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

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

#241

Post by gowld » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #140

paulirwin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is spot on. (I'm a long time vegetarian, so I've thought a lot about this.) Hunting, fishing, and even specialty slaughterhouses will likely continue. The economics will cause mass meat production to go out of business, though. Beef first, probably. Engineering can evolve much faster than cows and chickens and fish can. No politician, at least in the U.S. mainstream, is going to commit political self-destruction…

The ironic counter-ads will be viscious: "Be a real man! Risk getting sick from one of our real burgers! Each one is made from the hormone-pumped flesh of a real baby cow that never knew its real mom!"

Meat advertisting/propaganda uses "Eat natural whole foods (ignoring all the unnaural things they do to the animals and meat), not processed fake meat foods".

And to some extent, they have a point. But of course they don't invite you to eat natural whole plant foods instead of meat.

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

#242

Post by eloff » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #222

eloff wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

It's a pretty bad generalization if it's generally wrong then.

I'd say the problem is with the flawed generalization then, not being able to generalize about groups in general.

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

#243

Post by DantesKite » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

wcoenen wrote: post #75

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 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…

I like the idea that capitalism will just outweigh any questions of morality, because it'll be so much cheaper and better than anything else.

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

#244

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 5:25 PM UTC

buu700 wrote: post #128

marcus_holmes wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I wouldn't be surprised if this nuance were lost in the hypothetical future cancel culture, but I think anyone giving careful consideration to present circumstances would realize the terrible choice we all have to make. It's easy to judge someone for complicity in the mass murder of countless animals when you have the luxury of having been saved from that choice by more advanced technology.

>I wouldn't be surprised if this nuance were lost in the hypothetical future cancel culture, but I think anyone giving careful consideration to present circumstances would realize the terrible choice we all have to make.

It already is lost among many people today so that's not a stretch in the slightest. There are an egregious amount of people that use the morality of the present to judge the decisions of the past when the whole system and culture was different. All simply because these people were spoon-fed and told "this is bad because of 'x'" without explaining from a mindset of why people thought the way they did at the time. I mean the simple fact that there is a concept of "leftism" is enough to state that there is an ideology that someone can measure you against on how "woke" you may or may not be. It's exactly no different than the Catholic church setting up a mock trial to determine if you are a heretic! Except it's not a centralized theology. But clearly it has enough adherence that there are some aristocrats that are willing to kowtow to the belief system.

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

#245

Post by armchairhacker » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 5:25 PM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #203

I'm excited for these to be readily available and around normal meat pricing - but articles never seem to show any photos. I'm really curious how they actually 'grow' it, what sort of form it takes, and then what the final product texture is like or how versatile it is. 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 prod…

It looks like the lab-grown meat looks indistinguishable from real meat. They've even got salmon sashimi with the texture of real salmon. (source: captions in https://www.fooddive.com/news/cell-based-meat-plants-come-on...)

I doubt it tastes indistinguishable though, from hearing other reports of tasting lab-grown meat.

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

#246

Post by obiefernandez » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

I worry that if the premium for lab grown meat is high enough, we'll eventually have unethical actors selling real meat as fake meat (with no easy way for the consumer to tell the difference.)

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

#247

Post by Falling3 » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #163

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…

Veganism is neither a religion nor a diet; it's a philosophy that impact various areas of consumption and usage beyond just food.

As a vegan, I'm thrilled about the prospect of this. This is the only realistic route to anything resembling the cessation of large scale animal farming.

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

#248

Post by gowld » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

growt wrote: post #137

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…

A quick google search told me that 12 US presidents where slave owners. So far I think none of their statues have been torn down because of the fact although slavery is almost universally outlawed and condemned. For shorter term analogies I think something like gay-marriage fits. "Progressive" countries allow it, while the more "backwards" or religious countries fight it. I guess it will play out something like this…

Andrew Jackson is being cancelle^Wremoved from the $20.

It might not be a coincidence that he was targetted as being perhaps the most racist genocidal President.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_twenty-dollar_bi...

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

#249

Post by bserge » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #174

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 think it's going to be interesting simply because in order to ban killing of animals for food, we're going to have to almost genocide livestock in order to make their continued existence feasible.

People didn't seem too fussed about the mink mass killed because some were infected with Covid. "Had to be done" works every time.

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

#250

Post by gowld » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

Clewza313 wrote: post #84

smogcutter wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will we get to the point where statues of now-famous people are pulled down because they ate animals? Assuming some variant of "cancel culture" exists then, will that act retroactively and currently-lionised people get cancelled because they are carnivores, even though the current culture that they exist in considers it acceptable? Perhaps, if those statues were originally erected in honor of their diet, and to rem…

We're busily pulling down statues of various slave owners, none of which were erected to honor their slave ownership.

Which ones? Most of the statues were specifically erected decades after the Civil War, by KKK and friends, as part of an intimidation campaign against black people and in support of Jim Crow -style laws and resistance to the progress of equal rights legislation.