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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.
AIUI, most of these involve single-celled organisms, with their own abilities to fight off rival microbes that animal muscle cells, adapted to the presence of a broader immune system, lack. And for the rest, look at how much the products cost — and that's usually chemicals produced by the organisms rather than the cultured cells themselves. Or how much a financial hit is taken if a vat or batch "goes bad." You'll be required to maintain a food production plant more sterile than a medical lab, at industrial scale.
Again, I read a lot of stuff without remembering where I read it, so I don't have cites on hand, but a quick google search gave this link: "Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story."
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Also "Is Lab-Grown Meat Commercially Feasible?":
These are important barriers on a timescale of a few years, but on the scale of decades, the march of biotech and basic research will overcome imo.
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This all looks too pessimistic. Perhaps some of that is due to the politics involved; if some moron in some government declares that we'll switch over to artificial meat by 2030, yeah, this seems like a realistic picture of the problems. And lot of the vatshit spewed by the companies seemed like it was an attempt at extracting money from activists, progressives, and progressive-controlled governments. I agree that this field is unlikely to make anyone rich in a non-graft-related way, any time soon.
If we take politics out of the mix, we're still in the early stages. Of course this stuff will have to be grown in sealed containers, from clean ingredients, and the more the process can be automated, the better. But we're barely at a point where we get good reliable results, let alone at a point where we can think about ramping it up to industrial scale. If R&D has a chance to refine the process, maybe it'll pan out eventually. But if there's political pressure, then I bet it will fail spectacularly, and maybe give the entire field a bad name for years to come.
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