Live data from Hacker News

Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

smithsonianmag.com

271–280 of 493 posts

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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Given the topic of animal suffering here, what does the full picture of an animal used for this purpose look like? Are they treated any different to animals intended for direct consumption?

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

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analogy aside, just because the process has been evolutionarily optimized it doesn't mean it's the most efficient way of doing it. There's a lot of other evolutionary pressure where energy is expended in ways that don't benefit obtaining the arbitrary end product. Say synthetic wood as your example, I would be willing to bet that a dedicated system that extracts CO2 for the carbon and combines it with water to make c…

If it was evolutionarily optimized, it most likely is not the most efficient way of doing something but it most certainly is the most resilient way. Potato blight? soon to be available for: meat!

Is a fungal disease that ravages crop organisms grown in the open (wild varieties included) supposed to be an argument against growing food in a sterile, controlled environment?

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

#273

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).

> and why it's not safe to eat rare hamburger (where all the meat has been exposed to air through grinding the meat). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett

> permits mett to be sold only on the day of production

Sounds like Germany's laws acknowledge that non-fresh mett poses the same dangers as store bought hamburger.

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

#274
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Evidence? Do you have any background in the field? It's easy as a layperson to imagine that not having to support the l…

For evidence, my extended family down here raises cattle to this day. It's hard to beat doing hardly anything other than let the beasts eat grass for a couple of years. Try to beat that for a cost of goods.

This was asking about energy efficiency, though. The vast majority of the energy ever consumed by an animal is used in processes other than growth. The ability to grow meat without it needing to be part of an organism that has to be able to also grow a skeleton, reproductive system, be able to move and think, and other energetically expensive processes in addition to growing muscle, seemingly has to be possible for less energy cost than supporting an entire animal lifecycle.

Whether it can be done entirely using solar is another question, but free-grazing animals that only consume energy from local grass are not anywhere near prolific enough to feed the entire planet.

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

#275

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…

"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…

1) your externalizing the VAST environmental costs from grazing: methane production, vast amounts of land dedicated to grazing, plus likely there is still farming/crops to feed them over winter. Googling leads to (accuracy undetermined) that 41% of land is dedicated in the US to meat production.

2) you are assuming (because you externalize / push onto the future generations the cost) that grazing is the most efficient means for meat tissue production. I doubt it is. If artificial meat can beat cows wandering around eating grass for three years by a substantial margin, which I think is theoretically possible, then grazing will be a niche production.

This technology is desperately needed for climate change mitigation, on the scale of electrification of consumer transport. It's not just the methane and farming, it's also all that land that could be used as carbon sinks and biodiversity.

https://www.arespectfullife.com/2018/08/05/41-of-u-s-land-is...

The big issue is that the world wants meat. If we can reduce the carbon footprint by 1/10th, which I think is possible, then it will be a very good think for a sustainable human race.

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

#276
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This visualisation was an eye opener. https://justone.earth/food/ Perhaps an individual animal suffering is less compared to a wild death, but the sheer volume has to count for something.

After a cursory glance it would appear the we could reduce animal suffering by focusing on eating the larger animals that produce more food. The idea being, eat the big ones, feed more people, kill less animals. I'm not entirely serious about this. But I'm curious where the logical flaw is.

The logical flaw is in feed ratios. More feed required to produce less edible mass, therefore more land, water, resources, etc used. Feed production is also typically monoculture in the US. Chickens are actually some of the most efficient animals in this regard: https://awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/

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

#277

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…

What about something like lab diamonds? You can give nature billions of years to "do it's thing" or we can produce the same result in a lab in a matter of weeks without any suffering and at a fraction of the cost. Synthetic processes can be quite efficient and it sounds like you're discarding them completely which is a little shortsighted.

I'd argue synthetic diamonds and synthetic "life" are pretty different. We also don't eat diamonds.

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that would also apply to the current topic of chicken.

There is no shortage of slaughtered chickens for the curious person to taste.

Right, but we don't even know if their hypothetical concern is relevant yet. The comment could well have been "will this product taste the same as normal chicken?" as a top-level comment on this post. Instead it's "in the hypothetical case that this doesn't taste the same as normal chicken, which we don't know yet, then neither will mammoth or giant sloth taste the same as their ancient walking versions".

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

#279
post #73

Hard pass. Let's see some long-term (10 years) test data first (e.g., how does it effect things like muscle growth/retention, fat growth/loss, cell function, cancer promotion/prevention etc). I'd put this stuff on the same level as any mass-produced junk (HFCS, seed oils, etc) that has already been proven to be harmful to humans long-term as a cautious default.

Seed oils being unhealthy is quackery. https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-... They improve health outcomes when put to the test, especially when replacing saturated fat.

The problem with all processed oils is that all the fiber and the rest have been striped away, leaving only the extremely calorie dense oil. Processed oil like that takes up so little space in the stomach that's not filling, making it easy to eat too much food overall. At least in the US, this is compounded by so many processed foods having added oil as a primary ingredient or a cheap filler.

The healthiest way to ingest seed oils is undoubtedly to eat some seeds.

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

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soon it will only be cheaper if you're completely discounting the price paid to the ecosystem. In fact with a full accounting I'd wager it's already cheaper. How many unique species that evolved over tens of millions of years have been lost forever, in the last 50 years alone, due to clear-cutting in Brazil? How much clean water and topsoil has been polluted and washed away? How much carbon has been released? How muc…

> I really don't know how one can be so flippant about this. Easy -- think for yourself! Easier to get rid of all the useless eaters. Are you sure that doesn't include you?

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN