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The Bipartisan Consensus Against... Lab-Grown Meat?
This was not a tweet I expected to see today:
-Senator John Fetterman
Lol. LMAO even.
I am not a person that cares much about the suffering of animals, especially not the ones that taste good. Still, strictly speaking, the suffering is not an integral part of the process. If it could be removed, all else being equal, that would not decrease my utility in any way. I am agnostic on lab-grown meat. If it tastes good, is cheap, and is of comparable healthiness to legacy meat, I will eat it.
I can't help but be reminded of the law of undignified failure. Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades. Gallons of digital ink have been spilled discussing the feasibility and/or inevitability (or lack thereof) of cultured meat on places like the Effective Altruism Forum. Skimming through the top results, I don't see, "what if the proles hate our guts so much that they ban cultured meat out of spite?" on anyone's "factors to consider". It's also a harsh lesson that even the most positive-seeming improvements have to face-off against reliance interests who want things to stay the same. There is a lobby for everything.
Ban is a bad policy for getting to the goal.
If I wanted to eliminate lab-grown meat, I'd target the organizations that create it. Open investigations into the researchers and funders looking for political extremism. Target the patentability and profitability of the technologies involved. ("You can't patent chicken!") Publicize the process that creates these products. Labeling doesn't go far enough, you want to associate the components of lab-grown with dangerous chemicals and bad health outcomes. (I think when you look into the science of what they're currently doing, and not the glowing press releases, this is basically the truth.) Banning lab-grown just makes it exotic, and does nothing to stop its development in other localities.
If I wanted to popularize lab-grown meat, I'd start by making it exotic and sexy. Growing chicken and steak might be the ultimate goal, but this is a losing proposition: everybody knows what beef is supposed to taste like. I would develop unusual meats: lab-grown shark fin, panda bear, lion steaks, elephant. These meats would have a winning price-tag compared to "real" meat, and nobody can tell if they're not good enough. Run a promotion where the profits from every $70 "Penguin Steak" go to sustaining Penguin habitats.
I've also thought about opening a shell company that would advertise and sell lab-grown human flesh steaks. Sell a fun and fancy experience of getting to be a cannibal, except it's "ethical". This would generate a lot of publicity and interest. But I'm not actually sure whether that would ultimately be a winning or losing move.
What political extremism? "You can't patent chicken" isn't going to work as a slogan when 1) you can, in fact, patent literal breeds of actual chickens and 2) none of the things being patented remotely resemble chickens.
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Primeval Foods is currently working on exotic cultured meat including lion, zebra, giraffe, and tiger. (On a semi-related note, Because Animals is working on cat food based on cultured mouse meat.) But most companies are focusing on the meats that currently sell in very large quantities, for the obvious reason that they expect those will continue to be the most popular choices even if people have more exotic options for the same price.
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It's funny how they missed a profitable startup niche because of the deliberate rush to "NORMALIZE" vat-grown meat (in the leftist Twitter sense of "normalize X", meaning to make mandatory through social pressure and regulations).
They couldn't start with exotic meats for rich people because the funders wanted it to be a 1-1 replacement for burgers and chicken cutlets instead, and being a niche product would have undermined their moral power.
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Or clone DNA from extinct animals. I'm kind of curious on whether Hallucigenia tastes like shrimp.
I would even be in favor of inventing meats that don't exist. If some proprietary Frankenblend of, say, 25% shrimp, 40% pork, 35% passenger pigeon were delicious, why would you not sell it?
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Seems pretty niche. The reason people know what beef tastes like is that beef tastes very, very good. For more people than not, it's basically optimized for deliciousness already. There is just not much better than a good cheeseburger or steak. I'm fairly adventurous with food and love trying different meats, but the reality is that none of them are actually as good as just getting a classic cut ribeye and grilling it up.
You need to start with a niche, because the product isn't good enough to compete in the general market. Nobody will pay 5x for a steak substitute that's worse. But lots of people would try, at least once, an exotic whale steak. It can't cost much more to grow that than a beef steak. You wouldn't pay $100 for a bad steak, but would you pay $100 to try shark fin soup? It's an endangered species, it's an illegal dish in many places, and isn't that a good deal?
Once you have a niche, there's a productive market that incentivizes lab-grown meats to get better and better (instead of relying on government handouts and PR campaigns to convince people to replace meat in their diet).
I agree that beef is delicious, and I don't especially want to replace a nice steak with something lab-grown. I'm skeptical of the whole technology. But in a Machiavellian sense, this is the line I would pursue if I was in the industry. I actually feel like this is a billion-dollar idea lying on the ground, and if I had the money to invest in lab-grown and impose my vision, I would.
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Penguin steaks would be a terrible idea (don't ask me how I know) but I think you're on to something overall.
There has to be at least one exotic meat that hits a sweet spot for: relatively tasty; more expensive in real life than the lab; nobody is familiar with the real thing. If I were in charge of a lab-grown meat company I'd throw money at this question until one suitable species could be identified. Ideally several. Find a few celebrity chefs willing to experiment with and serve the product. You might not want to go to the grocery and buy lab-grown meat for the grill, but your girlfriend will want to post nice Instagram selfies of herself enjoying the lab-grown whale meatballs at a fancy restaurant. Politicians are not going to ban your product if they enjoy it. If you could get lab-grown steaks served regularly at the French Laundry, it's over.
Artisinal meats are the perfect test-case for lab-grown. Everything is small-scale and gives the tech a chance to develop. Lab-grown will not win a head-to-head competition with real meat without significant R&D. Developing beef steak first seems to me like the worst proposition, driven by (well-meaning) idealists who want to replace meat consumption. Surely it'd be easier to pass off a fake chicken nugget than a steak. Steak is something everyone is familiar with, is a food cooked to be eaten as itself with minimal coverings or dress. People will not accept lab-grown steak as viable until the technology is fully mature. Why would you pay 5x for a substitute that's worse? Because it's moral? That's a terrible proposition for most consumers. If the lab-grown meat industry wasn't run by idealists with a chip-on-their-shoulder about the morality of meat, they could easily see the business model I'm describing.
Galapagos Tortoises are apparently tasty enough that it was a real problem getting living specimens back because they kept getting eaten.
I'm sure their deliciousness was at least somewhat exaggerated due to hunger being the best sauce, but they were certainly praised highly.
Snapping turtle tastes excellent. If they tasted anything like that I'm not surprised they were eaten.
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I've always wondered how much reprovisioning affected their judgement. The tortoise would have been their first fresh meat after months at sea depleted their stocks of everything except dried peas and biscuits full of weevils. Hunger is the best spice, after all.
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Mammoth DNA exists well enough to in-theory be cloned. Green sea turtles are legendarily tasty. Bear meat is hard to get but supposedly pretty good.
I’ve had bear meat on several occasions, and while it is good, I don’t think it’s that much better than venison, squirrel, or beef. It’s also not exotic enough. Mammoth, whale, and giant tortoise meat all seem like winners though.
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Ok ok tell us what it tastes like
Stringy, gamey, wrong kind of greasy. Like it's got fish oil in its flesh.
You can try puffin in Iceland, which is similar in a lot of ways.
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