wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that "tech" has come to be a colloquialism for "digital".

It is not that surprising given that the most apparent technological advance in our lifetime has been the internet. I would be curious to see what "technology" was a colloquialism for different periods in time. My suspicion is that it would refer to the most impactful and visible innovations of that time.

Well, the word comes from the ancient Greek "τέχνη" (techne) which meant "craft" -- it basically meant creating things in the real world rather than "ἐπιστήμη" (episteme) which meant abstract knowledge, which is what philosophers were after.

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#118

Post by coldtea »

KGIII wrote: post #73
mmisu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling meat grown in a lab clean meat is just a marketing gimmick that could potentially make people believe they eat natural grown meat.

It does confuse me, as a term. Pretty much every bit of meat that I eat was harvested and processed by myself or my neighbor. Given that we are going to be the folks eating it, it's pretty clean. I clean my fish, deer, moose, beef critter, fowl, etc... I clean them very well. (They are delicious.)

>Pretty much every bit of meat that I eat was harvested and processed by myself or my neighbor

You do understand that you are the very definition of an outlier, right?

So it would OK if the term only confused you, since you are supposed to be confused, given that you do these things differently than 99.99% of the population.

But I think the term is confusing in general, not just to people who "kill and clean their own meat".

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#119

Post by bmj »

tray5 wrote: post #83
mmisu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it disingenous to call meat grown in a lab clean meat . Would you call Margarine clean butter ?

If the stats in the article are true, 96% less greenhouse emissions, 45% less energy, 99% less land use and 96% less water used in the production of the lab meat, I think it makes perfect sense to call it clean meat. Plus it doesn't involve the death of an animal, which is pretty "clean" I guess.

I think this is an issue of context.

"Clean" food means something very different than "clean" energy.

If I'm looking for clean food, my standards are very different than someone looking for clean energy. I know folks who wouldn't think lab grown meat was very clean simply because it was created in a lab.

All that to say: you're not wrong, but clean means something very different to the food-conscious person shopping at their local co-op.

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#120

Post by jhbadger »

maxerickson wrote: post #28
emmp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? As long as its vegan margarine. Its clean of at least a subset of ethical concerns that many foods are not. Clean is a very overloaded word though so I certainly see where you're coming from, but it works just fine for me.

It would probably be illegal to market a product that wasn't butter as "Clean Butter", because there are rules about labeling things as butter. So I won't be surprised if the animal products industry lobbies for rules about what can be called meat (or if such rules already exist). Of course such labeling concerns don't apply to an internet discussion, but they do indicate that people care about what's in a name.

Absolutely -- some dairy producing states like Wisconsin have forced makers of soy and almond milk to stop calling them "milk" so I'm almost positive that meat producing states would do the same.
Post reply on HN