As someone who has given a lot of tours through a brewery and wineries, a good amount of people are in fact disappointed by the abundance of stainless steel tanks.
Yes. Years ago I was involved with a controversy on Wikipedia over Skyy Vodka. Skyy had dumped a PR piece into Wikipedia, and that was flagged. So I did some cleanup. It turned out that Skyy Vodka was just a marketing company. Production was outsourced to Frank-Lin Distillers Products in San Jose. Frank-Lin makes most of the low-end booze on the West Coast. It's a big operation. Many stainless steel tanks. Their own railroad siding, where tank cars of industrial ethanol come in. The ethanol was from a company called MGP Ingredients, formerly Midwest Grain Products, formerly Midwest Solvents, in Illinois. MGP also supplied ethanol for fuel use.
Frank-Lin takes industrial ethanol, city water, and flavoring, and makes a large number of alcohol-based products. They make over a thousand brands, but there are only a hundred or so different recipes, they admit. Each brand has its own label, and many have their own bottles. A few years back, they moved to Fairfield, CA, to be next to the bottle factory.
The Skyy Vodka article was updated accordingly. Skyy marketing was not happy.
This is fascinating and bizarre. Any idea what those people expect or would prefer to see? Ancient wooden tubs, and people in quaint medieval costumes stomping grapes with their bare feet?
This is an odd argument. I'd bet the environmental impact of a battery farm chicken is less than a free-roaming chicken, in terms of hectares of land use, feed (less energy expended from movement), water use.
So if you are vegetarian for environmental reasons and had to eat a chicken, you should go with the battery-farmed one.
You would go with the (arguably mythical) happy chicken if you were vegetarian for moral reasons.
Arguing that the impact of free roaming chickens is higher than a battery farm tells me you haven't seen one or the other. Roaming chicken have a positive impact in the environment by spreading their manure over the land (where does this negative impact for anything that moves and eats comes from?) whereas chicken batteries stink for miles and produce a huge amount of sludge that contains heavy metals that is hard to process.
It really isn't. They have ethical problems with factory farming. They eat a specific diet to reduce environmental impact. There is nothing contradictory in those statements.
My takeaway was that it would only increase the environmental impact if their actual diet stays the same, in other words they ate the same # of chickens but only from free-range, local farms.
Given the same amount of money, I'm assuming they mean buy less chicken (but from non-factory sources) and spend the remainder on other foods with less environmental impact.
It's actually ecologically and ethically better to have "barn" chickens, which live in massive steel sheds on trays with roosting boxes and perches about 50cm high, miles and miles of racking.
They're free to move about at least in their "bay" and have the company of other hens that can wander about too. Sure, they don't get the marketing feelgood "sun on their backs and wind in their feathers", but they also don't get raptors, foxes, or rats.
You can get rescue hens and they're just about savvy enough to figure out - after you've lost one or two - that predators are a thing, and you'll get an egg every couple of days per hen. They'll eat all the bugs in your garden (and most of the herbs, and the tops of your carrots) and shit everywhere.
Free range chicken exist (or sometimes a slightly less free version of this, let's not split hairs). Their meat and eggs are more expensive. I don't know if they are economically feasible large scale though.
Because this is HN, where someone is sure to nitpick and/or take my next statement to logical extremes, I must be very careful about how I word this. I will regret it, but here I go:
I like eating chicken. I know lots of tasty recipes. I understand this involves killing the animal. Yes, I don't do it myself, but I could if I wanted -- I'm not squeamish. But factory chicken make me uneasy, it seems well past the inhumane line, almost like an extermination camp for chicken. I think free range chicken are happier, for whatever degree of "happiness" their tiny bird brains can understand. I like thinking that the chicken I eat lived a happy if short life trampling on actual grass and all that "breeze in their feathers" stuff. Yes, in the end it still involves killing them, but I think it's way better.
Your statement makes perfect sense to me. I think the folks who believe that quality of life is meaningless for non-human animals are the crazy ones. I don't know how someone could spend any amount of time with animals, wild or domestic, and not realize that many have a great depth of experience and emotion.
Indeed if they had a happy life where they did not need to suppress their instincts too much (roaming, scratching the ground, picking with their becks for tiny life in the soil) and getting killed in an instance, why would you feel bad about the killing&eating parts?
Killing a chicken is hard, I have done that many times and I it never get easier. After all it is a living thing and you feel it is distressed, angry and in fear. I know people that are impervious to that but I am not and understand why you would feel bad about eating animals.
I don't have a good answer for how I feel about killing and animals that were raised to have a good life. I get away with not having an answer to this question and defaulting to vegetarianism in two ways:
1) If I avoid all meat I cannot be held ethically accountable for it's provenance when, for example, a company's marketing department lies to you or the FDA does not sufficiently protect certain terms of art like "free range" which imply a lack of cruelty that wouldn't pass muster if I saw the treatment with my own eyes
2) If I am vegetarian, I will support vegetarian options, and I create support for companies and businesses that are unambiguously dedicated to reducing cruelty/suffering
Personally vegetarian for the same reason. Obviously I'd encourage people to be vegetarian if they can, but choosing options that avoid cruelty at personal expense or inconvenience is laudable.
it’s not useless, it’s just not that conclusive. Im pretty confident in saying a significant majority of animals raised for slaughter worldwide are done so in conditions commonly described as “factory farms”. We can quibble about the definitions all we want, but this is the dominant mode of raising animals for slaughter, that is clear to me
There is no reason at all to believe that the dozens of definitions that study used for "factory farm" fits the few ones stated on that wikipedia link. And there is no overwhelming problem that applies to all of the few definitions on your wikipedia link either.
As your wikipedia link shows, people commonly describe as "factory farm" anything from places where animals go indoor in the winter all the way to places where the animals have no space to move. Or places that create a lot of sessile animals are placed. Or places where animals are gathered to eat. Or places engineered to be comfortable for animals that don't move a lot.
And that is only if you stay within the reasonable people. Almost everybody with an impulsion to talk about this subject uses unreasonable definitions. How is a single name that applies to all that still meaningful?
Fine, let’s say “factory farming” is not a useful term. Do you have any suggestions for how we should talk about / classify modern farming practices? I genuinely appreciate this discussion
In a capitalist world where a small number of individuals possess significant wealth, the idea of free chicken is nothing but a myth. For the majority of people, money is the top priority and they will invariably choose it over any other option.
> Nothing wrong with eating a chicken or a pig who had a good life on an open field for me
Why vegetarian then? It's easy enough to buy meat that was raised on a local farm. Get a chest freezer, reach out to a local 4H club, and buy the whole animal. They'll butcher and vac-seal it for you. You could buy some kid's highschool project.
I live an hour from SF and I get much of my meat this way. It's surprisingly inexpensive. There are agricultural communities close enough to every urban environment to make it worth the drive.
What I find weird about lab grown meat is that it runs into all sorts of problems like how the cells have a lack of immune system so entire batches can be ruined by one errant germ.
I think we’re going backwards by trying to replace the natural bio reactor of the body with steal and piping. It’s all too labour intensive. To make this work we’ll need to genetically engineer an animal that has only the parts we’re interested in. Including skin to replace the steel bio reactors.
Cows due to generations of selective breeding are already remarkably close to this.
The milk most people drink is proceeded in facilities that look much the same, because whole batches of it are ruined by a single germ, since it has no immune system either.
We also have to pasteurize it. Or we don't, and germs from cows are hundreds of times more likely to make us sick, despite generations of selective breeding.
> The milk most people drink is proceeded in facilities that look much the same, because whole batches of it are ruined by a single germ, since it has no immune system either.
But you're not growing milk in those facilities, only storing and processing it. That's an important distinction, because it means with milk it's totally fine to deal with those "single germs" with long-understood sterilization techniques.
If you try to sterilize your "lab grown meat" cultures to deal with the germs, you're going to destroy your "meat" too.
Well, sterilizing the meat is the same as cooking it. The problem is keeping it sterile while it's growing/brewing. It can be done, as has been with breweries, but it is os not an easy task.
To make this analogy complete you’d have to compare current milk production to some fictional milk that would require far less human processing and facility investment.
I understand you’re saying the challenges lab grown meat faces arent insurmountable, but short of some outside influence (statutory interference?) I don’t see how it can compete with traditional cattle on the cost perspective
Cattle production, especially large scale for more efficient meat production (ie. chickens and pigs in very small spaces) is already somewhat outlawed.
Yeah, me too. It wouldn't help much, of course, but it's a popular way to do something.
At 380 ppm anything that doesn't either directly alter reflectivity of the atmosphere or drastically lower CO2 in the atmosphere is just not going to work.
I recall a very old sci-fi story in which bored scientists at a remote space outpost, well, some of them really missed milk. So they decided to try to produce it. But then that needed some kind of circulatory system to support the udder, and that required a filtration system, and an oxygenation system, and a way to get nutrition into the circulatory system ...
They ended up building a kind of exploded steel cow, all pipes and vats and such. It seems we are heading in this direction.
I have often wondered what it would be like to start with a cow, then engineer it to be anencephalic, then start paring away "features" or moving them around. Skip the legs, but do have networks of heart-like cells providing a contractile rhythm for the muscles, and so on.
I recall another article on the subject that said lab meat needed purified amino acids as food for the culture, and that many amino acids just aren't sold in the necessary quantities. A cow, on the other hand, needs only grass because it has extensive equipment to generate those amino acids from grass, called a digestive system.
There are ways to produce them by breaking down soy protein or pea protein (plain old acid hydrolysis, perhaps microwave enhanced - plus filtration; less cleanly enzymatically too), but it's another expensive step... And then you need to scale this process up.
Preference doesn’t come into it. My point is effectively that I can’t see how the current process will be scaled up to be economical enough for widespread adoption.
No they're not. Cow milk, fresh from the udder spoils in something like 16 hours. Most people cannot tolerate the milk, even if you're lactose tolerant, and it has various hormones in it that if you drink it long term would, uh, let's just say one would be able to notice the difference in your body in the swimming pool, especially if you're male.
To fix this it is processed in food factories that you can describe as squeaky clean massive installations of ceramic tiles and shining steel.
Raw milk is generally better tolerated than homogenized/pasteurized milk. However, in the early 1900s, as supply chains lengthened and the travel time for largely un-refrigerated milk from cow to table increased to days, we found that milk was a primary source of food-borne infections. The absolute risk was still low, but the relative risk was high. Thus, pasteurization became common and in most places, mandatory.
People have drunk raw milk for millennia and have not suffered from hormone-related effects..including people on dairy-centric diets. If you're talking specifically about rbGH, it's very easy to find milk free of it, which I would recommend anyway - I'd hazard a guess that's more common. It’s disputed that it has any ill effects, but I’m totally on board with not risking it.
Everything else aside, powerlifters aren’t recommending crazy diets like gallon-of-milk-a-day (GOMAD) and bodybuilders aren’t paying out the nose for human breast milk because milk has estrogenizing effects.
How do you propose they fix the milk in processing? Are you saying they are removing hormones from milk before bottling? I need some data about all these things you are claiming.
When you heat proteins they become unstable. Long chains become unstable first. So when you heat suddenly or not that high long chains break, but proteins still remain proteins, they just have a very high chance of losing their function.
Sorry, I’m comparing a cows body with its heart and skin to keep out pathogens and immune system to protect it and mouth to ingest nutrients, vs a steel bioreactor with steel skin and piped nutrients and a clean room/disinfectant for an immune system.
Other industrially processed foods don’t live in the uncanny valley of meat. I know garden burgers and the like are produced in basically a lab but I still enjoy them. Impossible burgers and Tofurky skeeve me out.
Seems like it's a cute way of saying that it's a material and superficial way of life (like religious ceremony). Which might be true for some people. I've been a vegitarian since I was YOUTH CREW (lol) but I've kept doing it for my own reasons. Most people have no idea...
What I notice though is that people get attached to their diets and act offended when you don't eat something that they consider to be some core part of their life style(barbeque, steak, meaty burritos, sushi, vegan fake meat). Some people can and do get butt-hurt when they find out I don't eat meat and then want to play "gotcha" reindeer games.
They feel unnatural and unconventional and is something a large part of the population will be unable to relate to.
Food is a very cultural thing.
We've also been educated to buy and prepare our own meals from the most natural/unprocessed ingredients as possible and avoid heavily industrialized/preprocess ingredients for health reasons.
Lab grown meat is the opposite of both of that.
I am just playing Devil's advocate here. I understand the appeal and potential environmental benefits as well.
I wouldn’t be so sure that most of the population could relate to the horrors of factory farms and slaughter houses—where basically all meat they’re buying comes from no matter how many alleged free roam grass fed consumers claim to exist on social media.
That’s why there are laws to keep them from seeing it. Which might be why so many HNers think animals grow up in sunshine and rainbows and it’s the sterile lab that's icky.
While this technology is becoming mainstream, those of us that are okay with it should understand there is something fundamentally "icky" for some people. Which is difficult to debate rationally.
This is partly the fault of Sci-fi, bio-engineering is rarely shown as a positive in TV and Film.
This will be mostly solved with time, eventually it may become economically unviable to buy "field meat" (not sure what the term will be), and it will become a lot more accepted when they see the people around them enjoying it without severe consequences.
Very weird thing to hear from someone who claims to be a vegetarian.
https://www.google.com/search?q=brewery&tbm=isch