Live data from Hacker News

Is Cultivated Meat for Real?

asteriskmag.com

51–60 of 78 posts

Re: Is Cultivated Meat for Real?

#51
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make Tempeh at home: the colonisation is ~24/72h. Super nutritious and if well cooked strong umami taste like wild/farm meat, compared to sweetysweet nugget.

Soy products contain high levels of plant-based estrogen, not something you want to pump your body with continuously. Or does the process of creating Tempeh somehow removes/inactivates this?

My understanding is there isn't much evidence of a link between soy an almost anything positive or negative (unless you have an allergy). "Plant estrogen" is different enough from human estrogen to be at most a weak form of the same.

Consider for example that it's highly popular in China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, and Japan has one of the highest life expectancies, second only to an autonomous region of China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

Re: Is Cultivated Meat for Real?

#52
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make Tempeh at home: the colonisation is ~24/72h. Super nutritious and if well cooked strong umami taste like wild/farm meat, compared to sweetysweet nugget.

Soy products contain high levels of plant-based estrogen, not something you want to pump your body with continuously. Or does the process of creating Tempeh somehow removes/inactivates this?

They do, but are mostly armless if consumed reasonably: don’t eat the same meal every meal!

A sheep got complications in the 40´s although no strong adverse effect have been found off human despite many studies and big consumption in Asia since a long time : 40mg/d in Japan/China while 3mg/d in EU/US (1): you may safely x13 your soy consumption if you live in the west.

Don’t worry either if you’re a men, you’ll be just fine (2)

1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002231662...

2 https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(09)00966-2/full...

Post scriptum: you can make Tempe with a variety of grains, not only soy.

Re: Is Cultivated Meat for Real?

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the hell does Israel do this?

Billions in foreign aid certainly helps

Regardless if there is voluntary long-term adoption of such technologies by a relatively free market vs. regulatory capture that leads politicians to arguably poorly-wastefully investing in technologies and companies pulling from the public coffers politicians have been entrusted with protecting; instead of the company and their technology, their offerings, gaining "votes" by consumers one-to-one buying the products, giving them profits and building more competent investors' confidence that the startup/technology is a actually good bet; of course the VC industrial complex has the whole hype up process for pump and dump, onto the public markets, so end consumers may become invested into bad investments if their stock broker and them aren't aligned properly incentives wise.

There's already a battle between mass produced and arguably unethical-inhumane living conditions/processes of the chicken industrial complex vs. small-organic farm raised chickens [of which overall arguably is losing and will remain suppressed even if it's what consumers prefer due to things like economies of scale and government subsidies that stack in favour to industrial complexes], and so adding a cultured "meat" into the food industrial complex landscape becomes more of a competitive battle between the existing handful of centralized incumbents and this new method of producing "food" [whether healthy or not] - which has the lowest manufacturing-distribution costs, and is policy structured to allow the general-mass population of people to have enough money to afford more than what is the cheapest.

There is also arguably a war within this industry, and perhaps foreign bad actors who may also be attempting to destroy our food production hoping for various outcomes, whether causing a reduction in supply and so an increase in price-profits, or other; I'll let your own creativity and imagination take you there, extrapolate further if you're connected to and spent much time already integrating the shadow.

P.S. The above of course isn't specific to Israel, many, if not most governments seem to do this to various degrees to "support" industrial complexes.

Re: Is Cultivated Meat for Real?

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most environmentally friendly is to not eat meat.

If you continue this ad absurdum, the only logical step would be to perform a variant of seppuku. I see relatively little sepukkus performed around me.

Your morbid sarcasm does not add anything to this conversation. GP doesn’t bring arguments neither but at least stays courteous.

Re: Is Cultivated Meat for Real?

#55

The idea of cultured meat sounds wonderful. Its real meat, but without the guilt. But there is the cold reality of enshittification and the numerous sketchy practices of the industrial food industry. So one has to make a choice: the traditional "Iowa" meat industrial complex or the new "valley bro" meat industrial one? For now at least I feel safer with the former.

For the sake of completeness : one also have the choice to not eating meat, with sub choices of various nutriments sources from wholegrain to heavily industrial processed stuff.

[dead]

Re: Is Cultivated Meat for Real?

#56
post #50

I like thinking about space colonization. Whether it be a the first colony on Mars or a robust space station orbiting Jupiter, what do you think their food is like? Do you think they have farms growing cows and pigs and dogs? Or do they have a bioreactor that uses substantially less water and organic inputs to output whatever meat they want without fear of zoonotic diseases and PETA? I'm willing to bet Star Trek ring…

I'm doubtful of any future space colonization, but given likely resource constraints, any sort of meat would be a serious luxury. As far as I know, plants are far and away the most efficient way we have of converting energy into a format compatible with human metabolism (though now that I type that out, I wonder how plausible creating synthetic carbohydrates from in-situ resources might be).

Re: Is Cultivated Meat for Real?

#57
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make Tempeh at home: the colonisation is ~24/72h. Super nutritious and if well cooked strong umami taste like wild/farm meat, compared to sweetysweet nugget.

Soy products contain high levels of plant-based estrogen, not something you want to pump your body with continuously. Or does the process of creating Tempeh somehow removes/inactivates this?

[deleted]

Re: Is Cultivated Meat for Real?

#58
post #39
post #32

I'm not convinced lab grown meat will ever be economical because real meat is subsidized, but not in the way you think (ie government subsidies). If you think about the Earth, it receives a large amount of solar energy. While it makes the world habitable it does a lot of other things. A big one is that the Earth stores this energy in various ways. Plants are an example of this. Photosynthesizing plants, in particular…

There’s not enough land for cows eating grass to make enough meat to satisfy humanity. Net result you get feedlots where cows consume the majority of the calories in their lifetime from optimized crops. That involves a great deal of labor and 80% of global agricultural land, but results in more meat from the same land. The ~10 billion people in 2060 who will on average be better off than we are today are going to wan…

The land requirement for cows you refer to is probably the US-centric one. That's not universal. For example, Australian cattle pretty much roams arid land not suitable for crop production. The food is supplemented but still the carbon footprint of Australian cattle is very different to US cattle.

My main point is that if we ignore the tragedy of the commons of land use (which we do), the energy cost of growing a cow is largely free.

Lab grown meat requires probably a sterile environment and you'll be paying for that energy. Where is that energy coming from? What is the footprint of that? Now maybe that density of lab meat production is really high but I'd be surprised. Large herbivores can gain hundresd of pounds a year just grazing.

I do believe in the future of industrial farming. I just don't think it'll be meat. It's more likely automated greenhouses of likely hydroponics. It's entirely feasible that this way can easily support a trillion people on EArth [1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzVxdmC8c-g

Re: Is Cultivated Meat for Real?

#59
post #3

I sincerely hope not. I have incisor teeth passed down to me from generation upon generation of my previous kin all the way back to my stoneage ancestors. Incisors are specifically designed for tearing and ripping meat. I eat real meat!

Oh, yes, look at the incisors on a rabbit for instance. Huge, clearly rabbits are terrifying predators.

Re: Is Cultivated Meat for Real?

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Animals are part of this thing called the cycle of life that has been going on since near the beginning of the earth and will go on long after humanity has faded to dust. Being eaten is normal, it's part of how ecosystems are regulated, and everything dies anyhow so why not be a meal on the way out so that something else can live. If you want to direct your rage somewhere, direct it at the people who force these anim…

True, but I hoped we could become more than animals in the future.

Why? I like food and sex and raising my children. I _am_ an animal, even if I have mastered fire and language and agriculture.
Post reply on HN