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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26431 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.

I mean, if the lab meat was literally identical in every way to real meat, then sure, I’d eat it. In practice though, I’d imagine it’s more like AI-generated media: the difference in quality is noticeable, but certain factions downplay the differences for political reasons.

It's premature to talk about differences in quality before it's even on the market.

For that matter, if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.

For that matter, if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.

Off the top of my head I can think of several things that were worse but ended up being mandated by the government. It's not hard to imagine this happening with lab-grown meat.

In this thread we're talking about a government action. It doesn't really make sense to say that the government banned something so that the government wouldn't mandate it.

It doesn't really make sense to say that the government banned something so that the government wouldn't mandate it.

Makes perfect sense to me. It's not like 'the government' is a person with a coherent agenda. Governments do things all the time with the intention of constraining their future iterations.

This doesn't constrain their future actions. It's just as easy to repeal this law and ban real meat as it was before the ban. Maybe if it were a constitutional amendment or something you'd have a point.

I suppose this is the same logic as smart-gun legislation in places like New Jersey?

The light-bulb playbook as well.

Thankfully, Florida is not the only polity on the planet, and lab grown meat can still be marketed elsewhere when and if it becomes commercially viable. So this ban doesn't prevent the development of an alternative.

It's just as easy to repeal this law and ban real meat as it was before the ban.

No, there can be a huge amount of institutional inertia. Governments generally do not turn on a dime. And that's just looking at the legal side. Scaling up a fake-meat industry would take a huge amount of time and investment and it can't even get started if there's a ban.

To be clear I'm low-key enthusiastic about lab-grown meat (though I also don't trust food scientists farther than I can throw them). I just took issue with your statement that

if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.

There's an argument that we have to stop the slippery slope to banning real meat as soon as possible. I'm not sure how well it holds up.

In some vague sense we'd be on the slope. Vegans aren't shy about describing how horrific any form of raising animals is. There'd be a push to ban the real thing once an alternative existed.

It's gonna be California first.

The groups pushing lab grown meat are already talking about banning real meat, so it seems both fair and sensible to do unto them first.

This is only true in the sense that groups pushing gun rights are already talking about establishing a white ethnostate.

In much of Europe, meat is almost banned in public institutions.

City canteens rarely serve it, university canteens the same. E.g. in Berlin, the limit is one dish with meat per day on 4 different days.

Much of Europe? I think is something that is common only in the most lib part of Berlin where all the americanized women and foreign expats gathers. Here vegetarianism is almost unknown, and also in big cities like Bruxelles I have seen meat everywhere, also in èlites institutions canteens.

There's a Europe-wide initiative to ban meat in large cities in public institutions. Forgot what it's called.

I also saw a Dutch academic complain that his uni also barely serves meat. So it's probably not just Berlin. Go look at I dunno, Hamburg unis.

There's a Europe-wide initiative to ban meat in large cities in public institutions. Forgot what it's called.

You're not talking about one of these WEF-adjacent things (C-40 Cities, etc)? They tend to be aspirational. A lot of cities signed on, but it'll take a while before they get implemented.

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Very little of Europe - probably just Berlin, which is the crunchiest city in Continental Europe, driven by some combination of the west Germans who moved there during the Cold War to dodge the draft and the hippies who moved there to take advantage of cheap rents immediately after the Wall came down.

In formerly-Catholic Europe (I have personal experience with France, Spain, Italy and Poland) vegetarianism is seen as a weird Anglosphere perversion (veganism even more so) and the only decent vegetarian food is traditional cuisine-of-the-poor which typically uses cheese as the main protein. A fond memory of my trip to Naples was seeing a solo American female who appeared to be EPLing being shown the door after bothering the only English-speaking waiter about her "intolerances" and being told that there were only three vegetarian items on the menu (two of which were the margherita pizza and the arrabbiata pasta) and she could take or leave them.

Don't know much about German city canteens (??) but Germany has the fourth highest meat consumption per capita in Europe, so I am not convinced that meat consumption is endangered there. Per capita consumption in 2020 was actually higher than in 2017.

This seems like a non-sequitur. We aren't talking about things that are vaguely politically associated, but rather things that exist within the same particular moral niche.

Precisely. The government's one and only legitimate role in this would be to mandate that it has to be labeled correctly and can't be falsely advertised as ordinary meat. Other than that, they need to stay out of it and let the people make up their own minds on what they choose to purchase.

Meanwhile the other side already uses government money to publish anti-meat propaganda. The reasonable answer is to grab the gun of state power and dump the mag before they get their hands on it, because they won't hesitate for a second once they have it pointed at you.

"Destroy your opponent before they can destroy you" does not at all sound like the "reasonable answer". Especially since this won't literally destroy them, they'll still exist and be even more ravenous to seize the reins of power. It seems like the actually reasonable answer is to de-escalate and decrease the power and influence of the government so people can make their own choices about their own personal lives.

I don't even get why there are "sides". I don't care whether the meat I eat comes from a "farm" or a "lab", I just care whether it's cheap, tasty, and nutritious. Let them both try their best and we can judge them and eat them according to our own preferences. I'm on team freedom, and that means nobody gets shut down pointlessly just to "own" the other side.

It seems like the actually reasonable answer is to de-escalate and decrease the power and influence of the government so people can make their own choices about their own personal lives.

The experience of the past few years clearly shows that that would make them more ravenous to seize the reins of power.

I don't think anyone has meaningfully decreased the power of the government in decades. Maybe a couple overreaching laws here or there got repealed, but plenty more came along, and the government just keeps doing whatever it wants with whatever justification they can make up ad hoc to justify the thing they already decided to do.

I think they’d be equally ravenous to seize the reins of power regardless. They’re just authoritarians. It’s like asking if the early Nazis would have been more zealous if they were up against a strict communist government instead of the relatively liberal Weimar one. I think their zeal would have been undiminished either way. Same goes for the fervent anti-meat crowd.

Unless do-gooders tax or otherwise restrict real meat "for our own good".

If we are assuming do-gooders puppeteering the state then a state ban is just a distraction anyway.

Or alternatively preemptively use state coercion to force your way before they do. Ban their stuff before they ban ours.

And for the many people who seem to view the state as a club meant to smash the heads of people with different preferences, that's generally their apparent goal.

Ban their stuff before they ban ours.

I don't see why the do gooders couldn't undo this ban and ban real meat anyway if they have the kind of influence to enact a ban on real meat in the first place. "Get them before they get us" doesn't apply if you are not, in fact, getting them.

I don't really believe in first mover advantage for laws, laws get overturned all the time. What appears as first mover advantage is likely just durable public sentiment.

Sure, but by the same logic the current ban is no big deal either, because if lab meat turns out to be highly demanded, the law will probably be repealed anyways.

There is no need for a conspiracy of puppeteers - the public health people really do have some very stupid ideas about what's good for the public, they've displayed it repeatedly, and taking options away from them preemptively has value.

For that matter, if it's so much worse, there's no need to ban it.

Except that it steals a march on those who would ban the real animal stuff in favor of it.

"Those", being the same government that just banned it?

Please don't do this pretending not to know who he's talking about thing. It's embarrassing.
He can link you a dozen lesswrong-ea-bay-area-forum posts that you're already familiar with, so all this does is waste everyone's time for a low effort sneer.

Feel free to elaborate. It's not the EAs that are able to ban meat, lab grown or otherwise. It's the state, which has just now banned lab grown meat apparently in order to "steal a march" and prevent itself from banning real meat.

There's an obvious point that various contrary factions are pushing and pulling the government. So push to get the laws you want or be stuck with the laws they want. Whoever "they" are in any context.

And laws are very sticky, so there's a huge first mover advantage.

There's a few vendors that passed USDA clearance last year, though they've had production and funding problems that have kept its products from having too much of an impact on the store shelves, and it's not clear the tech is going to get there very soon.

On the other hand, when or if the tech does get there, there's not much trust that it's gonna be left for people to choose. Whether for environmental, animal suffering, or macroeconomic reasons, there's going to be a massive push to 'regulate the unpriced externalities' of conventional meat, and many routes for that, like restricting grazing permits, will be near-invisible to normal people.

I imagine that depends on what kind of lab grown meat you’re talking about. Ground beef grown in a vat is obviously of much more comparable quality to the real deal than filet mignon.

Finally, the ability to enjoy steak tartare without guilt or worrying about tapeworms.

I don't think the main point against eating animal meat is the fact that it kills animals, but the impact on environment and the land efficiency. To eat a pound of beef, you need the cow to eat a lot of grass, which takes a lot more land than producing a pound of vegetables. Moreover, cows produce a lot of CO which has a huge climate impact.

Much of the land used for grazing would be unsuitable for other agricultural purposes. Without the ranching the land would be unproductive. How do cows produce carbon monoxide?

I meant CH4, and the problem is not the ranching it's the cereal production to feed cows.

The beef lobby claim

7% of total corn produced in the U.S. is fed to feedlot cattle

Corn acreage used to feed feedlot cattle is 0.2% of total U.S. land area, 1.4% of total U.S. cropland acres, and 7% of total U.S. harvested corn acres.

The problem is the 7% of corn acres?

Does the bacteria in the cow that releases methane, release more methane than would be released by the natural decomposition of the forage material?

I don't know how the beef lobby computes it (and whether they import cereal from foreign countries) but if you take account for all animal feed (not just beef) it is more than 7%:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-cereals-animal-feed?tab=chart

release more methane than would be released by the natural decomposition of the forage material?

Honestly I don't know but the point is not to let the cereal decompose, that would be dumb. It's to use those lands to produce something else, something that wouldn't produce any CH4 and ideally that would absorb a bit of it. Anyway it would be better to burn the cereals and to produce energy with it (we get no CH4 - worse than CO2 - and more energy).

I believe the bacteria in cows produce less methane when fed corn than their typical forage. The forage would decompose releasing methane if not eaten by cows. Cattle graze and forage on land unsuitable for other uses. We may get the CH4 anyway and there would be no beef. Deer, elk, bison and moose may then forage the areas with the cow deficit.

Yes but we wouldn't produce the forage in the first place. Or you can burn it to produce energy (and CO2 is still better than CH4)

Much of the the forage would exist in any event.

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This paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00589-6

has a nice visualization of the flows of inputs.

/images/1714930968548955.webp

Cows don't "produce" CO2, they're part of the biological carbon cycle, like rotting leaves and compost piles. All the carbon a cow emits comes from vegetation that got it from the air only a few months before. It neither adds nor removes carbon from the cycle.

Intentionally conflating the exogenous release of geologically sequestered carbon through fossil fuels with the natural carbon cycle is unforgivably dishonest vegan propaganda that needs to be stomped out thoroughly.

Whoever told it to you is a malicious liar you should hunt down and punish for trying to fuck with your understanding of the world.

Yes it is a cycle, but if you replace a cycle where the carbon exists 500 years as a tree and 70 years as CO2 by a cycle where it exists 1 year as corn, 14 years as a cow and 70 years as CO2 it has a huge impact on the quantity of CO2 in the air.

Anyway oil is also natural, it did not magically appear under the ground. It's just a very long cycle.

And by the way I don't care about vegans, anyone thinking bees should consent to give you their honey is dumb

Cows don't eat trees (much) though -- they eat grass, and after a year that grass is turning back into CO2 one way or another.

The land used for the grass and the cereals could be used for something else (growing trees, for example). And by eating the grass and anything green in the grass cow do prevent trees to grow.

Moreover the grass produces CO2 if it's not eaten by some other animal while the cow produces CH4. CH4 has a stronger greenhouse effect than CO2 and then it quite rapidly degrades and becomes CO2.

Again, biological carbon cycle. Even the massive reforestation of agricultural land in the last century has only been a one-time temporary reduction in atmospheric CO2. Trees don't magically suck carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it out of the biosphere; only some species of shelly plankton do that. And the very, very slow work of bogs creating coal deposits.

The land used for the grass and the cereals could be used for something else (growing trees, for example).

No, it couldn't -- cows (in the US) primarily graze in a place that has been know for hundreds (maybe more) of years as "The Great Plains" -- trees don't grow there.

Anyways, trees don't fix carbon either -- it doesn't really matter what you grow there, it's going to rot eventually.

Moreover the grass produces CO2 if it's not eaten by some other animal while the cow produces CH4. CH4 has a stronger greenhouse effect than CO2 and then it quite rapidly degrades and becomes CO2.

Actually proving that this made any difference would require writing out (and balancing) all of the reactions involved, including the ones taking place in the cow -- just saying "cows produce methane and that's even worse than CO2" doesn't really say anything about the quantities involved. I'm not going to do that work, because I'd be quite surprised if it didn't pencil out as a wash -- but you are welcome to write it up and if the methane from a cow's farts ends up significantly more impactful than all of the carbon contained in the grass a cow would eat over the course of a year I will eat a steak my words.

Yeah, the geological carbon cycle is still a cycle, but slow enough there's no equilibrium at human timescales.

At least when I was in college the geo cycle, rock weathering, and vulcanism was considered the most probable driver of temperature over geologic time. Burning coal is basically short-circuiting that cycle by releasing fossil carbon that wouldn't have subducted and come out of a volcano until a hundred million years from now.

It's like comparing surface eddies with a deep ocean current.

Cows don't "produce" CO2, they're part of the biological carbon cycle, like rotting leaves and compost piles. All the carbon a cow emits comes from vegetation that got it from the air only a few months before. It neither adds nor removes carbon from the cycle.

Intentionally conflating the exogenous release of geologically sequestered carbon through fossil fuels with the natural carbon cycle is unforgivably dishonest vegan propaganda that needs to be stomped out thoroughly.

Whoever told it to you is a malicious liar you should hunt down and punish for trying to fuck with your understanding of the world.

Hey I was asked to look at your comment by the volunteer quokka report thing and I assumed you were bullshitting but decided to look at the actual science just in case. To my shock, you are correct, despite all the things I've read online, the science suggests that cows largely maintain the current CO2 levels as opposed to adding on to them. So kudos for calling attention to a very important fact and I apologize for having been successfully brainwashed up to this point.

Isn’t the cow complaint usually about methane? I assume that isn’t automatically sequestered by plants like CO2 is.

Wait, apparently methane tends to turn into CO2. If that’s accounted for in your net calculation, then yeah, it sounds like the effect is neutral. That’d be interesting.

Methane breaks down in the atmosphere quite rapidly. Going from 10mil cows to 20mil cows will increase the equilibrium, but not cause an ongoing buildup. Notably the billions of majestic bison that once covered the great plains farted almost as much as cows, but they were "natural" so it doesn't count.

They want you to see cows like a coal plant that continuously spews "new" carbon into the atmosphere. That's because they want to ban them.

So, the way methane works is: it lasts about 12 years in the atmosphere, during which it gets completely broken down. But you have a lot of cows (~1.5B) constantly producing methane so you can think of the situation as a submarine that is constantly losing oxygen because of a leak but is also constantly getting air because of an open air tank. The overall result amounts to about a 0.5° increase in the planet's heat because of these cows. In other words, if you had a magic wand and made all the cows disappear, global temperatures would drop by about half a degree over the course of the next decade.

So methane has a significant negative impact on the climate but it can largely be managed and ameliorated through good policies. Proper manure storage can cut emissions by 50%, for example. Which is still worth discussing and thinking about, of course. But my priors were "cows are objectively bad, we need to cull the vast majority of them if we want humans to continue existing on this planet" which is very far from "the ecological impact of cows is a solvable problem".

Can I see your source? I’m getting serious mixed signals when I try to search this.

So that's two constituencies for banning real meat, one small but very tenacious (moral vegetarians/vegans) and one large and powerful (environmentalists). Seems to me that meat eaters have plenty to worry about and acting proactively to make such bans more difficult makes strategic sense.

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.

by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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:

“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “Our administration will continue to focus on investing in our local farmers and ranchers, and we will save our beef.”

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.

Having lab-grown meat available as an option does not force anyone to eat it, and it doesn't take away traditional options

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.

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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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:

The long-term goal of this research proposal is to explore and explicate the emerging social and bioethical implications of cellular agriculture (i.e. "lab grown meat")

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:

a nascent industry that portends to disrupt traditional livestock production by bioengineering animal products through cell cultures

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.

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.

the idea is that you eat this in moderation, along with fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables,

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?

meat substitute that is likely to be much healthier

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.

Alas, importing Japanese style intensive fat-shaming is unlikely.

Could we import active, fit, elderly Japanese men to make us feel like lazy fatties?

We've already synthesized "real" meat that may not be as good as real meat. Grain-fed beef can have an omega-3:omega-6 ratio several times worse than traditional grass-fed grass-finished beef, but everyone eats grain-fed since it's half the price. Time to fix the problem with a ban?

Grain fed is a misnomer- it’s actually grain finished- you’d go broke raising cattle from weaning on a grain diet. Ordinary grass fed steers are finished out on corn for a few weeks or months to cause rapid weight gain, which makes sense for farmers because they’re sold by the pound.

The omega 3:omega 6 ratio is different because the steers in question are obese at slaughter. The obesity makes the meat taste better and have a slightly better shelf life, which explains a big part of the popularity. Grass fed is more expensive in the USA in part because it’s aimed at a market which will pay more, and less because it’s a superior product.

Grain fed tastes better. I’ve heard a lot of English people say that steaks in America are so much better even than the high end (grass fed) stuff we get in the UK. Grain fed has more marbling which is in part what makes beef taste good. Many high end London steakhouses import US grain fed beef for customers and it’s usually (other than real Kobe etc) the most expensive thing on the menu.

There are distinctions between selective breeding/advanced animal husbandry and synthetic meat.

It's easier to mod a game than to make a new game from scratch.

The evidence synthesized infant formula is bad is entirely from confounded studies showing mothers who breast feed lead to better results. But mothers who breast feed have a lot of other advantages for kids.

We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way.

The potential for serious consequences that only show up a decade or two down the line is reason enough for me to foreswear this kind of technology until the research has been done. Maybe there's a manufacturing defect which means one in every ten-thousand pieces of meat has some fucked up prions in it - there are a bunch of ways serious issues could get through basic testing.

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:

Just six commodities — corn, soy, wheat, cotton, peanuts, and rice — account for 94% of FCIP support. Many of these commodities are not used to provide affordable nutrition but are instead heavily processed into the fillers and sugars that are likely a large part of people's health problems, including obesity.

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.

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.

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.

If you've ever had a regular soda and a diet soda you can usually notice a slight difference between the two.

Not slight at all.

I have shit taste buds and a shit sense of smell. But yeah this makes my main point stronger.

Diet Dr Pepper tastes more like Regular Dr Pepper

Human tongues are pretty sensitive, they can pick up very tiny differences in texture and taste.

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.

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.

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.

What do you mean "you can't, though"?

I mean you cannot, "right now", obtain lab grown meat of the quality you describe for any price.

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.

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.

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.

I'm confident it's plausible, biotech in general is progressing quickly, and getting something that roughly approximates meat just seems like a series of doable but meaningful technical challenges rather than something daunting like 'solving aging'. Might be a decade or so though.

or indeed with cutting firefighter numbers because there are far fewer residential fires than there were 50 years ago

That’s why (professional) firefighters now also double as paramedics in most places in America.

A substantial proportion of the US obesity crisis is due to HFCS subsidies for farmers

No evidence, but I honestly doubt this, it's too cute. Americans seem to have a strong desire for unhealthy food in general, I don't think HCFS is more fattening than other sugars, and the amount of sugar in food probably isn't that sensitive to the price given how much Americans seem to like having everything be sweet.

Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades.

And a staple of SF for longer than that... but in many SF settings, the vat-grown stuff is considered inferior.

in many SF settings, the vat-grown stuff is considered inferior

It would have to be, or else people wouldn't be growing it the traditional way any more. I suppose there could be a pure status signaling element but most people aren't going to care enough to sustain that at scale.

It's probably a lot more expensive than real meat in any reasonable scenario. In most soypunk the farmland is all poisoned nuclear waste, not that scifi writers have enough understanding of economics to make the alternatives realistic.

Meat might be the most capital+labor/calorie efficient food ever. Vegan nerd fantasies of vertical soy farms powered by millions of acres of solar panels can't match up to species that turn sunlight and rain into steak all by themselves.

Animals don't turn sunlight and rain into meat. You need to feed them plants. Which you have to grow first. Possibly on vertical farms run by hippy vegans.

Some animals can graze but I think this could sustain only than a small fraction of current meat production (after a quick googling, I saw the figures of 10% of beef production and 30% of sheep and goat meat production being sustained by grazing).

Most cows don't eat cultivated plants for their entire diet. They graze on "free" grasslands.

Is that actually true? The cows in the fields by the side of the highways of middle America, yes. sure. But what percentage of our meat comes from them and what percentage comes from the shoulder to shoulder cows in factory farms?

The US department of agriculture tends to be biased in a pro farming direction right? So this should be a reasonable source.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/sector-at-a-glance/

Cattle feeding operations are concentrated in the Great Plains region but are also located in parts of the Corn Belt, Southwest, and Pacific Northwest regions. Feedlots with less than 1,000-head capacity comprise most of U.S. feedlot operations, but they market a relatively small share of the fed cattle. Conversely, although feedlots with 1,000-head-or-greater capacity are less than 5 percent of total feedlots, they market 80–85 percent of fed cattle. Feedlots with a capacity of 32,000 head or more market around 40 percent of fed cattle. The industry continues to shift toward a small number of very large, specialized feedlots focused on raising high-quality cattle for a particular market, such as markets requiring cattle not treated with hormones and not fed beta agonists. USDA, NASS provides monthly Cattle on Feed reports.

Now... you may be wondering- what's a specialized feedlot? Do these cows really never graze? My searches indicate that feedlots generally aim to rapidly fatten cows on cultivated grains, but sometimes, cows are started in their youth on grazing, before being moved to concentrated feed lots for grain-finishing.

I'm not quite invested enough to do a full research essay quantifying the number of calories that come from "free" grass. But it seems safe to say that-

Most cows don't eat cultivated plants for their entire diet. They graze on "free" grasslands.

Is just false or misleading... At least in the United States. If your country's industry is a pastoral utopia then power to you.

Ok yes. The grain finished ones are starting on grasslands, you may well be the best kind of correct (technically correct). But then they bulk up on grains. What we really care about is how much non-free grain we use per cow and how many people we could feed with that land and labor. In fact... the 'free' grasslands also have opportunity costs, since land is a finite and often fungible resource for farming.

Factory farms for beef basically do not exist, especially not in the united states -- the feedlots that you mention take cows that have lived on grasslands their entire lives and fatten them up a bit. This makes them, well, fattier which humans prefer, and finishes them a little faster, but you could absolutely feed the demand for beef on grass alone with minimal cost impact. (particularly compared to artificial meat)

In fact... the 'free' grasslands also have opportunity costs, since land is a finite and often fungible resource for farming.

The free grasslands look like forest/scrub -- farming other things there is not economically viable, otherwise they wouldn't be free grasslands.

You have been grievously, grievously misinformed -- please don't spread it here.

Um. Ok. I've updated.

Having updated, I yield to anti-dan that they are more than just technichally correct. They are also correct. I'll also yield to you, for now- that the grazing fields can't be repurposed. I'm skeptical of this but I don't have the means to do a counterfactual analysis on every field at this time.

But as for factory farms, clearly you have a much stricter definition. I acknowledge that most cattle are not factory farmed their whole lives, and that the cattle in feedlots have more elbow room than in chicken factory farms.

but whatever you want to call these things: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Five+Rivers+Cattle+Feeding-+Interstate+Feeders/@42.2862795,-113.3138525,1875m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x80aaf6984afed193:0x249cafeffb8a8530!8m2!3d42.2831921!4d-113.3150227!16s%2Fg%2F1thkxj9_?entry=ttu

definitely exist, and are representative of the largest cattle finishing operations. In fact this is one of them. Now. the number of months spent here vary.

This company for instance claims that their cattle spend spring and summer grazing, then they spend 120 days in the feed lot. https://www.lazyt.com/the-story-of-your-beef

That's still over a third of their lives. And these numbers are fairly standard. 97% of cattle are grain finished, and that typically means something in the range of 6-15 months grazing followed by 4-6 months finishing. Depending on breed and operation.

Not all feed lots are the same, but the highest volume ones do look like this.

There. Is that accurate?

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But then they bulk up on grains. What we really care about is how much non-free grain we use per cow and how many people we could feed with that land and labor.

No, we don't, not really. We don't have a food shortage in the US, nor a lack of land (we have a lack of land in some spots desirable for humans to live, but there aren't many cattle in SF or NYC. Some in Newark, NJ but that's much less desirable. Nor are there cornfields there.) Worrying overmuch about those is optimizing for something that is, at this time, not much of a constraint.

Artificially-grown meat isn't free either. Sure, you eliminate the labor of some number of cowhands and slaughterhouse workers (and they won't thank you for it), but you're going to need meat factory workers, some of whom are probably more expensive labor than the cowhands and slaughterhouse workers. And all those calories which went into the cow in the form of grain to fatten it? You still need them; there's no free lunch here. Either you're still getting the energy from grain (which means you need to process the grain further, since the ruminant won't be doing it for you), or you're getting it from some other source such as natural gas.

Having updated, I yield to anti-dan that they are more than just technichally correct. They are also correct. I'll also yield to you, for now- that the grazing fields can't be repurposed. I'm skeptical of this but I don't have the means to do a counterfactual analysis on every field at this time.

This was my primary point. That most cows use mediocre land for much of their lives. Some probably do not. Its a big country. There are weird rents all over the place. But pure grain fed beef is way above average market price by 2-3x from what I see.

Can you link a study on that from any group that isn't openly pushing to abolish meat? Because I'm familiar with the propaganda tricks: classifying all rain that falls on grazing lands as "water used for animals", etc.

I know what my inputs and outputs are, and the inputs are extremely minimal. It's likely that the US wastes a lot of grain fattening up cows and even sheep (US carcass weights for "lambs" are double the UK's, which hurts quality for zero benefit), but those are inefficiencies due to our historically cheap feed prices and lack of innovation in decaying markets.

If you have specific counterfactuals that you want considered, I think we'll be better off doing the study ourselves. We should be able to get numbers on acreage and on gross industry input and output and run napkin math.

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Reports_By_Date/

Hmm. Yep ok. I can see why most people just let someone else do the several days of data science this is going to take. I still think gwerning it yourself is going to be your best bet at coming to a reasoned opinion you can trust though.

Around a decade ago I saw a report that some research group had produced vat-grown ground beef, and made a burger. At the time, the theoretical cost was $50 per burger, and it apparently tasted mediocre. But I have hope that America's engine of innovation (given time and effort and lack of government regulation) will improve quality and bring down prices until it's competitive. One of these decades. crosses fingers

It's probably a lot more expensive than real meat in any reasonable scenario.

Makes a ton of sense once you're in space. Delivering cow chunks from the surface of the earth could be extremely expensive (not to mention time-consuming) while assembling cow chunk analogues on site from available raw materials could be quite cheap given the right technology.

Ban is a bad policy for getting to the goal.

If I wanted to eliminate lab-grown meat, I'd target the organizations that create it. Open investigations into the researchers and funders looking for political extremism. Target the patentability and profitability of the technologies involved. ("You can't patent chicken!") Publicize the process that creates these products. Labeling doesn't go far enough, you want to associate the components of lab-grown with dangerous chemicals and bad health outcomes. (I think when you look into the science of what they're currently doing, and not the glowing press releases, this is basically the truth.) Banning lab-grown just makes it exotic, and does nothing to stop its development in other localities.

If I wanted to popularize lab-grown meat, I'd start by making it exotic and sexy. Growing chicken and steak might be the ultimate goal, but this is a losing proposition: everybody knows what beef is supposed to taste like. I would develop unusual meats: lab-grown shark fin, panda bear, lion steaks, elephant. These meats would have a winning price-tag compared to "real" meat, and nobody can tell if they're not good enough. Run a promotion where the profits from every $70 "Penguin Steak" go to sustaining Penguin habitats.

I've also thought about opening a shell company that would advertise and sell lab-grown human flesh steaks. Sell a fun and fancy experience of getting to be a cannibal, except it's "ethical". This would generate a lot of publicity and interest. But I'm not actually sure whether that would ultimately be a winning or losing move.

Penguin steaks would be a terrible idea (don't ask me how I know) but I think you're on to something overall.

There has to be at least one exotic meat that hits a sweet spot for: relatively tasty; more expensive in real life than the lab; nobody is familiar with the real thing. If I were in charge of a lab-grown meat company I'd throw money at this question until one suitable species could be identified. Ideally several. Find a few celebrity chefs willing to experiment with and serve the product. You might not want to go to the grocery and buy lab-grown meat for the grill, but your girlfriend will want to post nice Instagram selfies of herself enjoying the lab-grown whale meatballs at a fancy restaurant. Politicians are not going to ban your product if they enjoy it. If you could get lab-grown steaks served regularly at the French Laundry, it's over.

Artisinal meats are the perfect test-case for lab-grown. Everything is small-scale and gives the tech a chance to develop. Lab-grown will not win a head-to-head competition with real meat without significant R&D. Developing beef steak first seems to me like the worst proposition, driven by (well-meaning) idealists who want to replace meat consumption. Surely it'd be easier to pass off a fake chicken nugget than a steak. Steak is something everyone is familiar with, is a food cooked to be eaten as itself with minimal coverings or dress. People will not accept lab-grown steak as viable until the technology is fully mature. Why would you pay 5x for a substitute that's worse? Because it's moral? That's a terrible proposition for most consumers. If the lab-grown meat industry wasn't run by idealists with a chip-on-their-shoulder about the morality of meat, they could easily see the business model I'm describing.

Galapagos Tortoises are apparently tasty enough that it was a real problem getting living specimens back because they kept getting eaten.

I'm sure their deliciousness was at least somewhat exaggerated due to hunger being the best sauce, but they were certainly praised highly.

The 17th-century English pirate, explorer, and naturalist William Dampier wrote, "They are so extraordinarily large and fat, and so sweet, that no pullet eats more pleasantly,"[136] while Captain James Colnett of the Royal Navy wrote of "the land tortoise which in whatever way it was dressed, was considered by all of us as the most delicious food we had ever tasted."[137] US Navy captain David Porter declared, "after once tasting the Galapagos tortoises, every other animal food fell off greatly in our estimation ... The meat of this animal is the easiest of digestion, and a quantity of it, exceeding that of any other food, can be eaten without experiencing the slightest of inconvenience."[102]

I've always wondered how much reprovisioning affected their judgement. The tortoise would have been their first fresh meat after months at sea depleted their stocks of everything except dried peas and biscuits full of weevils. Hunger is the best spice, after all.

Snapping turtle tastes excellent. If they tasted anything like that I'm not surprised they were eaten.

Mammoth DNA exists well enough to in-theory be cloned. Green sea turtles are legendarily tasty. Bear meat is hard to get but supposedly pretty good.

I’ve had bear meat on several occasions, and while it is good, I don’t think it’s that much better than venison, squirrel, or beef. It’s also not exotic enough. Mammoth, whale, and giant tortoise meat all seem like winners though.

Ok ok tell us what it tastes like

Stringy, gamey, wrong kind of greasy. Like it's got fish oil in its flesh.

You can try puffin in Iceland, which is similar in a lot of ways.

Seems pretty niche. The reason people know what beef tastes like is that beef tastes very, very good. For more people than not, it's basically optimized for deliciousness already. There is just not much better than a good cheeseburger or steak. I'm fairly adventurous with food and love trying different meats, but the reality is that none of them are actually as good as just getting a classic cut ribeye and grilling it up.

You need to start with a niche, because the product isn't good enough to compete in the general market. Nobody will pay 5x for a steak substitute that's worse. But lots of people would try, at least once, an exotic whale steak. It can't cost much more to grow that than a beef steak. You wouldn't pay $100 for a bad steak, but would you pay $100 to try shark fin soup? It's an endangered species, it's an illegal dish in many places, and isn't that a good deal?

Once you have a niche, there's a productive market that incentivizes lab-grown meats to get better and better (instead of relying on government handouts and PR campaigns to convince people to replace meat in their diet).

I agree that beef is delicious, and I don't especially want to replace a nice steak with something lab-grown. I'm skeptical of the whole technology. But in a Machiavellian sense, this is the line I would pursue if I was in the industry. I actually feel like this is a billion-dollar idea lying on the ground, and if I had the money to invest in lab-grown and impose my vision, I would.

Or clone DNA from extinct animals. I'm kind of curious on whether Hallucigenia tastes like shrimp.

I would even be in favor of inventing meats that don't exist. If some proprietary Frankenblend of, say, 25% shrimp, 40% pork, 35% passenger pigeon were delicious, why would you not sell it?

It's funny how they missed a profitable startup niche because of the deliberate rush to "NORMALIZE" vat-grown meat (in the leftist Twitter sense of "normalize X", meaning to make mandatory through social pressure and regulations).

They couldn't start with exotic meats for rich people because the funders wanted it to be a 1-1 replacement for burgers and chicken cutlets instead, and being a niche product would have undermined their moral power.

I would develop unusual meats: lab-grown shark fin, panda bear, lion steaks, elephant.

Primeval Foods is currently working on exotic cultured meat including lion, zebra, giraffe, and tiger. (On a semi-related note, Because Animals is working on cat food based on cultured mouse meat.) But most companies are focusing on the meats that currently sell in very large quantities, for the obvious reason that they expect those will continue to be the most popular choices even if people have more exotic options for the same price.

If I wanted to eliminate lab-grown meat, I'd target the organizations that create it. Open investigations into the researchers and funders looking for political extremism. Target the patentability and profitability of the technologies involved. ("You can't patent chicken!") Publicize the process that creates these products. Labeling doesn't go far enough, you want to associate the components of lab-grown with dangerous chemicals and bad health outcomes. (I think when you look into the science of what they're currently doing, and not the glowing press releases, this is basically the truth.) Banning lab-grown just makes it exotic, and does nothing to stop its development in other localities.

What political extremism? "You can't patent chicken" isn't going to work as a slogan when 1) you can, in fact, patent literal breeds of actual chickens and 2) none of the things being patented remotely resemble chickens.

Lab-grown meat strikes me as like deciding that it's evil to draw pictures of Mohammed, but if you use a special light refraction method, you can have something that looks sort of like Mohammed but doesn't count as a picture for religious purposes, so Muslims lobby for use of this method and dozens of scientists spend millions of dollars figuring out how to get people to accept this method instead of normal photography.

I fail to see how this analogy is remotely appropriate.

The primary reason that people who are vegan/vegetarian (for non-religious reasons, and even plenty of those) condemn the consumption of meat is because their heart aches at the idea of eating cute little animals, with souls, emotions and a life of endless frolicking in the pastures to look forward to. Most of the arguments advanced alongside that primary concern, such as "sustainability" and environmental issues or resource consumption, are there just to buttress their core concern.

I wholeheartedly agree with @Quantumfreakonomics when he says that:

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.

After all, I've repeatedly said much the same myself.

Hence the recent fad, only just losing steam, of feverishly trying to find vegan substitutes for meat products. Impossible Burgers and all that jazz. Vegans, begrudgingly, note that they either like meat or that people who otherwise care dearly about animal welfare are dissuaded by the dullness of a life without nice steaks or a side of ribs to go with it.

So lab grown meat completely cuts the Gordian knot. No cute animals were hurt (or at least far fewer, if you don't look too closely at where fetal bovine serum comes from, but presumably we can avoid that too). What's there left to object to, on primary moral grounds? A chunk of vatgrown muscle tissue is probably less sentient than an equivalent amount of fungi.

But of course, like the environmentalist movement and the cleanest and greenest source of energy we had/have/can have*, nuclear, much of the opposition arises from the abhorrent idea that their self-flagellation and virtue signaling will become entirely redundant. What brownie points do you get for not eating a cow, when the average Joe who just wants to grill is using a steak that's indistinguishable from one made the old fashioned way, tastes just as good, and might even be cost competitive?

We're not there yet, and the last overview I read of the topic suggested it's not going to be easy at all, but the sheer idea that their performative ascetism is moot must gnaw at their bones (veganly).

*Barring fusion, or farming black holes I guess.

The primary reason that people who are vegan/vegetarian (for non-religious reasons, and even plenty of those) condemn the consumption of meat is because their heart aches at the idea of eating cute little animals, with souls,

The primary reason why people don't like pictures of Mohammed is because their heart aches at the idea, except for religious reasons.

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'm sure that if non-picture pictures of Mohammed were good enough, non-Muslims would be agnostic about using them. It's not as if non-Muslims think that pictures have to be real pictures, as long as they look fine and serve their function. Same as for the meat.

This makes zero sense.

What do you honestly think is the "function" of Mohammad pictures? I say it's "antagonizing Muslims and rallying anti-Islamists". There's no such thing as "technically isn't a picture of Mohammad" that magically makes a Muslim think it's okay.

In contrast, sticking it to the vegans is clearly not the only, or even the primary function of eating real meat.

I don't believe you don't see the difference, so spill the real point you're trying to make.

There's no such thing as "technically isn't a picture of Mohammad" that magically makes a Muslim think it's okay.

It's a hypothetical.

Also, if you really need a real-world example, Muslims are forbidden from charging interest, but have figured out ways to have non-interest interest. Demands that the US switch over to using it, even if it was as good as real interest and even if voluntarily, would be seen as absurd.

Most vegans I know aren't particularly fond of Impossible Burgers and such, or other recent "meat imitation products" (non-meatish meat substitutes like tofu are another matter). The supposed constituency is probably "vegan-curious" hipsters who occasionally cook non-meat dishes, though it hasn't taken hold of them, either.

Impossible burgers just aren’t very good, though- I tried one on a Friday(they got rolled out in restaurants near me right before lent, probably for that reason) and decided to go back to fish thereafter.

Impossible burgers are good. But unless I'm eating out anyway they're not worth the price hike.
For me its really a convenience thing. If the mild to moderate inconveniences were to drop below those of the traditional meat industry I would definitely go vegetarian. (we have homegrown eggs. We could be optimizing better for the well-being of our chickens but they're worlds away from factory farmed chickens. 90/10 rule applies IMO).

Until then I can't really spare the mental energy.

I consider eating factory farmed meat to be sinful in the same way that all skill issues are sinful.
But self-flagellating isn't an effective motivator for me. So what purpose would that serve other than to just cause more suffering?

I'm a vegetarian, and I would kill for a nice porterhouse. Although I probably know a couple of vegetarians/vegans who'd probably be upset that they'd lose the moral justification for the defining part of their personality, the large majority would absolutely start eating steak given the chance.

I would kill for a nice porterhouse.

You have that option, though it's quite difficult given the other work involved. Or you can just buy the ones where someone else has done the killing and all the rest for you. If you'd (literally) kill for a decent steak, there's no reason to be a vegetarian.

the sheer idea that their performative ascetism is moot must gnaw at their bones (veganly).

It's a little confusing to read this when it's not the vegans that are passing bans on lab grown meat.

I never had a problem with any of the aesthetics of either lab grown or fake meat. In fact, personally I think both are good in the sense that it would convince people to a least give it a go and in a way that doesn’t affect their lifestyle that much.

What's there left to object to, on primary moral grounds?

For the strict vegans, the objection really does seem to be that it comes from the incorrect kingdom. They don't eat mussels or honey, for example. Veganism doesn't hold to some consistent morally coherent standard, it's a quasi-religious practice where the lack of high-quality human food is sort of the point. I think this is what you're getting at in the next paragraph; I guess we're going to find out how much is about not wanting to eat cute fuzzy animals and how much is about avoiding food-sin.

What self_made_human said.

But also. Arbitrary religious dietary restrictions do serve a purpose, and that is incentivizing/enabling purity norms in the food industry.

If you're lactose intolerant and want to be 100% sure you're not getting traces of milk in your meat dish, you can generally trust the kosher label to mean that a Mashgichim from the Kosher certification agency has treated this with a religious tier of seriousness.

Religious food restrictions taken seriously serve as a third party quality check. Third party quality checks are good to have available, even if the underlying religious justifications for them are stupid.

Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons: Cattle farmers and the meat industry want to kneecap their economic competition, conservatives dread a future where steak is banned and scientists in white coats force feed them pink slime, hardcore vegans think that true commitment to their cause should require sacrifices and this sort of moral shortcut would undermine the whole puritan thing they have going on, economists hate it because it's currently expensive as hell, non-Westerners laugh at the whole enterprise, and environmentalists who can do math insist on switching to insect, soy, or mushroom protein instead.

Really the only groups rooting for its success at the moment are biotech investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing, biologists who are overconfident in their ability to pull it off, and the aforementioned liberals and environmentalists who haven't crunched the numbers.

The issue is that we can't have 10 billion peole living a western lifestyle on a finite planet. The amount of water, artificial fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics required for 10 billion people eating meat twice a day is simply not feasible. I don't think anyone is really enthusiastic over bug meat, it is simply an adaption to over population. Personally I would go for fewer people living on less industrially produced meat.

Apparently

we

can.

Food has been getting cheaper, we're growing more of it on less farmland since the 1990s, and malnutrition is declining rapidly. There's no reason to expect that all of the trends that have been occurring since the industrial revolution will suddenly reverse, especially since global birth rates (gross) peaked in 2016 and global TFR is about to fall below replacement (if it hasn't already).

While consuming far more diesel than ever, far more artificial fertilizers, degrading soil faster than ever and using enormous amounts of antibiotics. Modern agriculture isn't sustainable, it is built on using slowly replinishing resources at a high rate.

Good news! The price system has your back! As we continue using up all these finite resources, prices will rise, and people will naturally shift to alternatives out of their own self-interest. The bonus is that you don't even need to do anything. You don't need to say anything; you don't need to argue online for a position; you don't need to ban/subsidize anything; you don't need to organize any rallies or political movements. You can just be happy in your own personal knowledge that the future will give you your preferred reality and your own personal confidence that the prices of your selected set of finite resources will certainly rise in the future. You might even make some speculative wagers in futures markets that could make you a bundle of money with which you can extra enjoy the future world. After all, that's why prices of hydrocarbons just kept ramping up from the early 2000s and there was no technology change whatsoever that reversed that trend. One thing is for sure; we're absolutely not heading to a world where we get more value out of using less stuff (on an absolute scale, not marginal).

I have no idea how things will shake out in other parts of the world, but North America has no trouble sustaining tens of millions of ruminants indefinitely.

The issue is that we can't have 10 billion peole living a western lifestyle on a finite planet.

Have you tried, like -- not doing that?

I presume the primary proponents are persons who prefer to partake of provisions procured without the pain of prey.

(Sorry, got to "proponents" and couldn't help myself.)

I respect it.

BioTech investors.

These also include the 5 food corporations that own almost all food processing and would love to have a new, very safe market.

It's all so depressing.

We're banning a future of delicious and nutritious food with zero animal cruelty.

We'll probably end up at a future where we're forced to eat seed oils and government workers are paid to torture animals as a jobs program.

Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons

Notably, several countries in Europe (searching tells me France, Italy, and Austria, among others) are also looking to ban lab-grown meat, although their reasoning looks a lot more like the controlled-origin laws from what I can tell. IMO there's something to the "this is how we've always made it" that may merit protection, although I'm personally more ambivalent on the subject. Or the various labeling disputes for the current generation meat substitutes, which I think probably merit clear labeling.

Dumping an EA veganism quote for people to reference.

Vegan advocacy can spur the transition sooner. I submit that one of the most important efforts that Effective Altruists could be doing is triggering the veganism S-curve, i.e. reaching the tipping point earlier. It’s a unique S-curve in that it’ll be both technologically and socially driven. In this post, I delve into the social component and the impact that individuals and institutions could have by steering toward more uncompromisingly vegan diets.
I see the transition reaching completion when all mainstream restaurants and institutions serve 100% vegan meals due to significant demand from consumers. I expect stragglers such as Chick-Fil-A, who doubled down on their stance against same-sex marriage. But for the most part, I expect all progressive-leaning institutions to switch over. Eventually, the Ivy League universities, the Apples/Googles, and leading newspapers will cease serving animal products in their dining halls/events.

The biggest tipping point can occur through institutions. Jacy Reese Anthis’ great book The End of Animal Farming emphasizes the tractability of advocating toward institutions. Imagine the cascading effect if Harvard University or The New York Times had a full vegan mandate, e.g. vegan food for all events, dining, and travel expenses. Those would be big jumps in some of the values above, e.g. D. Institutions are sensitive to social winds as we saw during the MeToo and George Floyd movements. For example, the Golden Globes was effectively annihilated for not acting fast enough on inclusivity.

But there is room for flexitarianism. What matters is hardline vegan demand on planned occasions. A flexitarian may have a vegan Wednesday, in which case, the same awkward restaurant interaction may play out then. I see D as the proportion of occasions where the vegan demand occurs. Whether it’s a binary or tailing distribution among people is immaterial. Newly elected mayor Eric Adams started Vegan Fridays at New York City public schools. I anticipate this having a positive, significant effect on the S-curve transition

This is what desantis is fighting, and I don't see how anyone could blame him for it. They see no issue using any dirty tactic to ban meat, so why should anyone defending themselves against the attack feel any regret about clobbering them with whatever weapon they have on hand?
They want their enemies "effectively annihilated", what right do they have to protest their victims doing it to them first? You can even have fun #me-too-ing them or copying "firey but mostly peaceful" 2020 riots: they've already endorsed those tactics!

Do not compromise or negotiate with terrorists, do not trust them when they lie about their goals to your face and brag about it to their co-conspirators where they think you can't hear them.

I think the same instinct drove people to attack mask wearers in the early COVID days. It's also why people are intolerant of cultural practices which don't obviously affect them, like women wearing hijabs. It's harder for something to become mandatory if it remains rare.

Basically "what is not mandatory is forbidden," I take it?

It’s also a lot harder to make it common if you’re not willing to start small. I think the flexitarians will move the needle toward reduced demand for meat simply by forming the habit of eating less meat. And as more people are choosing to eat meat less and trying out vegetarian and vegan recipes and asking for those options in restaurants, then it’s going to be much more mainstream. And in fact I see it happening n grocery stores alongside keto and gluten free. People trying it out and doing it every once in a while was more than enough to put enough options in grocery stores that even in Missouri, I could easily get the kinds of foods that I want in any one of those diets. As time goes on, I expect that even more people will be willing to try black bean burgers or fake meat nuggets and never look back.

The problem there of course is that Vegan groups don't speak for or represent the opinion of most people, probably even for most people who might think developing lab grown meat might be somewhat useful, but still are fine with also eating animals.

So you pre-emptively create a division that might not ever have been a problem. Now if I do think lab meat could be useful, you are driving me to have to side with the vegans, in order to oppose your ban! When my opinion is probably just sure, let's try it out, might be handy for feeding people and if it turns out to be cheaper then that's a good thing, but I am still gonna enjoy my regular ole cow-burger.

It's only a good tactic if the radical side really is strong enough to co-opt the moderates, and my experience is at least for veganism that is just not gonna fly. Otherwise you are actually spurring a coalition to form, that may have remained fractured.

What if we more than suspect that you will side with the vegans anyway, the second veganism becomes the new leftist party line rather than the "admirable radical fringe" it is today?
In that case the way to control your opinion is by shaping the law so that you never adopt that position as the "safe, default leftist option."

The person I quoted drew the comparison to liberals suddenly going all-in on transsexuals the second it became the safe "in" thing to do. I'm not making it up: I agree with her that's how you decide what to believe in.

Then you are incorrect. If I didn't commit to veganism when my wife wanted me too, then I am not going to because other people do. I have no qualms about eating cats or dogs either.

Fads come and go.

Because if things worked the way you think they do them presumably YOU and everyone else should currently support lab grown meat because it is currently not legislated against?

Its just not how things work.

I could find similar quotes online by white nationalists planning their own long march through the institutions. That doesn't mean I should assume any policy proposal such people might agree with is being directed by them and must be fought tooth and nail to keep us off a slippery slope towards racial separatism. Playing culture war whack-a-mole makes you look crazy to outsiders and weakens one's position, whether you are a wokescold arguing about Halloween costumes or a conservative grandstanding on behalf of steak and bacon.

EA had 46 billion dollars in committed funding in 2021, and was growing at 37% per year, according to 80000hrs. If you could find white nationalists with that kind of clout, quoting them would be quite reasonable. And even I would be worried enough by that point to avoid getting a tan in case they won.

EA had 46 billion dollars in committed funding in 2021, and was growing at 37% per year, according to 80000hrs.

Look at the date. How much of this "commitment" was from SBF?

"what if the proles hate our guts so much that they ban cultured meat out of spite?"

What if the proles have caught on to the fact that it won't be 'tasty cheap nutritious cultured meat,' it will be 'expensive goo of dubious quality', and used as leverage in support of bans/punitive taxation on regular meat -- the justification being that 'modern alternatives exist, eat shit your beans, proles'.

I need to write something (and then edit out all the rage) about the "appeal to unshared principles." It's that 2020 meme: "bro the communists are being arrested you have to help them bro please I know they'd kill you and your family but what about libertarian values bro?"

Like there is no tactic that makes me instinctively hate someone more than a leftist who wants to mandate outcome B telling people that they shouldn't mandate outcome not-B because "mandates are wrong". It's pure "Darwin says whatever words make the meat puppets do what he wants in any given moment," with zero respect for the target as a thinking human being.

Like there is no tactic that makes me instinctively hate someone more than a leftist who wants to mandate outcome B telling people that they shouldn't mandate outcome not-B because "mandates are wrong". It's pure "Darwin says whatever words make the meat puppets do what he wants," with zero respect for the target as a thinking human being.

This seems like a very strange thing to say. A vegetarian leftist who wants to mandate the end of animal slaughter wants to do so because they think it is unjustified violence, comparable to murder. But they understand that their values aren't universally shared, so they come up with more limited animal welfare arguments grounded in more commonly held values in the wider society they belong to. That's not demonstrating "zero respect for the target as a thinking human being" - it's being pragmatic about how to achieve some limited version of their goals and build a coalition in a representative liberal democracy.

Like, if a pro-choice person A is talking to a morally pro-life, politically libertarian person B, of course A is going to appeal to B's political libertarianism when it comes to discussing how the government should legislate around abortion, regardless of what other disagreements they might have. This isn't trying to turn other people into meat puppets to do your bidding, it's respecting and understanding other people enough to try and meet them where they're at in order to achieve a compromise outcome both of you can accept.

That's not demonstrating "zero respect for the target as a thinking human being" - it's being pragmatic about how to achieve some limited version of their goals and build a coalition in a representative liberal democracy.

It's A pretending to share a value that is important to B to convince B to help toward's A's policy goals, whereas A actually holds both the B and the value in contempt. One of the cleanest examples of this, historically, is the western Communist's appeal for human rights including freedom of speech, but only as it applies to their treatment by western governments. If the Communist were to take power, those rights would disappear instantly and any attempt to appeal to them on the basis of that shared value would reveal that it was never shared in the first place. There's not really a true coalition, unless you consider the conman and his mark in a coalition to steal the mark's money.

This is less clear on issues of bodily autonomy and meat production, but probably not hard to see less charitable angles if you zoom out a few levels and look at a bigger picture than just those issues.

It's A pretending to share a value that is important to B to convince B to help toward's A's policy goals, whereas A actually holds both the B and the value in contempt.

So, the generalized version of the style of argumentation this meme is aimed at?

A smuggie is worth ten thousand words. The classic ones strike right at the heart of the issues, it's incredible.

This seems like a very strange thing to say.

Why are they the only ones who get to be "pragmatic"? Other people can "pragmatically" realize they have gals beyond the limited version they're proposing now, and "pragmatically" move to deny them their goals, and prevent any coalition from forming, even if theoretically they wouldn't be opposed to the limited version on principle.

I mean, sure, people are pragmatic and meta-pragmatic all the time. I don't really see the point of this anti-lab grown meat bill, since I think meat eating is so culturally dominant that it won't be wiped out within our life times just because lab grown meat becomes affordable and widely available. More likely, vegetarianism will remain a costly social signal of a minority of people until the diet becomes indistinguishable from meat eating in terms of price and flavor, and then when it is practically effortless a law might eventually pass that bans animal slaughter altogether.

It's going to be exactly what happened with slavery. Banning slavery when an entire regional economy depends on it is difficult to accomplish, and probably requires a war and imposition of force. Living in a world where everyone has 200 to 8000 energy slaves thanks to electricity and industrialization makes being anti-slavery very easy, basically without cost to the individual. I think I would be more likely to see the point of slavery if I had to fetch my own water, grow, prepare and cook my own food from scratch, clean my clothes by hand, wash my dishes by hand, etc.

"bro the communists are being arrested you have to help them bro please I know they'd kill you and your family but what about libertarian values bro?"

I extend my libertarian values to communists and other people who want to murder me and castrate/imprison my descendants so long as libertarians are in power (and so there's no actual threat of the inherently-corrupt ever being in charge; the entire point of allowing corrupt talk [identity-supremacy being the best example] in the first place is that there's generally at least a kernel of truth in what they say, and we can absorb it without stepping into the trap- in the "it's not what goes into a man that defiles him, it's what comes out" sense).

Indeed, this is the folly of the liberal; to assume that (sociological-economic-technological) conditions that permit non-corruption will exist forever and not just be enabled by a specific combination of those three from 1945 to 1973ish. A smart observer (Orwell) in a country that had yet to be positively affected by those conditions (England, 1948) elsewhere in the world would come up with an accurate description of how the future would work, and this would have been possible pre-computer.

I could have treated my enemies with that respect in 1950. I could have treated my enemies with that respect in 1970. I could maybe have treated my enemies with that respect in 1990.

I cannot do that today, so now I have to accept market shortfall on the net good that "developing lab-grown meat" would bring me because my [domestic] enemy will just use it as yet another excuse to hurt me and tax my virtues at a marginal rate of 100%. EVs are another example, so are smart guns (in the New Jersey sense). Neither rum-runners nor Edgar Friendly can survive a computer-assisted State.

I was trying to find a way to connect the vat-meat and fingerprint-gun mandates without explaining all the background, because it does seem like a perfect parallel. "We're openly pushing this technology to destroy an industry we hate, and don't care if the replacement works as long as we can use it for that purpose"

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.

from brewing to mycoprotein cultivation

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."

It’s a digital-era narrative we’ve come to accept, even expect: Powerful new tools will allow companies to rethink everything, untethering us from systems we’d previously taken for granted. Countless news articles have suggested that a paradigm shift driven by cultured meat is inevitable, even imminent. But Wood wasn’t convinced. For him, the idea of growing animal protein was old news, no matter how science-fictional it sounded. Drug companies have used a similar process for decades, a fact Wood knew because he’d overseen that work himself.

…

Wood couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In his view, GFI’s TEA report did little to justify increased public investment. He found it to be an outlandish document, one that trafficked more in wishful thinking than in science. He was so incensed that he hired a former Pfizer colleague, Huw Hughes, to analyze GFI’s analysis. Today, Hughes is a private consultant who helps biomanufacturers design and project costs for their production facilities; he’s worked on six sites devoted to cell culture at scale. Hughes concluded that GFI’s report projected unrealistic cost decreases, and left key aspects of the production process undefined, while significantly underestimating the expense and complexity of constructing a suitable facility.

…

“After a while, you just think: Am I going crazy? Or do these people have some secret sauce that I’ve never heard of?” Wood said. “And the reality is, no—they’re just doing fermentation. But what they’re saying is, ‘Oh, we’ll do it better than anyone else has ever, ever done.”

…

GFI’s imagined facility would be both unthinkably vast and, well, tiny. According to the TEA, it would produce 10,000 metric tons—22 million pounds—of cultured meat per year, which sounds like a lot. For context, that volume would represent more than 10 percent of the entire domestic market for plant-based meat alternatives (currently about 200 million pounds per year in the U.S., according to industry advocates). And yet 22 million pounds of cultured protein, held up against the output of the conventional meat industry, barely registers. It’s only about .0002, or one-fiftieth of one percent, of the 100 billion pounds of meat produced in the U.S. each year. JBS’s Greeley, Colorado beefpacking plant, which can process more than 5,000 head of cattle a day, can produce that amount of market-ready meat in a single week.

And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, GFI’s facility might not come any cheaper than a large conventional slaughterhouse. With hundreds of production bioreactors installed, the scope of high-grade equipment would be staggering. According to one estimate, the entire biopharmaceutical industry today boasts roughly 6,300 cubic meters in bioreactor volume. (1 cubic meter is equal to 1,000 liters.) The single, hypothetical facility described by GFI would require nearly a third of that, just to make a sliver of the nation’s meat.

…

It’s a complex, precise, energy-intensive process, but the output of this single bioreactor train would be comparatively tiny. The hypothetical factory would need to have 130 production lines like the one I’ve just described, with more than 600 bioreactors all running simultaneously. Nothing on this scale has ever existed—though if we wanted to switch to cultivated meat by 2030, we’d better start now. If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.

All of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator. That’s where things get complicated. It’s where critics say—and even GFI’s own numbers suggest—that cell-cultured meat may never be economically viable, even if it’s technically feasible.

…

“A key difference in the CE Delft study is that everything was assumed to be food-grade,” Swartz said. That distinction, of whether facilities will be able to operate at food- or pharma-grade specs, will perhaps more than anything determine the future viability of cultivated meat.

The Open Philanthropy report assumes the opposite: that cultivated meat production will need to take place in aseptic “clean rooms” where virtually no contamination exists. For his cost accounting, Humbird projected the need for a Class 8 clean room—an enclosed space where piped-in, purified oxygen blows away threatening particles as masked, hooded workers come in and out, likely through an airlock or sterile gowning room. To meet international standards for airborne particulate matter, the air inside would be replaced at a rate of 10 to 25 times an hour, compared to 2 to 4 times in a conventional building. The area where the cell lines are maintained and seeded would need a Class 6 clean room, an even more intensive specification that runs with an air replacement rate of 90 to 180 times per hour.

The simple reason: In cell culture, sterility is paramount. Animal cells “grow so slowly that if we get any bacteria in a culture—well, then we’ve just got a bacteria culture,” Humbird said. “Bacteria grow every 20 minutes, and the animal cells are stuck at 24 hours. You’re going to crush the culture in hours with a contamination event.”

Viruses also present a unique problem. Because cultured animal cells are alive, they can get infected just the way living animals can.

“There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick,” Humbird said. “Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line. The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”

If even a single speck of bacteria can spoil batches and halt production, clean rooms may turn out to be a basic, necessary precondition. It may not matter if governments end up allowing cultured meat facilities to produce at food-grade specs, critics say—cells are so intensely vulnerable that they’ll likely need protection to survive.

…

Of course, companies could try. But that might be a risky strategy, said Neil Renninger, a chemical engineer who has spent a lot of time around the kind of equipment required for cell culture. Today, he is on the board of Ripple Foods, a dairy alternatives company that he co-founded. Before that, for years, he ran Amyris, a biotechnology company that uses fermentation to produce rare molecules like squalene—an ingredient used in a range of products from cosmetics to cancer therapeutics, but is traditionally sourced unsustainably from shark liver oil.

“Contamination was an issue” at Amyris, he said. “You’re getting down to the level of making sure that individual welds are perfect. Poor welds create little pits in the piping, and bacteria can hide out in those pits, and absolutely ruin fermentation runs.”

…

The risks are even more dire when it comes to slow-growing animal cells in large reactors, because bacteria will overwhelm the cells more quickly. At the scale envisioned by proponents of cultured meat, there is little room for error. But if aseptic production turns out to be necessary, it isn’t going to come cheap. Humbird found that a Class 8 clean room big enough to produce roughly 15 million pounds of cultured meat a year would cost about $40 to $50 million dollars. That figure doesn’t reflect the cost of equipment, construction, engineering, or installation. It simply reflects the materials needed to run a sterile work environment, a clean room sitting empty.

According to Humbird’s report, those economics will likely one day limit the practical size of cultured meat facilities: They can only be big enough to house a sweet spot of two dozen 20,000-liter bioreactors, or 96 smaller perfusion reactors. Any larger, and the clean room expenses start to offset any benefits from adding more reactors. The construction costs grow faster than the production costs drop.

Also "Is Lab-Grown Meat Commercially Feasible?":

The first of Humbird's grievances is the need for a cheap and plentiful supply of nutrients for the cells. [15] Currently, such cell food is produced for pharmaceutical purposes, so is expensive and not produced in the vast quantities required have cultured meat supplant animal meat on the global market. [15] In fact, nutrients are the currently the most expensive part of cultured meat production. [15] On top of that, the most popular source for key biochemicals needed for proper cell growth is fetal bovine serum (FBS). [16] FBS is harvested (lethally) from unborn cattle after the mother is slaughtered. [16] A replacement for FBS will have to be found to keep the ethics people on cultured meat's side. Additionally, the cells' food would need to be extremely clean. In the case of animal meat, any trace toxins in the animal feed are (mostly) filtered out by the animal's liver, and do not end up in the muscle. However, for cultured meat, the cellular slurry inside the bioreactor has no liver, meaning any toxin left in the feed is put directly on your plate.

An effective scale-up of cultured meat production would also require an incredibly clean work environment. The warm, nutrient-rich bioreactor, ideal for animal cell growth, is also the perfect environment for pathogens (bacteria and viruses). If a single pathogen managed to get a foothold in the bioreactor, it would quickly overwhelm the animal cells, killing the entire batch. This restriction requires labs to be at least Class 6 cleanrooms. [15] Importantly, since that level of sanitation requires all pipes, windows, etc. to be perfectly sealed, as well as ventilation replacing the air 25 times an hour, they get much more expensive with size. Essentially, you can have a large factory or a clean factory. Cultured meat requires both. In animals, pathogens are mostly dealt with by the immune system. Since the cell slurry has no immune system, great care and expense must be invested to ensure the cells' safety.

The final problem I'll discuss is the limits on the size of the bioreactors. Larger bioreactors are more space-efficient, allowing you to have smaller cleanrooms, reducing those sanitation costs. However, larger bioreactors are also more susceptible to disease, since pathogens can ruin the entire batch. Beyond that cost balance lies another problem with larger bioreactors: waste management. When left to their own devices, cells build up waste products which slow down future cell growth. Cycling out this waste effectively is only possible in small bioreactors, requiring more reactors, therefore larger and much more expensive cleanrooms. [15] Another possible solution is to use slow-growing cell cultures, since they are more waste-efficient, however less frequent batches means again more reactors are required, again ratcheting up the price. [15] In animals, waste is extracted via blood vessels. Since cell cultures have no blood vessels, cell waste becomes a problem.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

Is that what is happening. I have to assume its some meat lobby that got this bill written up an introduced, plus the general revulsion that you can gin up when a person thinks of a ball of meat in a bulb being massaged by a robot.

DeSantis seems to think connecting lab-grown meat to "elites" and the "World Economic Forum" is winning rhetoric. We on the inside know that those aren't great descriptions of "rationalist nerds", but this is the same rhetoric that red-tribe conservatives used about SBF. To Joe Shmoe of Nowheresville Baptist Church, those secularist eggheads are all the same.

The vegan nerds can't be said to be "behind" the push for fake meat, because the endless funding is coming from the "elite" set desantis identified.

I mean, lab grown meat is an "elite" thing though. Never heard someone stocking at a Wal Mart warehouse talk about it.

Eh, is it actually all that weird to consider rationalist nerds elites?

My sense was that EA, at least, had plenty of money, especially before FTX exploded.

And I'm sure they're having a sizable impact on AI policy.

the suffering is not an integral part of the process

I beg to differ. The spite I feel towards vegans improves the pleasure from eating meat. Also the suffering is a bulwark against becoming like that girl featured here recently, who had turned her apartment into a breeding colony for pest insects.

Maybe I’m just squeamish but I didn’t find my visit to a slaughterhouse to be very pleasant (though the actual farmers I was with thought it was nasty business too).

The suffering of the worker in doing an extremely bloody and dirty job is something I don’t think we’d lose much in getting rid of, there’s no self-reliance or virtue of the hunt in a series of bolt gun shots.

I once again find the solution to be localizing the matter. There is something that is vaguely grotesque about industrial-scale slaughter, even for those of us that don't find anything morally objectionable about. Nonetheless, I know farmers and butchers, and they aren't particularly bothered by their work, and I think it's precisely because they're sufficiently close to it and doing it on a sufficiently small-scale that they're confident that the animals were humanely raised and slaughtered. Yeah, it's quite literally bloody and grisly work, but no worse than the same operation conducted on a deer that you've shot and killed. I wouldn't go so far as saying that I like gutting and skinning an animal, but you get on with it and it's not that big of a deal. I've done worse to mice as a research scientist, I did feel bad about that, and the marginal number of ruminants required to feed a family is a hell of a lot lower than the number of cute fuzzy animals necessary to do immunology.

Well, industrial scale makes it vastly more efficient. That's the perverse thing.

Some ag scientist once got fired, or into hot water for saying "cows eat grass" because.. it's no longer entirely true. A lot of them are fed other stuff, namely, and they don't take too well to it.

Pasturing them on grass which is the humane way requires either engineering better grass or would increase cost by a fair bit. Americans could afford it, eastern Europe or such places, half of the people who eat beef couldn't eat it anymore.

If vegans were nicer to you, would this reduce your happiness on account of feeling less spite towards vegans and therefore enjoying meat less? If I'm extra douchey to you, will this increase your happiness on net, on account of you getting more out of your next burger?

I'm 90% sure you're 50/50 [being facetious] / [saying this because it gives you that same warm spiteful feeling you describe.] But I'm sure you'd find other culture wars to get your warm fuzzies from if this one went the way of the dodo.
...
Shame about those dodos... historical accounts imply that they would have made for excellent farm animals and/or pets.

That is good - as with GMO ban. My concern in both cases are the long tail effects on the human body. In Europe and US we can afford the traditionally produced and expensive calories. I prefer the third world to be a test bed for such innovations for a couple of generations.

In the same spirit, many of us can afford humanely raised, fully pastured animals and should elect to do so whenever possible. I'm not as good about this as I should be, but I've moved strongly in this direction and the food is just better anyway.

Fully pastured/grass-finished isn't really necessary. Cows don't mind spending a bit of time eating grain in a feedlot, and ironically those "factory farms" are where they get the best veterinary care.
Knowing where your chicken and eggs come from is probably the most important thing for animal welfare.

Zvi covered this in his roundup (ctrl-F "vegetarian"), including the counterargument.

Quoting for people even lazier than me:

Claims that ‘we are not coming for your X’ when creating morally-superior-from-some-angle alternative Y are simply not credible. Creating Y, in practice, inevitably means calls to tax, restrict and often ultimately ban X, even if customers still want X.

In this case, it is obvious, many are not bothering to hide their intentions. Many of the people I know who are vegans absolutely want to come for your meat, and even your dairy. They are building alternatives in order to do this. They bide their time only because they do not have the power to pull it off, but they will absolutely impose first expensive mandates and then outright bans if permitted to do so, and would do so even with no good alternatives.

They certainly would do so if they could point to ‘meat alternatives,’ even if we all knew they were expensive and not the same. They would gaslight you about that, as other movements continuously gaslight us about other cultural trends via the full four-step clown makeup. And they think they are morally right or even obligated to do this

I love "four step clown makeup." He understands exactly how they think: that it's noble to lie to the proles to con them into "progess" by hook or by crook.

The same people will tell you it's a paranoid conspiracy that menthol cigarettes are being banned even though it's literally happening right now, and the fuckers celebrate it when they're not trying to gaslight you.

It's what I meant by the disgusting dishonesty and disrespect that makes me so furious at their lies. Treating other people as meat puppets to be manipulated "for Progress."

I'll say this for the SJers; not all of them are liars regarding this. Yes, there are some who are just flat-out lying, but there are others that are more correctly categorised as "pushovers"; they honestly don't support X now, but they will once the cool kids say that supporting X is cool.

It's kind of a weird edge case, because on the one hand they're not actually lying, but on the other hand they're not telling the truth; they literally don't know the truth of their own allegiance.

(And there are some who'll legitimately peel off and switch sides.)

I remember a blogpost about this, possibly from Scott, but I can't find it. It talked about different kinds of societal conformity curves where with some curves a perturbation can send everyone over to the other side and with some it can't.

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.

-

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...

The steel manned case for banning lab meat is that it will be shitty and maybe even less healthy at first but it'll become the default/only choice anyway. Banning it pre-emptively means it'll be harder to introduce unless it's at least as good.

Suggestion: Pass a ban that only takes effect if some other state (e. g. California) bans conventional meat.

Probably just lobbyists? Farmer lobby is big money and Fetterman seems very willing to go to bat for his donors even if it goes against progressive dogma.

Seems like an accidental good thing though. Lab meat© would have a lot of the same issues GMOs have, not so much health impacts, but legal impacts that put control of the food supply increasingly in the hands of our would be masters. With our climate too delicate to handle cow farts lab meat© becoming competitive would give authoritarian centralizing forces a better argument to ban meat. Or maybe just put carbon taxes on cows and subsidize meat© to the point no one can make a profit on meat and all the farms go under. Then an entire section of the food pyramid will require specialized clean rooms and labs to even exist. Things that the average person will not have access to.

I don’t think it does. You can actually grow your own food. And you can make black bean burgers and so on or cook with chickpeas or something.

This has got to be one of the most pointlessly evil bills ever. And I say this as someone who is very much not vegetarian.

You WILL kill ze pig. You WILL kill ze chicken. You WILL kill ze cattle. And you WILL be happy.

Fetterman is pretty much a socialist maga now. I wouldn’t count him as a true blue Dem anymore. He’s basically one of the old unionists Dems who until he got in office forgot they left him behind.

This is probably too political for the Friday fun thread so-

Florida: Not Literally Hell, Confirms Relieved Expert

State's Residents Reassured Their Suffering Merely Earthly, Politicians Confirmed Just Regular Humans

In a groundbreaking announcement that has reassured millions, Dr. Hugo Vortex, a leading expert in infernal studies from the International Institute of Theological Phenomena, confirmed earlier today that Florida, despite widespread rumors, is not literally hell.

"After extensive research involving environmental scans, interviews with local wildlife, and an unfortunate weekend spent in a Daytona Beach motel, we can confirm that Florida is indeed part of Earth—not an annex of hell as previously speculated," stated Dr. Vortex during a press conference, adjusting his flame-retardant suit.

"The presence of sinkholes swallowing entire homes and swarms of biting insects led some to believe they were portals to the underworld," added Vortex. "Our findings show these are just very unfortunate landscaping and wildlife management issues."

The study also examined the social atmosphere, noting the influx of notorious individuals like O.J. Simpson, which Vortex attributed to the state's generous homestead laws rather than any supernatural pull. "Such occurrences mimic the claim of the infernal upon the souls of sinners, but are indeed grounded in legislative text, much like the state of our prison system and our bans on certain civil rights," he clarified.

Opinions on the findings vary among residents. "I always knew those weren't demons; just politicians and real estate agents," chuckled Marcy Klump, a lifelong Floridian who recently had to replace her car's air conditioner for the third time this year. "Though I suppose the distinction can get a bit blurry." Meanwhile, critics such as local commuter Barry Gundham argue that Dr. Vortex's study overlooks key elements like the notorious traffic jams and recent bans on lab-grown meat. "Anyone who's been in a factory farm or stuck on I-95 can recognize the torment of the damned," he countered, before excusing himself to begin his three-hour commute.

Despite the reassurance, Dr. Vortex recommends that residents continue to wear sunscreen, hydrate regularly, and avoid making deals at crossroads after midnight. "While we can definitively say Florida is not hell, vigilance is advised. The devil is in the details—or in this case, possibly in the HOA bylaws."


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