Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells

Post by toiletfuneral » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 11:23 PM UTC

andrewla wrote: post #145

toiletfuneral wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait till you find out how unnatural most meat is. Its totally full or hormones and ammonia...And just to get ahead of the inevitable response, no, the vast majority of consumers do not buy grass fed / free range / whatever. Its a dodge and impossible to scale to current consumption levels based on land availability.

I mean, the animals that the meat is made from are living creatures, capable of reproduction and all the usual functions of those animals. We have not been able to shortcut biology in this regard; we are just working on the fringes of natural variability. In other words, the fact that we have biological systems that are achievable by breeding natural stock is a backstop against producing "food" that did not co-evolve…

Post by WillPostForFood » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 11:35 PM UTC

Daishiman wrote: post #108

WillPostForFood wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems non-obvious. How many salmon are farmed vs wild right now? Salmon is already protected and very expensive, so what's the potential for increase in wild population? 2x? 10x? And there would still be demand for "the real thing".

Farmed salmon incurs a heavy cost to the environment that surrounds said farms. Demand for real salmon will still be around but it will be a rare delicacy, which is totally OK.

Post by cheese_please » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 11:38 PM UTC

andrewla wrote: post #147

cheese_please wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I definitely understand your concern, I also think we can see this as a fascinating opportunity to improve the nutritional value of meat. These muscle cells in culture will generally speaking continue to produce the proteins, ECM components, etc. that they normally do, but we can also take advantage of genetic manipulation, metabolic engineering, and nutrition engineering to make them achieve more. A paper came…

All due respect, I do not feel like you understand my concern. "Improving the nutritional value" is exactly what I am railing against. The idea that we understand human nutrition in any quantitative way is not realistic. It involves attempting to reduce complex systems to a small set of things that we can understand (making the system more "legible") is dangerous and represents a huge failure of what James C. Scott c…

Post by dukeofdoom » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 12:57 AM UTC

tsherr wrote: post #152

dukeofdoom wrote: post #53

Is it worse to kill something for food, or deny it from ever living? I think personally I think I would prefer to have lived and be killed than not lived at all. I also kind of believe that things have an essence, a soul of sorts. So eating any part of an animal is still repulsive on some level.

Why don't plants fall into your "things that have an essence" category? They are alive. They communicate and work together.

Post by dukeofdoom » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:13 AM UTC

lee wrote: post #77

dukeofdoom wrote: post #53

Is it worse to kill something for food, or deny it from ever living? I think personally I think I would prefer to have lived and be killed than not lived at all. I also kind of believe that things have an essence, a soul of sorts. So eating any part of an animal is still repulsive on some level.

What is "it" from ever living. An stack of lumber does not make a table. The table doesn't exist until the wood is configured as such. If this salmon meat is grown by replicating cells, then there was no "life" that was denied. Your statement would imply that it "existed" somehow before it came into some physical form.