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Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

#251

Post by disintegore »

nberkman wrote: post #191

Excellent article explaining why lab-grown meat will never scale: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca... > David Humbird, the UC Berkeley-trained chemical engineer who spent over two years researching the report, found that the cell-culture process will be plagued by extreme, intractable technical challenges at food scale. In an extensive series of interviews with The Counter, he said it was…

It seems more accurate to say that the business model is contingent on a number of breakthroughs that may never occur. It's not hard to see how the development of a more (and, let's say, sufficiently) economical process would retroactively justify all the capital invested and press generated up to that point, especially if it can put an end to the ecological disaster and permanent superholocaust that is the modern meat industry.

Re: Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

#252

Post by cwkoss »

worik wrote: post #181

The article says: > 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…

Animals do a lot of stuff (and have a lot of parts) which are not necessary when producing a steak or ground meat.

Will use more GRID energy, but require significantly less arable land per unit. (And thus probably less fossil fuels, because agriculture uses a lot).

Re: Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

#253

Post by runarberg »

coldpie wrote: post #174
dalbasal wrote: post #137

Polling my own bubble, I'm dubious about lab meat. Across the board, it seems that people want lab grown meat for others. Vegans want omnivores to eat it. Omnivores think it'd be good for vegans. Meanwhile, any mass market product is likely to be some sort of processed meat product. Sausage, mince chicken nugget or somesuch. These aren't generally premium products, so you need to go really low for price competitivene…

If we priced externalities at their true societal cost, the problem of animal farming becomes clear very quickly. Reducing carbon emissions from animal agriculture is one of the bigger targets for helping reduce climate change. I don't think telling people to just not eat meat will work, so lab-grown meat seems like a promising solution to explore. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Doesn’t lab grown meat need a lot of growth serum, which is currently extracted from pregnant animals? So as it stands it is not a solution to help reduce climate change (nor animal suffering). For that we’d need a more sustainable way of producing these serums. I’m not aware of any methods which are proven to work at scale.

Re: Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

#255

Post by cwkoss »

coldpie wrote: post #39
glitchc wrote: post #4

Look forward to lab-grown burgers and steaks!

Me too. Aside from the environmental improvements, there's some pretty cool stuff they could in theory do with this tech. Making consistent, perfect cuts of meat with little waste. It's early days, but this is pretty promising tech and I'm excited to see where it goes.

Cool: perfect wagyu-level steak cubes

Not so cool: advertisers will subsidize your steak if the marbling looks like their logo

Re: Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

#256

Post by reb »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #167
reb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I eat meat, but I think it's fair to say bringing living/feeling/thinking things into existence for the express purpose of being killed and consumed is grim. This feels particularly true if the circumstances they're raised in are horrific, which seems to be pretty common in factory farms. In any case, nature might be crueler to living things than we are, but I still think becoming less cruel is worth the effort.

> I eat meat, but I think it's fair to say bringing living/feeling/thinking things into existence for the express purpose of being killed and consumed is grim. This feels particularly true if the circumstances they're raised in are horrific, which seems to be pretty common in factory farms. Wouldn't the logical conclusion than be to eat less and higher quality meat? I mean I have worked on Biodynamic farms with lives…

I agree there are a lot of problems with the intersection of food and capitalism, and there's plenty of room for solutions to those problems to just... create new or different problems. That said, I don't think the key issue is "poor practice and animal welfare", it's exchanging another animal's life for a few minutes of personal pleasure and eight-ish hours of energy.

With sufficient research, I believe we can free ourselves and other living things from that dynamic without sacrificing the experience and benefits animal products provide, and I'd be happy to live in that future. We obviously aren't there yet, so I support efforts that bring us closer to it, even knowing they'll be sub-par for years.

And in the meantime, I agree: eating less meat and favoring producers who treat their animals well is the way to go if avoiding animal products entirely isn't on the table.

Re: Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

#257

Post by markstos »

aendruk wrote: post #199
delecti wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a point against the whole concept, and not in particular against specific options like mammoth or giant sloth, which you replied to?

I think their point is that if a slaughtered animal is necessary for correct taste, the dream of tasting a mammoth won’t be fully realized by this technology.

Having read a bit about the topic, the chemical profile of slaughtered animals includes some changes due to the stress and fear that the animal's experience just prior to being killed, like increased cortisol levels.

Meat from stressed animals will be "tough, tasteless, and high in pH, and will go bad quicker than unstressed meat." (From: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-scared-animals-tas...)

If you've read about factory farms that most meat comes from, it's a stressful environment.

On the other hand, lab-grown meat sounds would be zero-stress.

Re: Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

#258

Post by apatil »

matrix_overload wrote: post #58
superkuh wrote: post #33

It will be animal cells differentiated into muscle tissues on collagen scaffolds initially. The technology comes from attempts to grow functional organs (ie, liver) that are biocompatible in the body serum proper. If there aren't health effects from transplantation within the animal type you can probably eat the animal tissues just fine. It's the same thing. It's meat. It's just without the animal suffering. And hope…

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…

As I understand your post, an explicit version of your argument would be something like "the level of suffering that nature intends for animals far exceeds the level of suffering experienced by animals farmed for meat, so farming animals for meat provides them with a better life than they deserve."

When assessing arguments like this I find it useful to substitute animals for a hypothetical population of hominids with cognitive abilities typical of nonhuman mammals. If an island populated by such people were discovered, and they turned out to generally live nasty, brutish and short lives for some reason, would that justify farming them for meat?

The answer is clearly no. If you were to ever encounter a hominid of any cognitive ability who was being farmed for meat, you would be horrified and would report the situation to law enforcement. That individual's treatment by the operators of the farm would qualify as brutal regardless of how much people of the same background tend to suffer out in the world.

I don't think there is a valid reason to treat hypothetical hominids with cognitive abilities typical of nonhuman mammals differently from actual nonhuman mammals.

Re: Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

#259

Post by kikokikokiko »

dqpb wrote: post #232
kikokikokiko wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And hopefully it'll eventually be cheaper than growing animals too." Just as simply planting a tree and letting the sun provide the energy for it's growth will always beat those "synthetic trees" people like to hype from time to time, I can expect to never see a synthetic process that is more cost effective to create "meat" than simply letting nature do it's thing. Down here in Brazil you basically give the animals…

> Down here in Brazil you basically give the animals it's vaccines and let them graze for a few years Let me fix this for you: > Down here in Brazil you basically destroy a million square kilometers of old growth rainforest, give the animals it's vaccines, and let them graze for a few years

You have no idea what you are talking about. Brazil is a continental country, I'm sure you know about it. My family and I come from the southern part, it's basically pampa downn here, a green savana. That's why Argentina, Uruguai and south Brazil are the best places to raise cattle in the world, it's just grass from horizon to horizon. The average HN user is so oblivious to anything other than this idiotic 1st world mainstream view it shocks me. The propaganda about the Amazon destruction is hilarious coming from a brazilian native point of view.

Re: Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

#260

Post by JasserInicide »

LtWorf wrote: post #147
prometheus76 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being exposed to air, for one. That's why it's safe to eat a rare steak (where the surfaces exposed to air are cooked to kill bacteria) and why it's not safe to eat rare hamburger (where all the meat has been exposed to air through grinding the meat).

> That's why it's safe to eat a rare steak The USA department of agriculture begs to differ. https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Is-a-rare-steak-safe-to-eat Personally I never place much trust in random comments on the internet.

So if the USDA recommends this, what's the reasoning behind allowing restaurants to sell rare steaks?
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