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Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage

bbc.co.uk

151–160 of 474 posts

Re: Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage

#151
A small reminder, that it does not cut the mustard in regards to climate protection, if we save guard any kind of meat consumption: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impacts_of_ani...

Besides that, lab-grown meat is still what I consider junk food.

Re: Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage

#152
post #31
post #12

BBC journos have a specific editorial style, and no doubt it influenced this headline, but this isn't to "protect food heritage". Food and drink accounts for a quarter of Italy's GDP. It's about money. Italy has a far-right government, which is extremely open to lobbying from that sector, and "heritage" is aligned with their nationalistic stance. Try to look a bit deeper.

You don't have to be "far right" or "nationalistic" to not want to destroy your economy

If they really wanted to protect the economy they wouldn't be preventing companies from investing in a sector that has huge potential for growth

Re: Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage

#153
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it’s unnatural to begin with. Other good movements like “organic” worked hard for that label and the producers of those products work hard. I don’t believe oat milk should be allowed to use the word “milk” and if it wants to then should be prefaced with words describing it as “imitation milk” or similar.

> unnatural You keep using that word, but you haven't explained what makes it unnatural. There are people who eat insects right now, and I'm willing to bet people have been eating insects as long as there have been people. It seems more "natural" to me than drinking another aninals lactations. I don't want to eat insects, but you've offered no explanation why it is insufficient to list the ingredients (which is alrea…

I’m referring to lab grown meat as unnatural. Insects are just plain gross to me. Although they are natural. But shouldn’t be called “flour”. It’s not.

Re: Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage

#154

This seems no different than the ridiculous laws proposed in some US states recently that would ban EV sales to protect the oil and gas industries. I’m sorry that people could one day lose jobs over this, but if lab-grown meat is proven to be a safe and cost/energy/carbon efficient alternative to raising and killing animals, then it would be insane to not pursue that.

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Re: Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage

#155
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being against Monsanto != being against GMOs.

It's a tactic of enormous dishonesty used by opponents of GMOs.

Conflating the two? Maybe. But here on HN you must assume people understand the difference: that Monsanto is dodgy as a company, but this doesn't generalize to GMOs as a technology.

Re: Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage

#156
post #125
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if lab-grown meat is proven to be a safe We need to fully understand its safety, nutritional content, and long-term health effects. Our understanding of the full biochemical spectrum of our diets is still limited. Therefore, it's important to ensure that lab-grown meat adequately replicates the complex array of nutrients and other beneficial compounds found in conventionally produced meat. Long-term effects: Si…

That’s a wildly misleading take on nutrition. Basically all foods are cells so they contain all the normal cellular machinery like DNA. As long as lab grown meat is just normal animal cells nothing new is going on. Where you need to care about each individual molecule is if we where creating food one molecule at a time via a replicator or something so we could have wildly unusual ratios of these individual components…

> Basically all foods are cells

Modern nutritional ingredients no longer contain only natural substances, and most additives are untested.

"The European Commission is banning titanium dioxide (E171) as a food additive in the EU, starting with a six-month phasing out period as of February 7, 2022, until August 7, 2022, after which a full ban applies. Following the publication of Commission Regulation (EU) 2022/63 in the EU’s Official Journal (OJ) on January 18, 2022, Annex II and III to Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008 on food additives will be amended accordingly. The Regulation also includes a commitment to review the necessity to maintain or delete titanium dioxide (E171) from the EU list of food additives for exclusive use as a color in medicinal products. On November 30, 2021, the Commission had already published Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/2090 in the OJ, denying the authorization of titanium dioxide (E171) as a feed additive for all animal species."

https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/european-union-titanium-dioxid...

in 2000, E171 was considered safe, but now it is not. Generally, it can be concluded that the half-life of food additives' safety is quite short.

Re: Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite a ban on ICEs but nevertheless analog attempts were made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws These laws didn't last long, fortunately, and ostensibly they were to protect cattle, horses and carriage riders but clearly the idea was to slow the car down to the speed of a pedestrian effectively hobbling it to the point that driving a car didn't make sense.

For what it's worth: this would still make sense today. It's insane how modern cities restrict the freedom and safety of people just so that a few people can drive SUVs more resembling a tank than a car in a city. Shit like Rezvani Vengeance should not exist, period. It's insane that the top leader in accidental death of children and adolescents involves automobiles [1]. [1] https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/00191…

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Re: Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage

#158

I have no idea why people on here are so against this. It just reinforces the fact that we're so different. Politically divided. I just want meat. Actual meat from normal animals. I have no idea why this is controversial. I don't get any of it. A solution in search of a problem.

The issue is that mean production has externalities (e.g. climate, labor conditions, environment, biodiversity, animal suffering), some of which we will soon no longer be able to ignore.

We can insist on ignoring the problems for as long as possible but that's still not forever. Eventually we will have to start paying the "real price", which would mean that meat gets a lot more expensive, as it used to be a few hundred years ago. But people will not like paying 3x for meat. They will have to eat less of it or look for alternatives, including insect-based foods. Such alternatives shouldn't be blanket-banned without good reason. (Not that I believe lab mean will be cheaper than animal meat any time soon)

Re: Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no "protection" of anything, this is populist vote-grabbing. Lab-grown meat isn't even a reality and won't be for like a decade at least on supermarket shelves. Also, that's not even the worse of the things introduced by our government yesterday, administrations do not need to publish a public contract for works up to 150k euros. Now every single administration can spend and gift corrupted money left and righ…

> populist vote-grabbing sorry but how is this different from just democracy ? we have democracy here in USA that allows NIMBY homeowners opposing any new development. Is that also just 'populist vote-grabbbing'

Populism is part of democracy and some people even like it. But riling up your voter base to be excited about one bombastic law without (1) considering second order effects or (2) talking about what might be more pressing but unpopular problems, is not something I (and, seemingly, OP) like. And this does not even go into the usual malicious uses of populism.

Re: Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you should do that as well for meat of animals that once lived, perhaps even with images (of the reality of course)

Yes, my butcher does that. When you enter the shop you have a beautiful picture of the cow that was used, as well as where it comes from.

Wouldn't look that beautiful usually (90+% the cases)
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