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Lab-grown meat one step closer to sale in the US
I'm neither a vegetarian nor an EA animal suffering activist, but I consider this largely a good thing. If we can produce lab-grown meat that costs the same or less than traditionally-raised or industrial-produced meat and is equally tasty and nutritious, I see very little reason not to do so. I've tried the various meat substitutes and, frankly, they just don't taste like meat or have the same texture. This isn't to say they aren't tasty in their own way, they just clearly aren't meat. The best ones I've had barely rise to the level of "gas station sausage patty" in terms of flavor and texture. Likewise cutting down on cattle ranching in the US would alleviate a lot of environmental pressure and gives us the opportunity to rebuild healthy habitat for native wildlife populations.
What does give me pause is the further connotative removal of people from food production. A farmer I know has an anecdote about a well-to-do customer who pulled up to his farm stand to buy some produce and was appalled to find potatoes sitting in a pile on a pallet. The farmer swears the customer, without any trace of irony, asked for "potatoes that hadn't been in the dirt". I'm hunt deer and small game and the bulk of my urbanite coworkers normally react to this somewhere on the spectrum between bafflement and outright disgust, all the while munching on ham-and-cheese sandwiches or a fish taco. (I work in a pretty blue area, so that's probably coloring things.) I can see scenarios in which PETA and other animal suffering activist organizations use lab grown meat as an attack surface to further restrict hunting and fishing activities.
I wish the nascent yet-to-prove-it's-viable cultivated meat industry the best of luck, because I am excited about the possibilities of what might happen if they manage to pull it off.
Imagine: celebrity steaks that are actual meat from celebrities! Want a bite of Ryan Gosling? Now you can!
Ever wanted to try panda meat but have obvious ethical and legal barriers? Now you can!
Or: Ever wonder what an alicorn would taste like? Our food artists have combined muscle cells from a horse, an eagle, and a rhinoceros.
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This is an odd mental image, primarily cause I actually work with pallets and drive forklifts.
You don’t usually store small irregular shaped items just loose on a pallet. They’ll roll off and spill everywhere, especially when you try to move it.
You typically store such items in containers of some variety (crates, tubs, bags, etc.) which you then stack on the pallet, or you equip the pallet with a “pallet collar” or “pallet cage”, essentially turning the pallet into a giant crate.
He might have had them in bags or containers sitting on the pallet. Or it might just be an old pallet that he threw down by the roadside and just dumped a heap of spuds on it. Not everybody is very careful about presentation, especially if the potatoes still had clay on them instead of being pre-washed 😁
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shrug I repeat what the farmer told me
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If we could produce meat indistinguishable from the real thing at a competitive cost and scale, I would eat it. This seems a ways off to me from what I've read in the thread so far, with the most viable solutions being mere facsimiles of this. I don't eat the Impossible stuff and the current leading synthetic meat seems unappetizing to me. I want to emphasize that this isn't due to fear of synthetic meat per se, but the idea of replacing genuine meat with an inferior product. If we can make synthetic meat as good as real meat, that's an amazing feat and should be celebrated.
Supposing we manage to do this, I'm mixed about some of the second-order implications. I don't like the centralization of food production that would likely result from this. Also, the potential banning of hunting and fishing as you said, or of consuming actual animals. I'd still want to pursue the lab meat. Making more of something for less time, money, and resources is how the species has avoided its Malthusian limits for so long. Any big advancement brings about issues we couldn't have conceived of before, but the tradeoff has almost always been worth it.
Bioreactors, especially large are supposedly quite tricky to get right. We'll see.
I don't like this on principle. Beef is a commodity. This would be a product, you'd be handing some vultures a monopoly. And then they'd then use activists to increase their profits by banning their competition.
I don’t expect it to be easy, or for them to get it right until at least a few decades are out.
I agree with your concerns. Still, a lot can happen between now and then and I’d hate to reject an amazing breakthrough due to our current dysfunctional relationship with capital and our countrymen.
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I've continually said "I'll become a vegetarian when chicken wings grow on trees."
And I mean it. So if they can match the nutritional profile of the real thing and cost within 50% of it, I will readily switch. Indeed, I'd probably start raising chickens myself to make sure they don't abruptly go extinct due to collapse of demand. Half-joking.
What society may not be ready for and will really have to grapple with is when some really exotic fare becomes available.
Is there literally any real objection to eating 'human' meat that has been lab-grown other than "that's fucking weird, dude." That objection can be sufficient, mind, but ethically speaking I can't find any reason to condemn it. I'd just want to not hang out with the person who made it a part of their daily meals.
I respect that but I believe that ending animal agriculture just means a further separation of man from nature and, in some sense, reality.
Agriculture is, itself, pretty separated from nature, and has only become more so over time (assuming you don't consider the entire notion to be incoherent because humans are a part of nature, and so are the things we do, like how beaver dams are part of nature). If you want to be connected to or part of nature, then hunt and forage.
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Under the right conditions this wouldn't be a negative thing.
Under our current conditions, yeah probably just going to make people become even MORE unmoored.
Hence, raising chickens would be one of those, at the very least, symbolic reminders of where we came from. One of several little reality tethers, if you will.
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There are different kinds of meat alternatives,
Actual lab-grown meat from animal cells, this could theoretically taste close to meat in texture but I suspect the taste will be off for a while. Worse than the taste, we're very far off from producing this at a wide scale.
Growing animal proteins using yeast. This does not taste like meat but can be done cheaply. I believe milk proteins is actually cheaper than dairy farming. I'm excited to see this gain popularity.
Impossible/beyond type of meat substitutes. These usually don't have the same nutrition profile, but they probably taste the closest to meat.
I'm hoping we can combine the yeast technology with the artistic skills from beyond/impossible for something that tastes and nourishes identically. On the other hand, there's something that feels wholesome about eating natural food, even if a ton of suffering goes into it. I do have minor concerns about the level of processing that goes into the beyond/impossible tier foods. Hopefully the lab-grown stuff will one day be economically viable and feel "paleo" enough.
Hmmm not sure 'natural' food is the source of most of the suffering.
The argument would surely be that factory farming is just as unnatural as growing the stuff in a vat, if we compare to the state of nature.
If factory farming is unnatural, is 19th century farming also unnatural? Where do you draw the line? Seems to me you could argue all food, being a product of agriculture, is unnatural, which kind of makes the label pointless.
At the very least, lab-grown meat is a big deviation from the status-quo. I'm not sure it would even count as raw/unprocessed food.
Yes, but I guess that depends on how much you think the "domesticated" animals in question differ from their wilder ancestors.
A lot of the animals we eat were 'bred' for captivity. But not the mechanized, energy intensive, close quarters type that typifies the factory farm.
I think an intuitive spot would be around when we started to inject chemicals into the animals to ensure their survival. That's a clear introduction of 'artificial' products of civilization as I can imagine.
That is, when the conditions change such that the animals would no longer be able to survive in the environment we've set up for them without human intervention.
We could of course have a decent discussion about this, or whether the natural/artificial' divide is even a meaningful thing.
I mean yes, but see the point above. If the products of agriculture would be unsuited for survival in the wilderness environment that their ancestors thrived in, that's a decent indication we've moved pretty far from the conditions of nature untouched by man.
And applying this to lab grown meats, if the meat can't survive outside of the very specific conditions set up for it by humans, that's also indicating that it is pretty far from the conditions of untouched nature.
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All but guaranteed in the current political climate.
Animal welfare hasn't yet taken off as the new frontier in social justice, but once whatever the current thing is passes from mainstream appeal, they'll find a new one.
Indeed, I'll place a marker down, even though I don't ever expect to be called on it: I'd rate it at 90% chance that some U.S. state, likely Cali but could be somewhere else, actually bans consumption of at least one form of commonly consumed animal meat, likely pork but could be something else, inside the next 5 years.
Here's your reminder that Cali is already stepping in that direction:
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2022/10/11/us-supreme-court-pork-law-more-space-pigs-california-pregnant-sows/69555929007/
Money will be dumped into this tech as well, and the more boondoggleish the tech is the more money can be grifted, so that just makes it more likely to get massive funding.
Torturing pigs marginally less is a step in the direction of banning pork entirely? It's interesting that you see these as steps on a continuum. It's almost as if maximal animal cruelty (so long as it doesn't eat into the profit margin) is necessary to signal opposition to banning meat entirely.
Do you want me to link the EA people talking about how these laws are steps on a continuum towards prohibiting meat entirely? This "haha you're paranoid and evil for noticing what advocates say openly" thing really gets to me.
EAs obviously want people to not eat meat, but most people do want to eat meat.
EAs obviously don't want animals to be tortured, and most people don't want animals to be tortured.
This "we have to torture the animals or otherwise it's a slippery slope" thing really gets to me.
Unfortunately I think it is an argument that applies. While I'm sure many animal advocacy groups really do intend to stick to their brief of "we only want anti-animal cruelty laws to be applied", I'm also sure some are using "First we sue the producers so it becomes too expensive to raise chickens/pigs/cattle for meat, then they have to shut down, and we're one step further along the way to banning keeping animals for food altogether".
Scott gave a grant last year to one of these groups:
It would be invidious of me to say that they are working towards banning raising chickens for meat completely, their mission statement says only that they want to ensure conditions are humane:
But at the same time, I don't think it's unreasonable of me to wonder if a few years down the line, once they've successfully won lawsuits, that their priorities won't change to "now let's ban meat raising completely!" when they have articles about chicken intelligence and a personal story as to why their founder became interested in this due to having a pet cockatiel as a kid:
My take on that, and it's only a personal opinion, is that if you are the kind of person who feels that chickens are "family members" and you were a "loved one" of a cockatiel, then it is going to become as repugnant and unthinkable for you that people eat chickens, as it would be for any of us to think about eating human meat. Being blunt, I trust the motives more of someone who says "It is morally neutral to eat meat, but we have no right to be cruel" than I do someone who says "My birds are the same as human members of my family to me".
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Yes?
Its the acknowledgment that the pigs have a cognizable legal interest in not suffering (which you can believe or not believe), that can supercede the farmers' interest in making a livelihood or humans, more generally, in eating said pigs.
Of course, we have tons of anti-animal cruelty laws on the books either way. So we already look at humans intentionally harming animals for no good reason as a criminal act.
But I don't know if you've noticed that the way these sorts of matters work is that there's a gradual shift in the legal tide which then ramps into a catalyst for rapid, immediate changes.
Such as, e.g., the abolition of slavery or the advancement of female suffrage. Or more recently, the recognition of same-sex marriage. Gradually, then all at once.
I'd argue that one only needs to signal indifference to animal cruelty in the context of farming them for food. I.e. the reasoning simply needs to be "We're going to kill them and eat them anyway, there's very little point to considering their feelings on the matter." This need not be an endorsement of maximizing the suffering or taking joy from it.
Plus, for the record, if we could engineer 'brain dead' animals that could carry out all the activities necessary to grow to full size for slaughter but were incapable of feeling any pain or pleasure, I would find this a perfectly acceptable solution as well. I don't want animals to suffer.
I would not consider their feelings at all, on the grounds that a pig, chicken or cow does not have any experience on the same level as human emotions or sensibilities. I don't care how a pig 'feels' about being slaughtered, on the grounds that while a pig shares the same instinct of all living creatures to survive and avoid death, it does not experience any understanding of death as such as a distinct state or philosophical concept to be anticipated, dreaded, and avoided.
I would consider their bodily sensation of pain and suffering, since if it can be avoided, then there is no reason to inflict unnecessary pain and suffering.
Hmmm.
Would you say the same for dogs?
Absolutely. I might not eat dog meat, but then again I've never had the opportunity to try it. Some cultures do have it as part of their cuisine. I'm not sentimental about pets. I don't think we should abuse animals, but they are not humans, proto-humans, substitute humans, or near human level. They may have rights, but nothing near the same rights as humans.
One thing I find hard to reason about with dogs in particular is that they've got an extensive history of co-evolution with humans, and have very clearly optimized towards being loyal, helpful companions to humans, and NOT optimized towards becoming a food source.
So on the one hand, it is not as practical to raise dogs for slaughtering.
and on the other, it really feels like a serious defection to turn a species that has centuries of loyal service into a food source absent some serious outside impetus.
But I can't find any serious ethical grounds to intervene in cultures where it is common to eat them other than "c'mon man that's horrible."
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It's an interesting idea, but it wouldn't work. In effect, it would mean that the animal has leprosy. Humans who have leprosy (aka Hansen's disease) need to actively and consciously monitor themselves for any physical damage, because it's their inability to feel pain that leads small wounds to fester. (And they get wounds easier in the first place because the pain feedback isn't there.)
So a baby calf with something like leprosy will quickly hurt itself and get festering wounds.
That means that for this enterprise to be at all viable, you'd need to keep that calf isolated and in clean environment, and still check it over like every day for sores or cuts. That's a lot of work, and therefore not economically worth it.
Speaking of leprosy, see this recent article about using the bacteria that cause leprosy to (potentially) rejuvenate livers and so do away with the need for transplants.
Biology is strange and we still don't know the half of it. The same organism that causes a horrific disease may help cure a different illness.
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If you don't want animals to suffer, but you have rationalized yourself to being opposed to efforts to reduce said suffering, you seem to have taken a wrong turn somewhere.
If you are really confident that California is going to ban eating a particular animal in the foreseeable future I am happy to make a bet about it.
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California has already put a dent in my daily diet of foie gras and shark fin soup.
Thought of that specifically, although I'll say those don't seem like 'commonly consumed' meats to me.
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Good, Mexican cartels need to diversify their business.
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There's at least some niche segments of the market where this won't matter. Some people like meat but want to reduce how frequently they eat it for environmental and ethical concerns. Although given the manufacturing process, I wonder how the emissions for lab grown meat would actually stack up...
Economically though, the whole process is a nightmare because cell culture has been developed for the medical field where costs don't matter, not the consumer market where there's actual competition. I was looking into this awhile back because I had some startup ideas that ran into similar problems as lab grown meat. The generic stuff (amino acids, sugars, lipids, etc) isn't bad, but the big problem is 'growth factors,' or recombinant proteins. In your body, the division of most cell types (and particularly muscle) are strictly controlled to avoid cancerous growths. They're typically quiescent unless certain soluble proteins stimulate receptors on their surface. Growing and purifying a cocktail of these proteins has been horrendously expensive, so people typically use fetal bovine serum (FBS) instead which costs 1500-2000$ per liter, and you use it at a final concentration of 5-10% so...a 10L bioreactor would cost you 2k in FBS alone, and produce about 250g/L or 5lbs of meat.
Obviously things have gotten cheaper (one of those articles mentions a plant-based substitute for FBS which I hadn't heard about previously), and economies of scale, but that paper mentions a floor of ~20$ per pound of meat which is a big ask even for the most motivated millenial-pseudo-vegetarian. Essentially, these people are going to have to develop an entirely new array of techniques tailored towards economic food production rather than medical research. Or just grow yeast instead.
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Yeah, I don't know what it is, but I too know quite a lot of people who seriously despise hunting. I don't hunt myself, but it seems clear to me that hunting is basically equivalent to eating extreme free-range meat; it's much more humane than farm-grown, but people see it as barbaric. I think a lot of people just associate it with low-status red tribe hicks goin' huntin'.
I don't personally object to hunting, but because you said "I don't know what it is", I'll take a crack at it: Hunting isn't about the food, it's about the sport. It's not crazy to think there's something deontologically wrong with killing creatures for fun.
There’s also hunting for wildlife management.
Because animals reproduce on their own in the wild, too many deer cause car wrecks and eat too much. This can lead to overpopulation of predators, who when they start to starve, go into human habitats and eat pets and garbage and attack people.
Hunting for game, when managed and balanced, helps the forests thrive. And it would be a waste of meat to just let it rot out there.
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