201–210 of 350 posts
I worked in this lab! Would be glad to answer questions.
> But you have to feed the cells. And you can't just grow some plants and feed it to the cells, you have to manufacture a very precise blend of chemicals (amino acids, sugars, surfactants, antioxidants, etc.) at >99% purity for each one. Often extremely nasty solvents are involved in the production process. Usually, some sort of petroleum product is a feedstock.
How would you assess these statements?
I'm not sure vegans would touch this, but they've always been more akin to a religion than a diet. Vegetarians would largely go for this I think. I'd be very happy if could get meat that was cheaper, safer, cleaner, and didn't have animal cruelty issues. This is the future. Also does anyone else here remember the beef vats in Call to Power, the civilization knockoff game? It really feels like I'm living in the future…
Some vegans will eat it - others won't. I don't think you can say with confidence what portion of them will until there's some data.
Many are vegan on ethical grounds - which don't apply here.
For example, the '5k burgers' figure comes from dividing the mass produced by some nominal figure for a burger. But is it actually mince they're producing? Is it minceable meat that could also be sold as steaks or .. 'joints' or 'ribs' (-like meat without there, presumably, ever being a bone)? Are they (expecting to be) able to differentiate different cuts, sirloin, rump, etc. that are pretty different when naturally grown?
Or is it just a sort of vague meaty thing that you can have in whatever shape you want, but is pretty homogeneous, and like an 'average' chunk of meat, or whichever piece they sampled for it initially?
The article touches on water and emissions; I wonder how these products compare on electricity usage (and whether that's counted in the emissions estimate).
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…
Why does everything have to be a slippery slope?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect reality will be a lot more boring. Animals are a low efficiency method of converting plant material into meat, both in terms of calories and protein mass input/output. So with scale, eventually lab-grown meat should become much cheaper than traditional meat. At the same time, it will be higher quality. Sterile production will eliminate E. Coli, salmonella, antibiotics... Input nutrients will be tightly cont…
Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition. For example, goats eat almost any plant, including many natives. Unless you think humans are going to be able to eat chaparral. The fact is that modern edible agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuel and mined fertilizers. Until we solve that problem, it's better to stop growing too many plants, let native vegetation regrow and se…
> Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition.
Animals are pretty inefficient at converting plants to calories, e.g. see https://learn.uvm.edu/foodsystemsblog/2014/07/10/meat-vs-veg...
Most of the energy spent getting grains to the table is in transport/processing. If you just compare the production, grains are way more efficient than animals.
Even though I'm sure goats are better than cows, they aren't as efficient as plants at producing calories, and in all cases you still have to process and transport them.
However if you've got some data showing otherwise I'm open to being convinced here.
> Until we solve that problem, it's better to stop growing too many plants
I think this is making perfect the enemy of the good. Plants use less water, produce substantially less GHG emissions, and so are still a net major win on environmental terms vs. the status quo.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, firstly, this: > For the sake of the experiment, let's assume the sci-fi writers are right, and eating animals will eventually be considered immoral. Also, is it vegetarianism if you only eat lab-grown meat? It's still meat, right, so you're still not vegetarian. Or is it the "not eating animals" that makes you a vegetarian now? I tend to think that (e.g.) Iain M Banks is right, and that eventually eating animals…
> Or is it the "not eating animals" that makes you a vegetarian now? That's the point of ethical veganism/vegetarianism, yes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition. For example, goats eat almost any plant, including many natives. Unless you think humans are going to be able to eat chaparral. The fact is that modern edible agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuel and mined fertilizers. Until we solve that problem, it's better to stop growing too many plants, let native vegetation regrow and se…
Most steaks come from cows than never tasted grass.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect reality will be a lot more boring. Animals are a low efficiency method of converting plant material into meat, both in terms of calories and protein mass input/output. So with scale, eventually lab-grown meat should become much cheaper than traditional meat. At the same time, it will be higher quality. Sterile production will eliminate E. Coli, salmonella, antibiotics... Input nutrients will be tightly cont…
Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition. For example, goats eat almost any plant, including many natives. Unless you think humans are going to be able to eat chaparral. The fact is that modern edible agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuel and mined fertilizers. Until we solve that problem, it's better to stop growing too many plants, let native vegetation regrow and se…
Also, even that 86% isn't "free" - it's not all pasturing, and it takes a lot of effort, energy, and equipment to get hay, inedible by-products of human-edible crops, etc. from the field to animals' mouths.
[0] https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/fao-sets-the-record-s...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Diet-Small-Planet-20th-Anniversary/dp...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect reality will be a lot more boring. Animals are a low efficiency method of converting plant material into meat, both in terms of calories and protein mass input/output. So with scale, eventually lab-grown meat should become much cheaper than traditional meat. At the same time, it will be higher quality. Sterile production will eliminate E. Coli, salmonella, antibiotics... Input nutrients will be tightly cont…
Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition. For example, goats eat almost any plant, including many natives. Unless you think humans are going to be able to eat chaparral. The fact is that modern edible agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuel and mined fertilizers. Until we solve that problem, it's better to stop growing too many plants, let native vegetation regrow and se…
I disagree. Average caloric and protein efficiency is 7%–8%. For beef specifically, it is only 3%. I don't know how efficiently a cultured meat factory could convert grass into beef, but I bet it could do a better.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...