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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26455 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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The Bipartisan Consensus Against... Lab-Grown Meat?

This was not a tweet I expected to see today:

Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron [DeSantis], but I co-sign this.

As a member of @SenateAgDems and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers.

-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.

Free Market Conservatism strikes again. This is primarily about protecting the economic interests of agrarian elites, secondarily about visceral disgust, and little bit about aesthetic anti-environmentalism. Other reasons offered are not necessarily insincere, but they are... noncentral? Which is to say, having them conclusively disproven wouldn't change many minds.

Dean Black, a cattle rancher and one of the Republican Florida representatives who pushed for the bill’s passage, told NBC News that cultivated meat is a national security concern.

“Although the FDA has said that this type of product is safe, that doesn’t mean it’s healthy,” Black said. “In Florida, we don’t want our citizens used as guinea pigs.”

Far be it from Florida to allow its citizens to pursue unhealthy habits.

Justin Tupper, president of the United States Cattlemen’s Association, called the bill a “win” for similar reasons. Although he said he doesn’t fear competition, he is concerned about chemicals in the new product.

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But Rossmeissl and Shapiro said there’s little merit to health concerns, because cultivated meat has near identical nutritional value to real meat. Furthermore, conventional meat often has fecal and intestinal pathogens, and antibiotic residues, that need to be cooked out for safe consumption, Shapiro said.

agrarian elites

Funny to mock people for talking about "elites" only to use it as a sneer yourself...

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