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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.
We can synthesize infant formula but it's not as good as the real thing. We synthesize fake sugar, fake chemical food (by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients). That was instrumental to the global obesity crisis and millions of premature deaths yearly.
Why would we be capable of synthesizing meat that's just as good as real meat? We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way. Maybe it has the wrong hormones, or the wrong mix of hormones or an absence of certain kinds of proteins. The people who brought us the food pyramid are hardly going to help. After obesity, microplastics and an ongoing crisis of mental illness we should be very wary of any novel synthetic-agricultural processes.
So when is Florida banning jelly beans? And calorie-rich sodas sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup? And sugary breakfast cereals? And cancer-inducing smoked meats? Tobacco? Alcohol?
Why should all those foods that we know are unhealthy and that consumers actually do overindulge in to the detriment of their health be allowed, but a meat substitute that is likely to be much healthier and is not even widely available needs to be banned?
I don't think “probably” is right; which nutrients and vitamins are essential is pretty well known, so the chance that lab-grown meat is unhealthy in some unpredictable way is pretty low. Especially since nobody suggests you switch to a meat-only diet; the idea is that you eat this in moderation, along with fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables, just like the recommendation is for real meat.
Still, if you personally don't want to take the risk, you would still be welcome to stuff your face with jellybeans, vodka and tobacco because you believe that's the healthier alternative. That's hardly an argument for a ban.
How would anyone know? We'd be relying on nutritionists. They've succeeded in confusing and/or deceiving the public for decades. Do eggs cause cancer? Reduce cancer? What fats are good or bad? Fat or sugar? The nutritionist consensus keeps changing, they're not doing real science.
I don't usually make traditionalist arguments but we should return to time-tested, traditional diets. Bread, cheese, milk, olive oil, fruit, fish, vegetables, meat, eggs... If it's been around for centuries, that in itself is a good argument for it. The meat/milk loving Mongols demolished grain-fed Chinese armies, meat and animal products have been historically valued despite their expense. Alas, we probably can't ban alcohol and tobacco. Alas, importing Japanese style intensive fat-shaming is unlikely.
But it is possible to prevent the development of synthetic meat. We can rely on industrial agriculture to cut corners and manipulate research to support their profits. That's how we got the food pyramid and a mountain of HFCS, breakfast cereals and so on. We should assume that they'll use this technology in an antisocial way. Drug dealers do the same thing - make the most addictive products at the lowest prices, they prioritize short-term profits over the long-term health of their customers and society. We should strictly regulate drugs and food for that reason. Synthetic meat should only be developed carefully, after we have a really sound understanding of how the body works, after biological immortality IMO.
Could we import active, fit, elderly Japanese men to make us feel like lazy fatties?
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If there were groups trying to mandate a jellybean and vodka diet for everyone out of moralist zealotry, I would be 1000% in favor of a jellybean ban as a first step towards eliminating the group entirely. As long as it was followed up by extrajudicial home raids on anyone who was detected funding opposition to the ban.
So are you arguing that without the extrajudicial home raids, the ban is useless? Because I'm fairly certain home raids aren't part of the current proposal.
Baby steps. Get people over the hangup of "it's not ok to just ban things, only leftists are allowed to do that!", then work on "woah you can't just throw communists into an alligator swamp, thats only ok when communists do it!"
If they can ban dishwashers that actually wash dishes and then raid people who import ones that work, we can do the same to them. And anyone who complains needs to be reeducated.
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People don’t do this right now with expensive meat; when it becomes cheap they still won’t do this. People will eat a steak with the nutritional characteristics of a hot dog along with a soda and some of the aforementioned jellybeans.
Sure, let's say, when left to their own devices, people will choose to eat garbage. Is it the government's job to prevent this? If yes, then why single out lab-grown meat, when hot dogs, jellybeans and soda are just as bad? If not, then what is the basis for banning just 1 of 1000 unhealthy foods that people already consume?
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I get really, really exhausted of this argument. That being "Bad things happen, so why do anything about other bad things?" Yes, we live in an imperfect world. Yes, it's fucking weird the shit that is grandfathered in, while new shit faces extra scrutiny. New shit still deserves the scrutiny, and all this argument does is promote fresh new manmade horrors.
Yeah, going to call bullshit on this. In fact, it's just the same hubris that gave us trans fats for 100 years, which most countries are now banning after a wealth of scientific data shows they directly cause heart disease. Or that caused everyone to turn a blind eye towards refined sugar's inherent toxicity because the PhD's assured us that calories are calories. Didn't you know one guy ate Twinkies for a whole year, and with vitamin supplementation "nothing" happened to him? And on and on and on.
Fact of the matter is, nobody knows the long term effects of industrialized foods, but we are increasingly finding out, oops, we've been getting poisoned our entire lives. But trust us, we have a handle on this now! This new industrialized food is totally not poison! Also, now it's in everything.
I'm just trying to pin down the argument here. If the argument is “the government should ban unhealthy foods in the interest of public health” that's a position that's easy to understand, whether you agree with it or not, but adopting it would imply banning a bunch of traditional foods too.
If the argument is “the government should ban unhealthy foods, but only if they are new” then the logic is less clear: why does it matter if an unhealthy food is new or not? You should be able to defend the “only if they are new” qualifier, unless your real motivation is something different (e.g. irrational hatred of lab-grown meats or the people who advocate for them).
(Note that all of this assumes that lab grown meat is unhealthy as a given, which I certainly don't believe in the strict sense, though I will concede there is some unknown risk associated with it.)
Let me make my argument absolutely clear then.
The failure of the government to ban some subset of unhealthy foods does not prevent the government from banning other unhealthy foods. The fact that the government has failed to ban trans fats, refined sugar, etc, etc, etc is not an argument that the government should not ban lab grown meat. Making that argument is taking a government that sucks, and claiming it needs to suck more. It's claiming that because the government has done the wrong thing before, it's not allowed to do the right thing now. That's a silly argument.
Yes, I agree that failing to do something useful in the past shouldn't prevent you from doing something useful today, but by that very logic, the government can still ban any number of unhealthy foods if it wanted to.
That's why I don't buy the explanation that the ban on lab-grown meat was motivated by concern for public health, because if that were true, the government would also be banning alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks, etc. If you want to explain the meat ban in terms of public health concerns, you have to explain why none of the other, much more effective, bans are happening.
Of course, in reality it has nothing to do with public health, but simply waging the culture war. DeSantis is trying to own the libs by banning something that they advocate for. DeSantis himself said as much:
Nowhere does it say that public health concerns were the reason for the ban. Instead, it's all about “fighting the elites” and “saving our beef”. If lab-grown meat was provably more healthy than regular meat, DeSantis would still oppose it for the above reasons.
And of course the whole reasoning is bogus. Having lab-grown meat available as an option does not force anyone to eat it, and it doesn't take away traditional options. The idea that allowing anyone to eat lab-grown meat would result in everyone being forced to eat it is a classic example of a slippery slope fallacy.
It literally does, they literally say that's the goal, I am literally looking at a half-million dollar federal grant right now that talks about using vat meat to "disrupt traditional livestock production in a just and equitable manner" https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_20196702329856_12H3/
I hate lies so much. People telling low effort, stupid lies right to your face and sneering at you for daring to point out they're lying, it makes me so angry I feel like throwing up and smashing things.
Why do you do it? It can't be strategic because the strategy is stupid and ineffective. Do you just enjoy the feeling of gaslighting people? Fucking stop it, because it's poison.
For someone who uses words like “lies” and “literally” quite liberally I'd expect you to stick closer to the truth yourself. The research grant isn't about banning real meat at all. To quote:
So the purpose is literally “to explore and explicate”. Maybe you think there is some more sinister hidden purpose, but if so, it definitely does not literally say that the goal is to remove meat-based options, and if you think that's the actual purpose you will have to make an argument for it. (How annoying! That's much harder than simply calling people liars!)
The part that you are upset about is this:
This is just standard fluff you put in research proposals to make the topic of your research sound super duper important: why should someone pay you USD 500,000 to study a phenomenon if that phenomenon isn't something earthshaking? It's no different from the hundreds of blockchain startups that claimed they were going to disrupt the financial system in order to secure VC funding (spoiler alert: they didn't).
But even taken at face value, “disrupting” traditional livestock production doesn't imply that real meat will be banned. It's easy to imagine a future with 50/50 fake/real meat; that would be pretty disruptive to the agricultural sector, but it still doesn't make real meat unavailable.
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Calm down, and stop ranting at people and accusing them of lying and making bad faith arguments when there is no evidence of this. (The quote you cite as evidence does not say what you claim, and while you can legitimately argue that that's the actual intent, you cannot legitimately claim that anyone who disagrees is gaslighting you).
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