• Lab-Grown Meat Is Getting Cheap Enough For Anyone To Buy
    167 replies, posted
You haven't given any figure indicating that consumption of crops alone wouldn't suffice to feed the current human population. Which is what I have an issue with. Most of our livestock aren't fed using hay, even though they should be, ideally. I'm pretty certain we would have no issue providing enough calories fit for human consumption if we used the edible crops for ourselves instead of feeding livestock with it.
this is a fantastic replacement for mediocre meats, things like fast food, canned chilis, hot dogs. things where the quality of the meat really is not a concern. it is going to be a long time before the tech gets cuts of meat comparable to the different cuts of steak. cheap, crappy, glued-together steaks might disappear, but there will always be smaller farms raising cattle for meat, which i think is the best way to go about it. we don't need to abolish real-animal meats, just the juggernaut of an industry that meat is.
Neat, the meat industry's really bad for the global environment and also for medicine if you consider the insane number of antibiotics that are used to both protect against disease and to artificially fatten animals so this seems like a step in the right direction.
Because I don't know what the efficiency of the meatless biomass is. Or if you're suggesting that we could manage on a vegetarian only diet, then I have other bad news. http://www.pnas.org/content/114/48/E10301 Not only would the United States not be able to meet the nutritional requirements of it's own people, but the greenhouse gas emissions would (surprisingly) barely drop due to the need to burn all the plant waste and increase artificial production of fertilizer. The US being a decent metric due to the low population density and high availability of good land. If the US can't do it with so few people and so much land, then everyone is fucked. The US does indeed have the raw farmland to produce the calories though, which is neat. Though the margin isn't as great as it needs to be and it fails to account for transportation and spoilage. A protein biomass is necessary. I'm fairly surprised by the greenhouse gas findings in that paper. I had not considered the consequences of removing livestock as a source of fertilizer components. I guess in general I had not considered the products that are obtained from livestock. Capitalism has seen to remarkably effective use of animal parts. From brake pads to basically all home paint, animal parts are in everything. Livestock do produce things other than meat. Hm. I'm still on board for lab meat, but I am curious about what it will do long term, even assuming an efficient conversion of plant matter.
US agriculture was modeled to determine impacts of removing farmed animals on food supply adequacy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The modeled system without animals increased total food production (23%), altered foods available for domestic consumption, and decreased agricultural US GHGs (28%), but only reduced total US GHG by 2.6 percentage units. Compared with systems with animals, diets formulated for the US population in the plants-only systems had greater excess of dietary energy and resulted in a greater number of deficiencies in essential nutrients. Your original point was: Which, according to the study, is false. Using all edible crops for human consumption results in an increase in overall available calories. The problem comes from a lack of appropriate nutrients, which is not the same thing. Your argument is that one needs some meat (or other animal byproducts) in their diet to effectively take in a healthy mix of nutrients, which is not a point I am disagreeing with. What I mean is that a drastic reduction in meat production would increase the total amount of available food, not reduce it. We would still have sufficient amounts of proteins for everybody even if we produced only a fraction of what we currently do.
Curious to see if they can actually replicate all flavours and not generic 'beef, chicken and pork' flavours. Beef cuts all have different tastes and textures to them, this also changes according to breed (from fat content to what the animal is eating, grass fed being a premium etc) - chickens and pigs come in many breeds that all have flavours which also change depending on age, foods eaten, exercise and even happiness. Will they be able to dry age these meats? Will they be able to just grow a tenderloin and sirloin cut or will it always stay in the form of some mince meat paste? Interested to see how it advances. I wonder if they will even try to grow offal as something for consumption. As a type of food it has shifted through the ages as being rich man food, for the poor only or sometimes both. I can see it becoming a expensive delicacy again if this lab-grown stuff booms and farmed animals become rarer. But this would probably take decades to happen. What will happen to our animal breeds? Some were already made extinct to the nature of needing to mass produce a 'default' cow, chicken and pig - others have been made dangerously rare breed as a result.
I'm greatly looking forward to all this, I've tried several soy based "meat" products but they always taste a bit off or have a weird consistency. I'm also kind of excited for insects to become a more common food item here in Finland, you currently can't find them at all in my city at least.
first we need to tell them to STOP BREEDING!!!
I also had a read of the study. It brings up some interesting points and potential challenges for the future (maybe solve it with vertical farms, that would be dope), but I largely disagree on what their modelled plant-based diet was. Way too many grains and a lack of vegetables. No wonder it presented nutritional deficiencies, it looks like a diet for dummies
There's a lot that could be done to improve yield before we have to resort to vertical farms, though. And yeah it's no surprise that the default assumption is that they should grow lots of grains and close to no veggies. That's the American model.
I worry intensely about our health in that situation. Food is important beyond belief and we ready have a problem with it in regards to preservatives and other products being strongly linked to cancers. A heavier reliance on that seems scary potential
Well, to me, preservatives and carcinogenic effects are in the background at the moment. It's either solve the equation of food and energy efficiency or go extinct - cancer won't really be a problem since we won't be here anymore.
I mean fair enough but seeing as proper nutrition is one of the reasons we’re seeing countries like South Korea seeing age old physical stereotypes go away(short, low muscle voluke, etc, were the results of a poor diet, not bad genetics) and I would hate to see our world and the people’s of it reduced to serious concerns over health and wellness. Its really not that simple IMO, and not worrying about the quality of our diet is just as silly as not worrying about food at all.
What's wrong with preservatives? They help keep food from spoiling, which is great for reducing wastage.
Your body doesn't like them and doesn't want them in the quantities we put them in foods? http://www.ijsrp.org/research-paper-0415/ijsrp-p4014.pdf It's not good for us ultimately to have a diet that is heavy in these products. We can see the rise of massive cancer issues in the United States, an area with a high concentrated amount of processed and preserved foods. The link is there. It's not like they're guarunteed to cause cancer, but they do cause inflammation, and a whole host of other issues worth avoiding. I pulled all processed and preserved foods out of my, and my girlfriends diet for a month. The change has been significant in terms of health benefits. Her skin is clearer than it ever has been, in her whole life. And it's due to food as nothing else changed. There's a cost to having food stored and preserved in these ways, and I guess that's just what we'll have to deal with in the future.
Preservatives hinder microbial growth, so it's no surprise they can cause damage to a human organism as well. Some of them do, frequently flagged as potential carcinogens.
Looks like a predatory journal to me, one page article that barely cites anything and simply makes vague, unsubstantiated claims. At least try to get better quality articles. There is little evidence to suggest that the more widely-used preservatives cause any harm at the levels they are used. Notable exceptions include nitrites which can react with proteins to form nitrosamines, and sulfites which can cause allergies. Those are well-known issues and there already are control measures in place to limit the harm they cause.
Alright I don't have any harder evidence to offer you at this moment but sugar is in almost everything these days, a wide gamut of preservatives are used as well. I pulled these out of my diet, entirely, and saw a massive change. So, I personally can verify this is there, and this is a real thing. But yes, more research should be done into it.
Good for you, but don't go around spreading misinformation based on personal anecdotes. Sure, but at the levels they're used in food they mostly don't affect humans. Any examples of these potential carcinogens? The only one I can think of I already mentioned (nitrites can cause carcinogenic nitrosamines to be produced in cured meats).
We digest things through our personal microbiomes in our guts. We can EASILY damage our microbiomes with imporper foods, and we can even train our microbiomes to be addicted to bad foods and bad things for us. It's not misinformation to have concerns about the effects of some of the things we put in our foods. We are chemical beings. We are putting other chemicals, we know have the ability to react, into our bodies. More research needs to be done, but the fact you're telling me that it's just pure misinformation to worry about this is wrong. https://www.environmentalnutrition.com/issues/36_9/features/Safety-Of-Food-Preservatives_152494-1.html And frankly, we have a long history of banning, and removing various different food preservatives after we find out they were harmful. Do you really think that our current gamut of preservatives and the like is incapable of also falling prey to the same effects of our older attempts at preservatives? Don't dismiss me out of hand, and have such confidence that you're right to do so based on a historicity of doing EXACTLY what i'm talking about.
I wonder if this can be used to help out people like me with anemia and vitamin B-12 deficiencies who want to eat their meat without fucking up the world in the process.
I admit that I was being too dismissive at first, and I do recognise the potential for currently-recognised as safe preservatives being found to be harmful in the future. I even cited examples where preservative usage does need to be watched (nitrites especially). But you're doing the exact opposite and basically demonising all of them without any sound reason, which is textbook chemophobia.
I'm not afraid of them, i'm arguing caution as we go into a time frame and period where the use of these things is likely to be more prevalent than ever before. We're already seeing health issues in the United States due to diet, I don't see how doubling down on the problem of highly processed foods is a good decision to make going forward. Caution needs to be used going forward. And I don't see a whole lot of that in our culture, regarding our food.
Being someone who has cleaned butcheries before, one of the biggest things I'd like to point out is that they can be very hard to clean and that you have to scrub them VERY THOROUGHLY every day. Over and under every single part and corner. If you skip a day, you can get some really gross build up of dried up meat. Lab grown meat may or may not have the same issue, so it's if your state inspectors are slackjawed this could be a good alternative when it comes to sanitary food. I'd probably stick to this if in red states. Regardless though that all depends on the people handling it, sadly.
Realistically, this will probably come down to economy of scale when it comes to manufacturing and transport.
That too, I forgot about transport tbh If its not stored properly in transport this could end up being a really terrible thing universally. There's always the chance of getting meat that you store and oh its turned into black mush
Well, at least with lab grown meat, you can produce it basically anywhere, so you could have it as close to fresh as economically possible, and cut down on the ecological impact of things like trucking frozen/refrigerated meat long distances via truck.
I'm all for this and I want to see more research done on it, but there is nothing at all wrong with being hesitant of an almost entirely new method of growing food. You guys act like this post is decrying it as cancerous, GMO meat that'll cause your dick to shoot off your pelvis like a rocket. I fail to see how it's anything but perfectly sane to be hesitant to try meat grown via a process that's only existed since 2013.
Because most of this concern and hesitation stems from a complete lack of understanding of basic chemistry and biology. There are valid criticisms to be made, but "grown in a laboratory" is not one of them.
Growing meat in a laboratory is a first, and involves processes and compounds that haven't been used so far in regular meat. While we're fairly sure regular meat doesn't cause (too important) health issues, it's possible that some of these processes can cause health complications down the line.
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