As a thinking experiment, let us consider that on the 1st of January of 2025 it is announced that an advance making possible growing any kind of animal tissue in laboratory conditions as been achieved and that it is possible to scale it in order to achieve industrial grade production level.
There is no limit on which animal tissues can be grown, so, any species is achieveable, only being needed a small cell sample from an animal to start production, and the cultivated tissues are safe for consumption.
There won’t be any perceiveable price change to the end consummer, as the growing is a complex and labour intensive process, requiring specialized equipments and personnel.
Would you change to this new diet option?
In a heartbeat. Although I’d prefer meat alternatives to lab grown meat. Like impossible burgers.
I don’t eat a ton of meat, and I’d like to eat even less. this option would help me feel like I’m not making animals suffer just so I can survive.
Impossible burgers are extremely unhealthy, full of processed flours and additives. It’s best to not eat any “meat” at all, and instead eat whole vegan foods, than eat these things. Lab grown meat, if it’s like real meat, is much more desirable health-wise.
Lab grown beef isn’t going to be healthier than vegan fake meats, you can’t make saturated fat be good for you even if it’s from a lab.
This fear mongering about veg replacement meats is mostly manufactured and not a mainstream view among dietitians.
Saturated fat is not evil, this is an old idea that has been debunked by latest research.
Mixed research has come out, if it was debunked it wouldn’t be nearly so mixed. Regardless, the idea that plant based food is unhealthy because it uses ‘processed flours’ (literally all flours are processed?) is a fringe view.
Processed food is bad, this is common knowledge. Saturated fat is nothing compared to it. These fake burgers are ultra processed in order to feel like meat. Just do a search about processed foods on the guardian and nytimes in the last year. A LOT of new research has come out about it.
I thought you said it was common knowledge. is it groundbreaking research?
Yeah, so does smoking tobacco ! I assure you it has been debunked by Marlboro ! Smoking is healthy !
There’s tons of plant based proteins already. Having already added more vegan meals to my diet I think this would just be another option for me and one more for novelty than anything else
Yeah, that. My preferences go: chicken > steak > pork > beans == lentils == hamburger > impossible meat > lab-grown meat > mechanically separated meat > starvation > insect meat
If also taking into account environmental concerns, test tube protein sinks further while beans and lentils rise to the top.
Edit: Why is this getting heavily down-voted without any reply?
I absolutely don’t believe you’d refuse a worm meal burger over starvation. You say that because you’re not starving.
Some people just need to not be told what it is and have it pepared to resemble something they’re familiar with. My family wouldn’t try calamari, but when I took them to a place that had it looking like noodles on a buffet, they tried it and liked it.
edit: Also, lots of people actually like anchovies and eat them on Caesar salad and in sauces without realizing.
I mean, I want people to understand what they are eating more, not less, as well as the consequences of producing it. So I’m not a fan of tricking people.
I wonder how much of people’s disgust over certain foods is social rather than any ingrained revulsion, and if normalization will therefore make it a non-issue for the vast majorities.
Of course. Same reason why most people don’t eat dog but eat pig. There’s no other reason other than cultural and emotional.
edit: Also, lots of people actually like anchovies and eat them on Caesar salad and in sauces without realizing.
For what it’s worth, I like some foods in certain forms but not others, such as pureed but not whole. A plain anchovy (yum!) is far more powerful, bone-filled and salty than in sauces.
Then there are foods where I only like certain varieties, or they’re very different when you have them in different regions, so someone can think they don’t like a food but in reality they’ve only experienced a crappy version of it so far.
First insect meat I ever ate was some kind of BBQ tarantula in Cambodia. It was amazing. I don’t shy away from insect meat at all now. I’ve even been to a Michelin Star restaurant that has insect based dishes. It’s a cultural aversion, I get it, but the right insects prepared the right ways are great
Edit: Why is this getting heavily down-voted without any reply?
Bugeaters.
Definitely. I see no downsides.
I don’t eat very much meat as it is. But if I could drastically reduce the suffering inflicted when I do I would not hesitate.
Only if it’s human.
Rimworld player found
For clarification, human meat or humane?
Yes
The answer I was hoping for!
You really thought I’d eat inhumanly sourced meat?
Hey I don’t judge people from their fetishes. Not since the incident at least.
That’s not a fetish; that’s just playing with death with several possible causes for it.
Personally, I’d be the worst last meal of any canniba, as my body carries a nasty condition that would carry on to those consuming my corpse.
Bad breath?
Negative. It is a meat popsicle.
a celebrity.
As long at it wasn’t even more destructive than normal cultivation (very much tbd), absolutely.
I had no qualms about switching to Beyond Meat either.
If we could figure out how to make a decent ribeye out of peas and seed oils, I’d prefer that to lab-grown too.
deleted by creator
There are so many wrong things on that sentence.
there’s a not so small possibility that development of meat growing tech and patent expression will give us a niche market of not-available-before-for-ethical-reasons meats, like white rhinoceros burgers, cat and dog steaks, human fillets.
I don’t really care about lab grown meat. Haven’t eaten meat for years, don’t really miss it that much since the plant based alternatives have gotten so good.
Give me lab grown dairy.
100%
I did hear, though I can’t remember where, that someone had successfully gotten yeast to produce the protein in milk that is required for cheese.
I’m too lazy today to search for the article on it…
Reminder that the meat you buy at the grocery store is as also as human modified as it gets and NOTHING like the wild game that our ancestors ate or even the farm animals from 100 years ago. The animal itself is probably GMO, spends its entire life in a steel cage standing in its own shit and piss and is given specialized processed feed to optimize how much meat it produces (or just has a tube down its throat so we don’t have to worry about it eating fast enough). Not to mention tons of antibiotics that are given to the animal just to ensure it survives the hell we put them through which definitely makes it into the meat and therefore into you as well. And they’re slaughtered and butchered by underpaid overworked factory workers who have to balance fulfilling brutal quotas with carefully extracting the meat and not getting it contaminated with shit from the animal’s guts or the myriad other disgusting things around the meat that you wouldn’t want to eat (you can guess how well that usually goes).
Animal cells (without the animal itself and also no central nervous system to experience suffering) growing in a clean, well controlled lab in tanks of sterile cell media doesn’t sound so bad in comparison.
Additional reminder that nearly all of the worst infectious diseases in history have been caused partially or completely by animal agriculture: the plague, spanish flu, smallpox, whooping cough, swine flu, bird flu, covid, etc. So if you’re worried about the long term health implications of lab grown meat, you should be ten times more worried about long term the health implications of regular meat, to the point where you should be worried even if you don’t eat meat.
I’ll move to it in a second. Protein with no need to slaughter animals would be so fantastic for the animals, the earth, and people.
protein isn’t the issue, it’s all the bio-available vitamins and healthy fats that have already been converted.
if it’s a 1 for 1 replacement, depending on how we deal with the massive and now useless animal populations, I would totally switch.
What do you think supplements are for?
corporate profits.
Exactly.
once it’s affordable, yeah almost immediately i reckon. i already go for plant based meats whenever i can find them for a reasonable price!
Sup. No need to keep doing it the old way at that point.
Hell, you could have boneless meat, so it’s even better.
But the bones are how you make banging soups…
It’s OK you can make fake bones too
Fuck it, I’m in!
Yes, absolutely. No risk of virus or bacteria, or worse…
Grown to the size you want…
Of the shape and type you want…
No fat (maybe?)…
What’s not to like.
What kinda idiot would want no fat?
The kind that wants realllllly consistent beef jerky.
Constipation-jerky
I’d say price is definitely a factor. I already pass over good cuts of meat for that reason. Also taste/texture/overall experience. If it checs those boxes, and it has been on the market long enough to be confident I won’t get instant cancer, then 100%! A little marbled fat makes it better though.
Yeah, definitely some fat is needed…
But I can see hordes of healthy people looking for fatless meat, as they already do I the supermarkets.
Impossible Burgers already exist and are fucking delicious.
But, sure, if I can have pastrami or corned beef again without requiring a cow experience a life full of torment, emit a cow’s lifetime of methane, or have any of that happen where a forest should instead have been left untouched, I’d try it!
I had some impossible patty from restaurants and it’s actually not bad and fairly close to meat flavor.
The beyond stuff is a hard pass.
As long as it scaled to reasonably the same price as current meat, I’d absolutely do it unless there were some significant downsides like it somehow being even worse for the environment.
This ^
If it’s better for the environment and doesn’t involve the industrial scale poor treatment and wanton slaughter of animals, AND it tastes just as good, I’d be on-board instantly. Even with a premium price hike for consistency.
Roll on quality facon, wagu beeef, and octo-chi k en drumsticks.
I do think that flora missed a trick with vegan, fake meats though…
“I can’t believe it’s not bacon/ burger/ chicken” they would have slaughtered that ad campaign
