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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

#421

Post by hitpointdrew »

lofatdairy wrote: post #329
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…

>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 I'm not entirely convinced by this argument. A lot of the ecological arguments against meat-eating is because cattle grazing requires huge swaths of land. Current practices generate this lan…

> I'm not entirely convinced by this argument.

It’s been proven by Allen Savory and others, you can check his Ted talk here https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI

Even if lab grown meat is the next best thing since sliced bread it would be a complete climate disaster to not continue, and expand, holistic cattle farming.

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

#422

Post by puglr »

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…

I am an avid carnivore that hopes to consume only lab grown meat in the future. I've met many people like me. You may be underestimating the size of this group.

That said, like many others in these comments, I'll be waiting at least 10 years to understand the long term effects, if any.

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

#424

Post by sokoloff »

LtWorf wrote: post #416
sokoloff wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They recommend 145°F, which is medium-well. Experiential outcomes suggest pretty strongly to me that forcing all steak to be cooked medium-well or greater is wildly overly conservative.

> Experiential outcomes suggest pretty strongly to me that forcing all steak to be cooked medium-well or greater is wildly overly conservative. Do you mean you grew coltures of bacteria from various levels of cooking and compared? Was this work peer reviewed?

I do not mean that. (That would be experimental rather than experiential.)

Order of magnitude, ~15% of beef consumed is quality steak cuts. US residents on average eats 67 pounds of beef (so 10 pounds of steak) per year. If eating steak cooked less than medium-well was dangerous in a practical/meaningful sense, it would be common knowledge (based on lived experience) that steak should be catastrophically over-cooked as a food safety measure.

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

#425

Post by asdff »

skeaker wrote: post #358
asdff wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But why is it disingenuous? Both are masses of living cells. Both die after damage or neglect. I'm just highlighting our species' biases. My cat for example is intelligent but has no such biases, eating rodents, insects, and catgrass with the same violent gusto. I'm just pointing out its a bit of a human fallacy to label some organisms as off limits and others for our harvesting, when no other forms of life do this.

It's best to be aware of this bias so you can treat these other ecologically important organisms with similar respect we reserve for intelligent life. Conservation efforts for example are often more successful if the animal is perceived as cute, which is kind of sad. I'm not saying don't cut down that corn field for harvest, chop it all, but be aware of what these and other behaviors of the farmer are doing to the rest of the organisms in the area, such as native flora, or microbial life that in turn contributes to your corn yields.

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

#426

Post by dudeofea »

ben_w wrote: post #385
dudeofea wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> Lab grown meat will have the same problem assuming the cells have little to no genetic diversity. I know it isn't on quite the same scale as literally cloning the cells, but livestock isn't a very deep gene pool. Lots of selective breeding, by the same mindset that gave european nobility weak chins.

I agree. Lab grown meat seems like a further step towards the preexisting industrialization of meat.

Removing the sentience from cows does reduce animal suffering, though I wonder if other things couldn't be done to preserve genetic diversity. Like maybe breeding oysters without ganglia, as they are barely alive to begin with. Farmed oysters are also better for the environment than wild ones.

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

#427

Post by i_am_proteus »

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#:~:... .

Those things don't convert cereal grains into the protein that humans need. Poultry, eggs, cheeses are good ways to do that. Crops can't just be substituted for each other.

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

#428

Post by asdff »

bobobob420 wrote: post #344
asdff wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

?? We are not carnivores. We are literally some line between herbivores and omnivores. Carnivores have to kill or they will most likely starve to death. Vegtables and fruits are the natural foods of earth for herbivores and omnivores and some carnivores. You are not killing when you eat plants and fruits. Fruits and vegtables want to be eaten for their seeds to spread. It is not a question of concious vs unconcious.…

You are killing when you eat plants and fruits. Are you foraging in the woods for these things? Or are you buying them from the supermarket, from an orchard where the farmer killed a thousand acres of native flora and all the fauna dependent on that flora to grow these fruits and nuts fit for shipping across a continent?

Everything has a cost, and we should be conscious of them so we can work on mitigating them, no matter if the cost is to intelligent or unintelligent life. Most of the biomass on earth comes from unintelligent life.

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

#429

Post by i_am_proteus »

xyclos wrote: post #192
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…

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

Whether it's oxen in a slaughterhouse, deer pierced by a hunters' arrows, or herds that die off because their grazing lands get taken for crops, animal lives are sacrificed so that more humans can live.

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

#430

Post by solraph »

cloverich wrote: post #415
flenserboy wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Meat", at best. Yes, muscle cells in a matrix. The problem will be getting the rest of the structure to be there, and to grow properly, such as connective tissues and fats, and to get the same amounts of minerals and other nutrients into the "meat" as an animal does. Meat, as a food, is much more than a clump of muscle cells. Then there are the costs to do this properly (packaging the correct nutrients in bioavailab…

> The problem will be getting the rest of the structure to be there I would guess if they can handle real actual meat, they can handle fat and nutrients which would seemingly be the easy part. If not would it be any different than today's vegetarians which just take supplements? > letting a cow loose in a pasture to do what it does. Are most cows pasture raised? I think most are raised on feed farms; I think antibiot…

> Are most cows pasture raised? I think most are raised on feed farms.

This is very much dependant on the country. For example, New Zealand beef is about 96% pasture fed, Australia is about 66% pasture fed, and Brazil seems to be about 90% pasture fed.

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