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Notes -
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.
Only tangentially relevant, but I'm deeply skeptical of the commercial viability of "lab-grown meat" because of the need for, and serious expense of providing, the requisite hyper-clean conditions and total lack of microbial contamination. That is to say, the living animal has an immune system, your bioreactor culture equipment does not.
There are lots of other large scale processes that have very high cleanliness standards and can’t use strong disinfectants, from brewing to mycoprotein cultivation. Honestly seems like one of the less difficult things to get right.
Brewing uses strong disinfectants (which meat cultures could also use between batches I suppose) and the yeast also has its own natural defenses against bacteria. Mushrooms also have their own natural defenses (nice rhetorical trick attempt with "mycoprotein" I suppose). The problem with meat is meat is not a full organism, its a part of an organism. It doesn't have a billion years of evolution on its side. You have to re-create that for the beef ribeye you are trying to recreate.
No rhetoric intended — “Mycoprotein” can include regular mushrooms but in the meat replacement context, it’s usually used to mean microfungi like Fusarium venenatum. These are cultivated in big vats in roughly the same way you’d cultivate brewer’s yeast, rather than on more traditional farms like field mushrooms.
I’d be pretty surprised if the issues you raise were a serious problem. We have a huge amount of experience at preventing bacteria or pathogens getting into a whole range of industrial biotech processes, and in this case we can very tightly control the inputs and monitor conditions. Hell, if necessary, you could just include antibiotics as inputs into the process, though I doubt it’d come to that.
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