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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.
Farmers are an extremely powerful constituency because they have money, are rural (privileged in most democratic systems, especially in the US with the Senate) and have a salt of the earth reputation (like doctors and firefighters, farmers do a ‘good’ job).
Screye had some good examples of how the farmers stymied Modi’s essential land reforms in India (which would in the medium and long term have had hugely positive impacts on Indian prosperity). In France the farmers just dump shit on the street and ruin daily life in the cities until their subsidies are restored. In almost every Western country farmers are often very wealthy with millions of dollars in land (usually pretty liquid given a robust farmland market).
A substantial proportion of the US obesity crisis is due to HFCS subsidies for farmers:
But as with doctor pay and healthcare costs (or indeed with cutting firefighter numbers because there are far fewer residential fires than there were 50 years ago), because farming is a ‘good’ job, the public can be baited into supporting these people and serving their interests indefinitely.
Lab grown meat, if it can be made cheaply and to taste indistinguishable from the real thing, would be an immense scientific achievement that would improve billions of people’s lives. And even though I don’t value farm animal wellbeing particularly highly, it would still reduce a lot of animal suffering which on some level is probably a good thing if it can be ensured without harming humans in any way.
I accept the premise here, but those two if clauses are doing a ton of work. I'm skeptical that either is plausible, but concerned that in the name of going green, governments will push them anyway. My preference would be for government to stay away from it altogether (aside from normal basic research that NIH and others fund), but if we're going to wind up with governments feeling the need to get involved, I'd rather they ban the slop than subsidize it. Note that scientists generally benefit from the same public optics issue - it's a "good" job, so pouring money into questionable endeavors is pretty common.
Taste does seem very difficult, but cheapness seems inevitable.
Just from physics/energy perspective lab grown or vat grown meat is more straightforward. Animals are not 100% edible and some of the energy they consume goes to their non edible parts and to activities that provide no benefit to edibility.
I think it's comparable to the difference between cars and horses. Cars have more uniform energy requirements, and far less wasted energy. But horses have numerous aesthetic benefits that are hard to imitate (like auto navigation).
Taste is just an engineering problem, though. We understand enough about how cells grow and divide to intervene in the process, and understand the chemicals that cause things to taste like so pretty well. I think you could get lab grown meat that's reasonably indistinguishable in taste from (average store bought, with implied caveats about taste and nutrition) real meat right now if you were willing to pay absurd prices (edit: like, tens of thousands of dollars per pound).
It's an engineering problem, but the precision control needed is pretty high. I don't think it's impossible, just difficult and thus likely to remain expensive.
Human tongues are pretty sensitive, they can pick up very tiny differences in texture and taste. Consider diet sodas. If you've ever had a regular soda and a diet soda you can usually notice a slight difference between the two. They try to make the two sodas taste the same and fail, even though it's a much easier problem than textured meat.
Well aktshually, the sense of taste is rather gross, with the tongue only really being able to detect basic aspects of salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami, and the vast majority of what people would consider flavor, including all the subtleties, are from olfactory sensing. That's why if you hold your nose it's difficult to tell the difference between an apple and an onion.
It doesn't affect your point at all. I just thought it was interesting.
It does seem like individual taste buds are bad, but society wide taste buds are pretty accurate and good.
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Not slight at all.
Diet Dr Pepper tastes more like Regular Dr Pepper
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I have shit taste buds and a shit sense of smell. But yeah this makes my main point stronger.
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You can't, though. And when the bills to ban real meat come around, they will be based on this false assumption, which will be trumpeted through all the normal propaganda outlets (media, schools and universities, political pressure groups with sciency names, etc).
(And further, there's better meat than the average store-bought easily available for a modest premium, often in the same stores)
What do you mean "you can't, though"? I am really quite confident that I could get lab-grown meat that passed a blind test for something like tens of thousands of dollars per pound if I for whatever reason really wanted to. It's not that difficult of an engineering problem, we know how to create the relevant tastes and textures, the problem is getting costs down to what nature's gotten very good at over a billion years.
I mean you cannot, "right now", obtain lab grown meat of the quality you describe for any price.
I do not believe you could, and in any case you cannot do it "right now".
I also vaguely remember something like that happening? It might (or might not) have been this. https://time.com/collection-post/6140206/cultivated-meat-passes-the-taste-test/
Again keep in mind that I'm comparing this to shitty meat. I don't even like shitty meat.
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Energetics are less of a problem with cattle than vehicles though - they're not particularly efficient, but they're capable of growing literal tons of high-quality nutrition by simply eating grasses that grow naturally. While this is apparently not as cheap as CAFOs currently (although I'm not clear on how much of that is a product of corn subsidies), there's something to be said for the ability of someone without expensive equipment and sterile lab conditions to produce excellent meat via naturally occurring inputs and a herd of cattle or bison grazing. You can afford to waste a lot of energy when the energy is being produced by the sun, processed by plants in a field, and reprocessed by ruminants.
We'll see. Cell culture media isn't cheap though. For the time being, I suggest exercising a lot of skepticism about what the financial inputs for lab-grown tissue are if someone claims that it's actually quite cheap.
If you buy the individual components and formulate you own media, it's some like 1-2OOMs cheaper than what they sell you commercially. I looked into this awhile ago.
You run into problems (currently) with growth factors like IGF/FGF which is where the 50$ burgers come from. From what I've read in the literature though, fermentation of these would scale well once the demand is there and we could make them very cheaply in bioreactors. What I haven't seen a solution for yet is (surprisingly, to me at least) Albumin which increases the yields very significantly but seems to be hard to produce at scale. I'm curious whether people can break down the various functions of albumin into separate, easy to ferment at scale proteins or whether we need to find better production methods there as well. At least that's what I've been able to glean without having an insider's perspective into the industry.
More broadly, keeping the government out of many of these industries does seem ideal. At the same time, our car companies are about to get fucked by subsidized Chinese EVs (and, to be fair, often flat out superior products) without government intervention. America's rise to power in the late 19th and 20th centuries was hugely influenced by oil; if solar panels do indeed end up being 'the next oil,' well, Chinese government intervention has given them a near monopoly there too. In essence, they learned the lessons of the tech industry on a national scale - absorbing losses for a few years/decades is fine if you end up with a monopoly. It's not clear to me that we can compete without doing the same. Perhaps the winning move is subsidizing some of these growth factors for a few years and giving out some grants for replacing albumin and seeing if we can build some American (or Western/'friendshored') companies that can dominate the space.
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