181–190 of 493 posts
> Some hope that lab-grown meat could reduce the carbon footprint of the food industry.
Some hope. What are the facts?
I am sceptical that a lab process can be more efficient than a biological process. And being less efficient would it not use more energy, resources, and release more carbon?
The energy for biological processes is often largely solar, for lab processes often largely from fossil fuels.
I have no data, does anyone?
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> from a pregnant mare I’m quite skeptical about this. How do they obtain and culture chicken cells from a horse?
It's the medium, not the genes. Like someone else mentioned, it's called fetal bovine serum (presuming GP meant "cow" and not "mare") and it's used in large quantities.
I’m much less skeptical now
It's not clear to me that there's a real upside to this though, for folks who don't mind killing and eating birds.
Research I have seen (you can see it too: [1]) indicates that chicken, dairy, and legumes are all about as low-impact as it gets when it comes to protein sources for humans.
As other folks have mentioned, scaling up the meat lab causes a lot of headaches because the lab meat doesn't come with its own immune system the way a chicken or a cow does. Headaches in the form of increased operating costs and energy inputs.
[1]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-015-0931-6
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> It's meat. It's just without the animal suffering Are you sure about the no suffering part. Currently this meat is grown using a growth medium most often extracted from a pregnant mare using a technique called bloodletting which is often extremely painful for the animal. EDIT: I think I’m actually wrong about the pregnant mare. Animal suffering through bloodletting from pregnant mares was a recent scandal where I’m…
> technique called bloodletting The technique is called a "biopsy" and while it does hurt, the animals recover pretty quickly from it. Branding is far more painful.
I have no faith in a regulatory framework being enacted and enforce which will minimize this suffering while keeping businesses profitable.
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For context, the life of an average herbivore in the wild consists of living with no shelter in harsh weather while having to fear every sound. And it typically ends by being ripped to pieces by a predator and eaten alive while the brain still has some residual oxygen and awareness. The typical farmed animal experience where you are sheltered, vaccinated against common illnesses, provided food and slaughtered after b…
I'm not sure I buy your argument. For example, pigs have an average lifespan of 15-20 years but in a farm setting are slaughtered at 6 months old. Also I suspect a pig is more adapted to its natural environment than living in a confined shelter (often less than a square metre). In fact, in the UK, less than 1 in 20 pigs are allowed to go outside - hardly a good life! This is just pigs.
Perhaps an individual animal suffering is less compared to a wild death, but the sheer volume has to count for something.
Yeah I’m going to let other folks experiment with that for 10 or so years and see where it goes. I’m sure the meat is fine, it’s just a matter of not contaminating it during the process that I’m concerned about. The FDA is really poor at enforcing the health and safety aspects of manufacturing and processing. They simply don’t have enough inspectors and the inspectors don’t fine big offenders enough
My questions are will vegans or vegetarians eat this? Why or why not? Also what about people that hold cows sacred? Will they be able to eat this? Why or why not?
Lab grown? That's beyond impossible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For context, the life of an average herbivore in the wild consists of living with no shelter in harsh weather while having to fear every sound. And it typically ends by being ripped to pieces by a predator and eaten alive while the brain still has some residual oxygen and awareness. The typical farmed animal experience where you are sheltered, vaccinated against common illnesses, provided food and slaughtered after b…
Regardless of how one would like to spin it, industrial scale animal production means farming animals with the intent to match market prices or you go out of business. That means the production goes by the minimal animal welfare required by law. Whether one believes conditions are torturous or not that bad, is beside the point, which is that they wouldn’t even exist if we didn’t spawn them. So what we do is we rip ne…
Yeah I’m going to let other folks experiment with that for 10 or so years and see where it goes. I’m sure the meat is fine, it’s just a matter of not contaminating it during the process that I’m concerned about. The FDA is really poor at enforcing the health and safety aspects of manufacturing and processing. They simply don’t have enough inspectors and the inspectors don’t fine big offenders enough
If you put cattle on farmland, and utilize regenerative agriculture techniques, it costs a bit more, because yields aren't artificially boosted while destroying the topsoil. In return you actually capture carbon into the grasses from the atmosphere. That would normally just rot, but the herbivores digest it and make it bioavailable for the fungi and bacteria in the soil, where the carbon accumulates. The herbivores a…