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

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

#221
post #104

I'm surprised at the claim that it does 80-percent fewer greenhouse emissions. The recent research suggests that lab-grown meat may not be better than conventional meat (at least for beef) because a part of cows emissions are methane related that dissipates fast while majority of emissions for lab grown meat is CO2 that stays in the atmosphere for long. From https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.000…

How do you reconcile your claim that "methane ... dissipates fast" with this: > Methane is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane

It seems like a faulty way to analyze the problem in any case. Atmospheric methane devolves into CO2 in about eight years, "on average." CO2 emitted into the atmosphere appears to stick around for 300-1000 years. The heat-trapping of methane is obviously much greater during that eight years but then it devolves into CO2. I guess the only way to draw a real conclusion would be comparing the amount of Methane+subsequent CO2 resulting from traditional animal husbandry with the amount of CO2 produced by this lab process.

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

#222
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really dislike the notion of throwing entire swaths of people into a single bucket. 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.

> I really dislike the notion of throwing entire swaths of people into a single bucket. Because there are always exceptions to the rule? Or because you think you can't generalize about any diverse group of people (yes you can, knowing that it obviously doesn't apply to every individual)? > 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 da…

> Because there are always exceptions to the rule?

No, because the exceptions are the few times they are correct!

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

#224
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

humans have kept dogs and cats and horses around even though many of them aren’t used for their original purposes anymore, so I’d be surprised if some sentimental folks didn’t keep a few cows or sheep or whatnot around just for fun.

Especially with cows, sheep and chickens, I suspect the market for their non-meat goods (milk, wool, eggs) will persist (perhaps in a progressively more artisanal market) for far longer than the killing-animals version of the meat industry.

I don't know about wool, but outside of artisanal situations the industry for milk and eggs is cruel from birth to death, not just at death.

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

#225
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making from plant proteins directly will always be cheaper, faster, require less resources and be healthier This is not clear at all. If you look into what goes into making something like an Impossible Burger, it is basically none of those things.

Which part is not clear?

For one thing, plant based meats require a ton of resources, and for another there’s no clear evidence that it’s any healthier than vat grown meat.

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

#226

The price seems to be ~$3.90 to produce chicken breast. Given that I regularly find chicken breast in a store for $1.99, I'll assume that's still ~3x as costly as just farm raising chickens. It will be interesting if subsidies can change this though. The negative externalities of raising animals must be huge. The jobs tied up in these industries are enormous as well though.

$3.90 is an incredible drop in price considering what it was just a couple years ago. I'm certain the price will come down more as more competition and the technology improves. At the rate the price is falling for lab-grown meat, I'd be surprised if it is not cheaper than animal meat in a couple years. https://vegnews.com/2019/7/price-of-lab-grown-meat-to-plumme...

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our economy and workplaces are significantly different from what they were when horses were replaced by cars. The 21st century isn't special and we weren't born a quarter century ago. The economy and our workplaces will continue to evolve, as they have since the beginning of time.

The 20th century may have been special. In a hundred years we went from riding horses to landing on the moon. If the 21st century is to advance on a similarly breathtaking scale we'll need some astounding changes -- immortality, say, or true AI.

About 27% of the world still works in agriculture, as of 2019 - the vast majority as subsistence farmers - down from 44% of the world as of 1990 [1]. That's over 200 million people that just began the transition from pre-industrial agriculture to a modern market based economy. Modern technology is so unevenly distributed that over two billion people are still fed without the benefit of industrialized farming.

I think you're vastly underestimating how much work there is left to do.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS

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

#228
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a generational issue. Sometimes it seems like the Internet thinks that all the *isms have been invented after 2010. Studying newspapers or TV shows from the 1970s easily refutes that assumption. Also, there is no correlation between goodness and vegetarianism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism

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…

Why people take SF authors seriously about the future is beyond me. It's just people wishing for things. Part of the reason I stopped reading it is that it was so apparent that people used "the future" as a synonym for "Narnia" to tell their own stories or moral fables, and yet dated themselves tremendously and guessed wrong. They were more dishonest because they tried to make plausible magic, kings, and wizards instead of just realizing what they were asking for pretty much required it.

The culture has about as much chance of coming into existence as the fact that we discover unicorns. So why should we take him seriously?

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everything have to be a slippery slope?

It's a pretty binary decision (eat animals or not). What does the slope look like?

Eating whales. Or dolphins. Or dogs. Or chimps.

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

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 20th century may have been special. In a hundred years we went from riding horses to landing on the moon. If the 21st century is to advance on a similarly breathtaking scale we'll need some astounding changes -- immortality, say, or true AI.

About 27% of the world still works in agriculture, as of 2019 - the vast majority as subsistence farmers - down from 44% of the world as of 1990 [1]. That's over 200 million people that just began the transition from pre-industrial agriculture to a modern market based economy. Modern technology is so unevenly distributed that over two billion people are still fed without the benefit of industrialized farming. I think…

Well, down from 80% farmers in the Middle Ages. So we've come a long way.
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