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

bbc.co.uk

341–350 of 474 posts

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

#341
post #110
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the same reasoning factory farms that feed cows with grain, not grass, should be banned, as it very significantly alter meat nutrition.

Many individuals remain skeptical about the concept of evolutionary nutritional adaptation, arguing that our bodies have not adequately adapted to a variety of modern foods and additives. Indeed, there is mounting evidence suggesting that ultra-processed foods can have negative impacts on our health. In the ongoing debate surrounding breast milk and baby formula, the majority continues to favor breast milk as the opt…

Coevolving with meat didn't stop saturated fat from raising our rate of cardiovascular disease.

Due to antagonistic pleiotropy and short term reproductive selection you could even argue that novel foods have an advantage over the foods we've "adapted to" since our bodies never learned to make short term trade-offs with those foods.

Those skeptics should also be skeptical of the naturalistic fallacy.

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

#342
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But shouldn’t be called “flour”. It’s not. the definition of flour is "ground substances," see also bone flour, fossilized flour, stone flour...

You know very well that the purpose of calling it "insect flour" is to mislead and to normalize it. Nobody cares about "stone flour" etc because it not sold as flour on a shelf next to real flour. It's not intended to mislead.

There is absolutely nothing misleading about the phrase "insect flour". And people are allowed to try to normalize things. See "part of a balanced breakfast" from cereal commercials.

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I am not vegan and I don't understand why you brought them up. I am not even arguing for vegetarianism, if we all just replaced beef with pork that would be a huge improvement.

Most deforestation of the Amazon is done to create more land for cattle, to give you one example. It is by far the largest driver of tropical deforestation, and almost all global deforestation is tropical. Grazing land that can't support anything else is by definition not included in statistics on deforestation or loss of biomass and biodiversity.

https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-drivers-deforestation

It's true that a lot of cow feed is stuff humans won't eat, but it's not true that it would all be wasted if we stop raising cows. We can grow less of it, we can throw the scraps in anaerobic digesters to generate power, we can simply feed it to other animals, as a last resort we can use it for compost.

I'm pretty sure vegans are less than 1% of the world, and I don't think they have some special influence over the IPCC and most climate scientists on the planet.

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

#344

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'

Believing in tightening immigration controls is a matter of policy that people can reasonably disagree on. "I'm going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" takes that policy and makes it populist vote-grabbing.

Likewise, there's plenty to be said about standards for food safety and quality, but legislating against lab-grown meat serves no practical purpose right now (it may in the future), other than pure political grandstanding.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power plants are more efficient than engines crammed within the trunk of a car. They have no limitations in space and weight and so you can do fancy things like heat recovery (you use the exhaust to pre-heat your fuel mix or reuse said heat for nearby industries), always have the combustion chamber at the best temperature for efficiency, ... . Plus, you can install much better filtration systems for combustion byprod…

Got it, that all makes sense. I know its certainly got to be an improvement, I guess I just thought it was more qualified an improvement than it is! Even if still highly tied to geography I guess. We should definitely take what improvements we can get! (Also, sorry for injecting stupidity into the discourse in general. I didn't mean to anger people or say something wrong.)

No problem. I am actually happy you asked instead of remaining convinced of your ideas.

I think if you and others ask these questions it means that there's room for improvement in how we should discuss EVs and renewables!

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

#346
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not an abomination to eat natural food. Any carnivore/omnivore would eat a cow if it could. If the cow could speak, I believe their opinion would be otherwise. Humans don't generally appreciate it when lions, tigers, and bears beat them to the top of the food chain. Perfectly natural, that hypocrisy; as natural as your face being eaten by leopards. > The fact that you perceive something natural as an abominati…

> If the cow could speak, I believe their opinion would be otherwise. Except cows... Don't speak? That's kind of the whole point. We can't apply human value judgements to other species that work in a fundamentally different way. > Humans don't generally appreciate it when lions, tigers, and bears beat them to the top of the food chain. It's safe to say no carnivore/omnivore denies that animals suffer. And I'd bet mos…

> It's just not a deal breaker, seeing as it's outweighed by many benefits.

Obviously so.

You'll note I said "vegetarian" above rather than "vegan", despite the reasons (I could quote PETA but I won't bother) that milk itself can be well described as an abomination.

Thing is though, as we become better artisans, the comparative benefits of "natural" over artificial are ever reduced.

The ban proposed in the link reminds me of the early years of motorcars, when they were limited to a few miles per hour lest they scare the horses.

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

#347
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's deeply unpopular why is it so threatening Because of who is behind the unpopular thing, and who has power to make (thing) happen. Nuclear weapons are also deeply unpopular. > Won't the market quickly show that "bugs and lab-grown abominations" can't stand? The market won't have a say when bureaucrats pass a law mandating every burger or sausage should contain a % of lab-grown meat, with the % increasing eve…

> If there's anything the recent years have showed is that slippery slope isn't a fallacy. What are you referring to?

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

#348
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The animals robbed of their life entirely for that major part of yours would like to have a word with you. It's not like meat is the only thing tasty or joyful in life.

Food is tasty and no amount of your religious preaching is going to change that.

No, I know that. A steak is one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten, for sure.

But I still have self control, I don't have do do anything that feels good. I just don't want something sentient to die for my dinner, that's all it is.

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

#349
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.

Europeans are always going on about how their right wing is to the left of America's left wing (as if any American should care).

So when I hear "soandso European is far-right!" then shouldn't I be forgiven for thinking, "well, then it's no big deal."

If Mussolini III is indeed to the left of Joe Biden (as they keep telling me over and over and over and over and over) then...nothing to worry about, right?

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

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't think slavery and economics had a lot to do with the American Civil War, think again.

Pretty sure that OP was being sarcastic.

My bad for forgetting Poe's law, again.
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