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Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

smithsonianmag.com

351–360 of 493 posts

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

#351
post #291

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…

I doubt it, considering the demographic problems and the end of globalization, we’re likely to see about two billion people starve in most of our lifetimes, mostly in East Asia. It’s going to be a rough ride.

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

#352
post #8

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

Do you have ANY idea what goes on in a meatpacking plant? Let's just say, the large intestine doesn't exactly stay pristine in the process, and I doubt they clean everything like you think they do.

It’s gross but we use heat to make it safe to eat. The contamination does not migrate into the meat for the most part just the outsides. With lab grown you could potentially contaminate an inner surface or induce some other contamination that’s not exposed to heat from a grill. Anyway after a decade or so we will probably know what the risks are and of contamination of that nature is likely or possible in the process. Seems like lab grown hot dogs might be a good place to start for example.

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

#353
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a certain point of view lab grown meat is a high risk yolo solution. Animals have a highly effective immune system pumping out hunter killer nano bots to actively fight off invasive microorganisms, lab grown meat doesn’t. Similarly it’s far easier to tell of an animal is extremely infected.

If anything, it seems it would be easier to monitor lab-grown meats for chemical byproducts of harmful microorganisms.

That assumes quite a bit, noticing a cow died is dead simple. Building, validating, using, and monitoring a system to detect harmful byproducts has a rather high threshold by comparison.

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

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We could rewild huge parts of the Earth Probably not without radically changing how we grow plants for human consumption, assuming we still eat plants and don't move to an all-meat diet. Looking over the data for the area I farm, according to government figures, 36% of the cropland is used for animal food. Most farmers here grow a rotation of soybeans, corn, edible beans, and wheat. The edible beans and wheat are i…

Soybeans are crushed, meaning the oil and protein are separated. The major crushers are ADM, Bunge, and Cargill. The protein is then toasted into flakes for better animal digestion, and sold to milling operations of meat producers (e.g Smithfield foods). The oil is sold to consumers as soybean oil in most of the world, and marketed as vegetable oil in the US. Hunt-Wesson is the biggest soybean oil buyer in the US. Yo…

> Soybeans are crushed ... The oil is sold to consumers as soybean oil in most of the world, and marketed as vegetable oil in the US.

That's the 40% I referred to. Crushers, while generally less profitable, are a better fit for my poorer ground. I lumped this in as animal food to keep things simple, but you're right that there is also human uses. You could write books about the subject if you want to capture all the details and nuance.

The 60% are food grade (IP) soybeans, which generally end up as things like tofu, soy milk, along with other foods where the soybean seeds are eaten whole (more common in Asian countries). I was growing 100% IP soybeans for a while, but as mentioned before wasn't having much luck on my poor ground so had to introduce some less resource intensive crushers into the mix to keep things sustainable.

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

#356

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…

What makes you think a human optimized process specifically designed to be simpler/faster/tastier than slaughter won't be? The whole reason it's getting research and work done on it is for the reasons you claim are important, so how are you reaching the conclusion that it's somehow worse?

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

#358
post #304
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eventually shifting public opinion, and growing the subsection of people who "mind killing" seems like a major upside.

Everything you eat requires killing. We are only weird about killing for meat because as conscious life we are biased towards conscious life. Meanwhile, we don't blink an eye if we take down an entire field of corn, or even take town an entire forest to grow that field of midwestern corn, because its unconcious life and not valued by our moral principles. The secret is to just treat things with respect. You can be re…

I'm no vegetarian by any means, but equating the life of corn to the life of a relatively intelligent animal like a pig is really, really disingenuous

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

#359
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…

An obvious difference is that animals require extraordinary amounts of land to live on and lots of food that needs land to be planted on which necessitates a very significant amount of deforestation, something that will not be needed for a lab

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

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soybeans are crushed, meaning the oil and protein are separated. The major crushers are ADM, Bunge, and Cargill. The protein is then toasted into flakes for better animal digestion, and sold to milling operations of meat producers (e.g Smithfield foods). The oil is sold to consumers as soybean oil in most of the world, and marketed as vegetable oil in the US. Hunt-Wesson is the biggest soybean oil buyer in the US. Yo…

> Soybeans are crushed ... The oil is sold to consumers as soybean oil in most of the world, and marketed as vegetable oil in the US. That's the 40% I referred to. Crushers, while generally less profitable, are a better fit for my poorer ground. I lumped this in as animal food to keep things simple, but you're right that there is also human uses. You could write books about the subject if you want to capture all the…

Ah interesting. I’ve never known anyone who grows IP beans because the farmers I know are in NC which is a meat state.

Are IP beans kept moist or sold dry?

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