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

bbc.co.uk

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

#301

Post by yamtaddle »

pfdietz wrote: post #138
bovermyer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in favor of banning GMOs, incidentally. The part of the-company-formerly-known-as-Monsanto I take issue with is their predatory practices, like suing farmers for inadvertently cross-pollinating their crops from Monsanto-copyrighted seeds from a neighboring farmer's fields.

You're being a useful fool here, repeating that outright lie, which has been well debunked even here on HN. The scoundrels committing this blood libel against Monsanto and GMOs count on people like you to propagate their poison.

> The scoundrels committing this blood libel against Monsanto and GMOs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel

Ahem. Dafuq?

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

#302

Post by kibwen »

CalRobert wrote: post #261
bluGill wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we made it possible to get to a lot more things in our cities than you can by walking, and enjoy a lot more space. A walk only city is not a pleasant place to live. Your counter to the above should be building more transit. However in the English speaking world we are incompetent in that these decades, and we refuse to learn from anyone else.

Transit, and bicycle infra. But sadly you're not wrong regarding incompetence in the English speaking world, which is why I'm visiting Freiburg in a week to help decide whether to move there or Utrecht.

In contrast, I'll be visiting Amsterdam in a week to help understand how I might bring that culture of human-friendly infrastructure back to America. There are plenty of people in the English-speaking world working to fix the problems that our forebears created.

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

#303

Post by eimrine »

illiarian wrote: post #196
eimrine wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the same "reasoning" that ultimately led to ban on most GMO foods like actual long-term tasty tomatos. Long-term tasty tomatos are a good thing but what about impossibility to breed my own tomato seeds if GMO will win 100% of the market?

> Long-term tasty tomatos are a good thing but what about impossibility to breed my own tomato seeds if GMO will win 100% of the market? That is a great question and a very valid concern. Because there are two things at odds with each other: - We don't really want GMO plants (or even animals and fish) to interbreed with non-GMP plants/animals because wide-spread effects on the ecosystem could be disastrous. We've liv…

You are talking some decent ideas but I do not agree on the Heracleum mantegazzianum point (we use to call it borschevik).

1. Any invasive specie known today is about transporting an organism, evolutionally willing to live from one place to another. GMO organism aren't evolutionally willing to live, they just genetically willing to give us better tomatoes.

2. Absence of non-GMO is not a problem at all if I still have an access to bleeding-edge reproductionable seeds as it happens today. The problem is in patent system, what if the cost of bleeding-edge seeds will be costing so much that small farmers with expensive and not yummy non-GMO will be out of market? Have you seen any vegetable before selection? Nobody needs the corn with few grains while we use to have a corn with few hundrends of grains. Even the most green-headed crackpot on the planet will not grow that in 21th century.

3. I do not believe that all plants harvested from GMO are _really_ sterile. Since they use to have a reproductive system so all kinds of mutations are possible if something with CRISPR/Cas9 goes wrong. And there are some experiments with attempt to spread some modified genes to something like all the malary mosquitoes [1] . There are some GMO even among humans, and that humans are not sterile [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31095529

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair

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

#304

Post by ChrisRR »

dangwhy wrote: post #135
epolanski wrote: post #47

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'

I would hardly use the US as the shining example of a fair democracy

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

#305

Post by ChrisRR »

dangwhy wrote: post #193
krastanov wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> riling up your voter base But where did you get that this happened in italy . I didn't see that in the bbc article.

The title?

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

#306

Post by xdennis »

burkaman wrote: post #165
nashashmi wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man plans. God laughs. I'm calling Bs on the whole cow industry being bad for the planet because of their bodily functions. Any cows, any animals, any living creatures are never going to be bad for the planet. There is more resource consumption and harm in transferring the livestock as meat and farming livestock than there is in the methane gas. And lab grown meat is not going to change that.

It's not just their bodily functions (which are very significant despite your feelings), it's the enormous amount of land we clearcut and leave basically empty so they can graze. Also, it's not about the planet, it's about us. The planet obviously will be fine, but a lot of humans won't be.

> it's the enormous amount of land we clearcut and leave basically empty so they can graze.

This is typical vegan misinformation to appeal to people who are concerned about global warming (as we should).

Land that's used for grazing is typically land which can't be used for other purposes. People don't grow grass on flat fields of black soil because it doesn't make economic sense.

Additionally, animals are also fed the leftovers that people don't eat. That is, when you grow corn, we eat the grain, and the rest of the plant (leaves and all) is given to animals. Without livestock that food would just be wasted.

These are just some of the many ways vegans mislead.

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

#307

Post by beepbooptheory »

yamtaddle wrote: post #295
beepbooptheory wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that obvious? At least in the U.S., there is a pretty high chance that nonrenewables are charging your battery.

It's pretty fucking obvious that more electric cars will mean, overall, less gasoline and oil use, yes.

[flagged]

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

#308

Post by est31 »

nforgerit wrote: post #181
gpderetta wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People did elect both Berlusconi and the current government.

Germans also did elect Hitler's party as a majority in the last couple of elections before he assumed power. That's not the point. The point is that some stakeholders of the political class worked on hollowing out the Italian political system for 2-3 decades. And corruption is an issue in economical growth.

Neither NSDAP nor Hitler as an individual ever got a majority in a free federal-level election. Hitler lost to Hindenburg in a presidential election 1932. In the Reichstag parliament election of March 1933, which was shortly after Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg, and which one can't really call free at this point due to violent suppression of the political left, the NSDAP still only got 43% of votes. They only got a majority of seats after they managed to remove the KPD seats through violence and arrests, and then quickly made a vote to make the Reichstag irrelevant for making new laws (with help of other parties as they needed a two-thirds majority).

But yes, they were met with little enough resistance from the conservative establishment that they could execute their power grab.

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

#309

Post by ihateyouall123 »

9dev wrote: post #63
nemo44x wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not Italian but think it’s a step in the right direction, but overreaches. I think they should make it law that synthetic meat can’t be called “meat” and that insect ‘flour’ can’t be called “flour”. And should have to be prefaced with “unnatural food product” or similar on all sides of packaging.

This whole insect flour debate is so braindead. We have billions of people to feed. Dried and shredded insects provide a great protein yield, can be produced incredibly efficient, and aren’t as destructive to the planet as lifestock. Many cultures have been consuming insects for ages. There is nothing unsafe, unnatural, or otherwise „bad“ about using insects for food - other than an embarrassing, unreflective revulsi…

You are delusionally ignoring that the issue is with calling blended animal protein a flour.

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

#310

Post by xdennis »

bratbag wrote: post #241
stametseater wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There is if no threat exists. Then it just becomes a ridiculous performance to suck in the gullible.

Lab food presents itself as non threatening because it's not generally accepted. But if it gains a significant majority the vegans will be calling for natural meat to be banned. It's best to stop it before it gains a foothold.
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