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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

#291

Post by eloff »

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…

When this technology finally gets there, and I see no reason to think it won't eventually, it will change the world so dramatically. The amount of land and water we won't need to raise animals or food for animals it's staggering. The amount of meat the world consumes will double by the end of the century (will it? I made that up). As the world gets richer, people eat more meat. Combine that with a rising population and the amount of land we need for livestock dwarfs the remaining agricultural land we'll need (again, I made that up, but it could be true.)

We could rewild huge parts of the Earth, returning the habitat to nature.

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

#292

Post by toasteros »

abfan1127 wrote: post #277
Guest9081239812 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, but we send people down into deep pits to dig them up with very little regard for their wellbeing.

There's an amount of suffering "required" for the production of both of these things. A diamond itself is not screaming in agony as we prepare it for use, but there's a human cost involved.

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

#293

Post by species9606 »

epgui wrote: post #179
zenburnmyface wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s call FBS, and it can be grown in a lab, too (if it’s even required…). See companies like Future Fields.

In practice, artificial FBS or FBS-free medium can be very tricky to use successfully. It's definitely not a solved problem yet.

It is a solved problem, UPSIDE (and I believe one other company) now have animal-component-free medium.

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

#294

Post by asdff »

dqv wrote: post #239
mikewarot wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've seen this argument get eaten, partialy digested, spit back up, then go through 3 compartments of a stomach and it still doesn't make sense when you actually think about it. If the intent is actual sustainability, then they have to be given their full 20 years to live. The cattle themselves act as carbon sinks too and have to be part of the whole ecosystem, not only exposed to one part of it. If you're constantly…

The ecological role idea is interesting. The great plains for instance used to support some 30 million bison that native populations would harvest from. There is an ecological role for ruminants in this case in these regions. Today the great planes have 16 million cattle (1), and one could argue this remains a good area for ruminants to graze.

1. https://agrilifetoday.tamu.edu/2021/04/29/great-plains-grass...

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

#295

Post by EL_Loco »

yafbum wrote: post #262
markstos wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There down in Brazil, rainforest are being cut down at alarming rate in service to animal agriculture. It will be easier to preserve the Brazilian rainforests if there was some other way to grow meat that didn't involve huge grazing pastures for animals.

I don't think deforestation is for pasture? I thought it was for animal feed crops like soy

It's done to renovate or create grazing land too.

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

#296

Post by dudeofea »

blargey wrote: post #272
dudeofea wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The source of potato blight is from the genetic similarity of the potatoes grown, as potatoes clone themselves when grown from potato seed (small potatoes) rather than "true" potato seeds, from their flowers. They are naturally selected, then naturally cloned en masse.

Lab grown meat will have the same problem assuming the cells have little to no genetic diversity. Even if grown in a sterile environment, they could become susceptible to a blight-like organism (virus, bacteria, fungus, etc) once on grocery store shelves.

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

#297

Post by aendruk »

delecti wrote: post #278
aendruk wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The charitable interpretation would be the on-topic one.

  > > > FDA: First-generation cultured meat is not illegal.
  > > I’m excited to taste mammoth!
  > This technology is still too young for that.

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

#298

Post by asdff »

markstos wrote: post #282
i_am_proteus wrote: post #183

Maybe some folks will enjoy this as a food product. 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 headache…

There's a chart here with the carbon footprint of protein sources. Nuts, Peas, Beans and Tofu come out ahead of fish, eggs, chicken, pork, cheese, shrimp and beef (the worst): https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat#:~:... .

Chicken costs could be lowered a lot for example, since you can use them as pest control for your garden, compost from their waste, etc

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

#299

Post by EL_Loco »

kikokikokiko wrote: post #95
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…

"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…

Is that how chickens are raised in big farms here in Brazil too? It's funny how I hear some people say they'll never eat lab meat and it will never taste as good as meat from an animal, and then they sit there drinking their Coke or their Pepsi because they don't like fruit juice.

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

#300

Post by ars »

eloff wrote: post #291
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…

When this technology finally gets there, and I see no reason to think it won't eventually, it will change the world so dramatically. The amount of land and water we won't need to raise animals or food for animals it's staggering. The amount of meat the world consumes will double by the end of the century (will it? I made that up). As the world gets richer, people eat more meat. Combine that with a rising population a…

Only if it's cheaper.

They said the same thing about plant based meat - and it hasn't because it's more expensive.

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