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

World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day

slashgear.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 350 posts

Re: World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day

#91

Post by ethanbond »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #35
ethanbond wrote: post #2

> Future Meat Technologies says this facility requires 96-percent less freshwater than livestock production, as well as using 99-percent less land and producing 80-percent fewer greenhouse emissions. Even accounting for PR hyperbole, it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do. This is a national security issue. We can choose to curse our y…

> We can choose to curse our younger generations with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future. A false dichotomy if I ever saw one.

It is a false dichotomy currently because the in-between area is largely occupied by “do the economics make sense.” That is very clearly trending in one direction (towards “yes”), so at some point in the future it will largely boil down to something akin to this dichotomy. My framing is definitely dismissive of one side, but it does strike me as a set of arguments that are largely aesthetic on one side and the reality of food security on the other.

Re: World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day

#92

Post by marcus_holmes »

esens wrote: post #83
marcus_holmes wrote: post #42

I always wonder about the morality questions. This is like a lab experiment for subjective morality. For the sake of the experiment, let's assume the sci-fi writers are right, and eating animals will eventually be considered immoral. This is an extreme stance at the moment (hello PETA) but let's assume it will eventually be accepted as the only moral stance. How long will it be between the introduction of lab-grown m…

> How long will it be between the introduction of lab-grown meat until killing animals for food is banned? Is this a generational thing (so older people still consider eating animals to be acceptable, while younger people do not), or is it a country-wide thing (countries move to ban eating animals one by one, driven by a general shift in moral attitude), or what? How does this change in morality propagate through soc…

True. We tend to cancel slave traders rather than slave owners, because if we were to cancel the slave owners then we'd have to cancel a lot of people.

I should clarify. I'm not criticising cancel culture. I'm interested in how the shift in morality happens and how it propagates, and what that means for us now. Is morality retroactive? Am I an immoral person because I eat meat, even though it's common practise now?

Re: World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day

#93

Post by andscoop »

ethanbond wrote: post #2

> Future Meat Technologies says this facility requires 96-percent less freshwater than livestock production, as well as using 99-percent less land and producing 80-percent fewer greenhouse emissions. Even accounting for PR hyperbole, it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do. This is a national security issue. We can choose to curse our y…

I used to feel similarly, but now, I'm not so sure. What worries me is that lab-grown meat will allow big ag practices to continue, which will do more harm to our co2 emissions and world's soil health.

To expand on this further, there is active research and practices into sustainable farming practices that show diverse crop rotations along dense but short grazing across the land has the ability to rebuild top soil 10x than previously thought. Most importantly this top soil serves as a MASSIVE CARBON SINK.

Using this proven methods, we can leverage the world's farmland to sequester carbon while improving the health of our soil and the nurtition density of our food.

The catch is that we need the animals to restore soil health and presumably we need the business model of selling the meat to make this practice sustainable.

Further Reading:

Dirt to Soil - Gabe Brown

Alan Savory's Holistic Management Practices - https://youtu.be/q7pI7IYaJLI

https://www.marincarbonproject.org/

Re: World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day

#94

Post by wccrawford »

detritus wrote: post #19

I know we've got to start somewhere and I'm all for this direction, but wake me up when we're making synthetic meat products based on beef or pork cell lines. Chicken's the one meat I don't feel too guilty about eating, especially in emission terms. Yet, anyway...

>At this point, the facility is already able to produce lamb, chicken, and pork products without using genetic modification or animal serum. Future Meat says that it will soon also be able to start production on beef, too.

So, they're not producing it commercially, but they can do pork. I'd say the day is inevitable at this point.

Re: World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day

#96

Post by falcolas »

WJW wrote: post #77
falcolas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. Another: How will the ranchland dedicated to their raising be used? In Montana, where the cows outnumber the people, the land they occupy is considered unfit for farming, largely because it’s not friendly for combines. There’s also the whole infrastructure and supply chain dedicated to the breeding and raising of various meat sources. What will happen to them?

Seems fairly straightforward to predict, since this has happened dozens of times before as technology marched on: with no more business for them, they'll go bankrupt and the workers will eventually be assimilated into other professions. Maybe there will be a small remaining industry tending to hobbyists, similar to how horse shoeing and buggy whip manufacturing are very much a niche professions these days.

Have we had one of these "industry extinctions" in the last quarter century, particularly one at the scale of the meat industry?

Our economy and workplaces are significantly different from what they were when horses were replaced by cars.

Re: World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day

#97

Post by matthewdgreen »

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #29
ethanbond wrote: post #2

> Future Meat Technologies says this facility requires 96-percent less freshwater than livestock production, as well as using 99-percent less land and producing 80-percent fewer greenhouse emissions. Even accounting for PR hyperbole, it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do. This is a national security issue. We can choose to curse our y…

It is of course impossible to verify either way, but I am very sure these statistics of 96% savings in freshwater are total nonsense. Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc. Moreover, we have seen time and time again, the reporting of extremely high numbers for water usage in beef and milk…

>but it turns out they are counting the water that falls as rain on the pasture land, or the rain/ground water used to grow the alfalfa.

Can we use that pasture-land (and the rain that falls onto it) to grow more useful crops? If so: I don't understand why that wouldn't count.

Re: World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day

#98

Post by paulcole »

justinmchase wrote: post #47
marcus_holmes wrote: post #42

I always wonder about the morality questions. This is like a lab experiment for subjective morality. For the sake of the experiment, let's assume the sci-fi writers are right, and eating animals will eventually be considered immoral. This is an extreme stance at the moment (hello PETA) but let's assume it will eventually be accepted as the only moral stance. How long will it be between the introduction of lab-grown m…

Another question is, if its banned to kill an animal for meat, for various animals, how long until they go extinct? Many are co-dependent on humanity for their survival at the species level... Or at the very least how will it affect their evolution?

> Many are co-dependent on humanity for their survival at the species level

Can you list them?

Re: World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day

#99

Post by jurip »

andscoop wrote: post #93
ethanbond wrote: post #2

> Future Meat Technologies says this facility requires 96-percent less freshwater than livestock production, as well as using 99-percent less land and producing 80-percent fewer greenhouse emissions. Even accounting for PR hyperbole, it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do. This is a national security issue. We can choose to curse our y…

I used to feel similarly, but now, I'm not so sure. What worries me is that lab-grown meat will allow big ag practices to continue, which will do more harm to our co2 emissions and world's soil health. To expand on this further, there is active research and practices into sustainable farming practices that show diverse crop rotations along dense but short grazing across the land has the ability to rebuild top soil 10…

How many animals are we talking about in a scenario where all the animals were being used for crop/grazing rotation? I've heard about this and it sounds good to me, but without having looked into it at all, it sounds to me like something that probably wouldn't support the number of animals we're using right now for meat production?

Re: World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day

#100

Post by Cthulhu_ »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #42

I always wonder about the morality questions. This is like a lab experiment for subjective morality. For the sake of the experiment, let's assume the sci-fi writers are right, and eating animals will eventually be considered immoral. This is an extreme stance at the moment (hello PETA) but let's assume it will eventually be accepted as the only moral stance. How long will it be between the introduction of lab-grown m…

I don't think eating "from animal" meat will become too controversial within the next few decades yet.

However, there will be a few shifts. Any meat that is unrecognizable as cuts of meat - hamburgers, sausages, etc - will be 'cut' with factory meat as a means to cut costs (assuming factory meat will become cheaper than livestock, which I'm confident it will with scale), similar to how it's now filled with water, MRM and other fillers, or how a few years back there was a big controversy in the UK when it turned out ground beef contained horse meat.

It'll be awhile before legislation catches up to make it mandatory to indicate the source of the meat.

But, if this scales up, I think total meat consumption will only increase.

Post reply on HN