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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

#251

Post by Noos »

ainiriand wrote: post #220
Noos wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't be accepted. If anything it probably will be treated like veganism, which is mostly moral grandstanding. People who consume boutique products to show their virtue. A lot of us simply don't lose sleep over the suffering of factory animals, in the same way we didn't lose sleep over the starving kids in china our mothers used to berate us about when we didn't finish our vegetables. That doesn't mean we constant…

Your comment starts presenting an interesting debate but you steer towards some kind of partisanism or tribalism that is quite stange to witness. You do not need to hear any kind of moral guardian to do and conduct yourself knowing that every single person is responsible of the actions they make and though I am not responsible for those starving children I am responsible for many of the atrocities commited for the bu…

It's not partisan in the sense of right or left, the "starving kids in china" was pretty much the same thing on the right. Jellyby was definitely a moral conservative, and victorianism is surprisingly bi-partian. Usually its the fashions of the rich, if anything. HN in particular is unaware of how they imitate it, with the sudden rediscovery of Stoicism and Aurelius a bit much.

I don't agree that easting meat is an atrocity. I think it devalues words to use them like that. I think a lot of veganism is the same reaction to the existence of suffering a lot of religions have had or deal with; it's a form of going to the desert as a monk or mystic to escape the contradictions of the world. That is up to everyone, but the difference here is the monks want to make the entire world the desert now.

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

#252

Post by sireat »

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…

As Gibson wrote in 1984 (a few years earlier actually):

"`Jesus,' Molly said, her own plate empty, `gimme that. You know what this costs?' She took his plate. `They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't vat stuff.' She forked a mouthful up and chewed."

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

#253

Post by t0mbstone »

This is kind of a weird question, but how exactly does anyone prove that this is actually lab grown meat and isn't just normal meat that has been turned into meat paste and then sold for twice as much as normal meat?

I mean, obviously, they wouldn't do this at first. They would wait until everyone was complacent and used to eating lab grown meat before they started supplementing their production.

As long as creating lab-grown meat is more expensive than growing real animals and butchering them, there will be an economic incentive for this sort of fraud.

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

#254

Post by greenonions »

jurip wrote: post #99
andscoop wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Even if you could convert all the corn/soybean land in the United States to more regenerative methods, you probably wouldn't be able to meet the current demand for meat.

Additionally you have a logistical problem with the animals being distributed across an enormous area vs concentrated in a CAFO.

Now, you would easily be able to grow enough food for the country and possibly the globe, but meat demand cannot be sustained.

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

#255

Post by wintermutestwin »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #5

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.

>The price seems to be ~$3.90 to produce chicken breast. Given that I regularly find chicken breast in a store for $1.99

$2 Chicken is non-organic. Organic is ~$5 at Costco.

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

#256

Post by Noos »

mdasen wrote: post #212
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…

> eating animals will eventually be considered immoral. This is an extreme stance at the moment (hello PETA) There are a lot more vegetarians and vegans than just PETA. It looks like around 5% of the US and hitting 10% in many countries ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country ). Many parts of India have very high vegetarian rates. > How long will it be between the introduction of lab-grown meat until…

> I think we also see some of this in Christian stuff. I feel like Christians like Isaiah 11:6's "the lion will lie down with the lamb" (yes, I know that technically that's not quite the animals in the text, but it is how I often hear it said by English-language Christians). I think the idea that predators might not be predators in some world-to-come isn't something that has to be creatively reinterpreted.

There's sort of a verse that deals with it. The context is in eating meat sacrificed to idols, aka immoral meat. It's not clear on what that means, where it's eating meat in a ceremonial service or buying meat in the marketplace that was resold donations to a pagan temple. Romans 14: 1-9

>>Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. One person's faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them. Who are you to judge someone else's servant?

>>To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand. One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind. 6 Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord. Whoever eats meat does so to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. 7 For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living.

I'm not Christian any more, but generally the spirit is more "your brother needs to be vegan, don't convert him or argue with him and do your best to strengthen his faith." Each person must do what he feels God has commanded him to do in his own way.

The new heaven and new earth is a radically different experience. Its not just lion laying down with lamb, its that "we shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, and be like the angels" which Jesus said in answer to people disbelieving in a ressurection. It's a total break from humanity in a sense, and trying to emulate it has led to a lot of cults engaging in self-destructive behavior.

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

#257

Post by madacol »

t0mbstone wrote: post #253

This is kind of a weird question, but how exactly does anyone prove that this is actually lab grown meat and isn't just normal meat that has been turned into meat paste and then sold for twice as much as normal meat? I mean, obviously, they wouldn't do this at first. They would wait until everyone was complacent and used to eating lab grown meat before they started supplementing their production. As long as creating…

The promise is that it should eventually be cheaper than normal meat, otherwise they'll fail

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

#258

Post by AnotherGoodName »

t0mbstone wrote: post #253

This is kind of a weird question, but how exactly does anyone prove that this is actually lab grown meat and isn't just normal meat that has been turned into meat paste and then sold for twice as much as normal meat? I mean, obviously, they wouldn't do this at first. They would wait until everyone was complacent and used to eating lab grown meat before they started supplementing their production. As long as creating…

You can ask this about a lot of foods. How do you know your baby formula isn't just crushed white building material mixed with water? (This happened btw, see melamine baby formula).

In the end big conspiracies like this leak out since there's a lot of employees in the supply chain and trust in the brand is broken. The Chinese go out of their way to buy Australian and New Zealand branded baby formula to this day because trust in their own local brands was destroyed.

So this is unlikely. Possible and similar short sighted things have occurred in management before (see Boeing) but it would be ridiculously poor management to let something like this happen.

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

#259

Post by t0mbstone »

madacol wrote: post #257
t0mbstone wrote: post #253

This is kind of a weird question, but how exactly does anyone prove that this is actually lab grown meat and isn't just normal meat that has been turned into meat paste and then sold for twice as much as normal meat? I mean, obviously, they wouldn't do this at first. They would wait until everyone was complacent and used to eating lab grown meat before they started supplementing their production. As long as creating…

The promise is that it should eventually be cheaper than normal meat, otherwise they'll fail

Realistically, even fake meat sold as "lab grown" could be cheaper than normal meat if what they are doing is turning low quality meat into paste and forming it into shapes and stuff.

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

#260

Post by mythrwy »

iammisc wrote: post #136
wcoenen wrote: post #75

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…

Having eaten goat a few times I'd say a goat is still pretty near inedible so there is no realized gain. Tastes may vary though.
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