I recently watched a documentary on lab-grown meat. Although I am sold on its benefits, I find it weird to eat lab-grown meat and won't be eating it for sure.
I am not sure if this is a benefit per se, but you could get very high quality cuts of meat for essentially cheap, because it's artifically human constructed. It is the same argument for lab grown diamonds over mined ones, the former can be more perfect gems than ones from the earth ever could simply because humans engineer them to be so, something a non-sentient Earth cannot do.
Well, how would you define "high quality"? High quality meant comes from well cared grass-fed livestock. It is delicious and have long proven health benefits. It's effects on human body have been known pretty much as we gain ability to learn.
If the cellular structure is the same, the benefits would be identical. Just because something is traditionally made a certain way doesn't mean it couldn't be made better, as we understand the scientific processes that made them. Flight, for example, comes to mind, where birds traditionally fly but we, having understood aerodynamics at a deeper level, can make planes that fly faster, farther, and longer than birds ever could.
I see your point, but all those comparisons are quite a stretch. One can care less about naturals diamonds vs lab ones, but for something you consume and something that eventually gonna become building blocks for your body one may exercise different approach.
Well, protein powder exists. We already know the building blocks of muscles (and therefore meat), all the various protein compounds. They can come from non animal and non meat sources too such as peas and whey, so I don't see how one can eat vegetables with protein and drink protein shakes yet still be hesitant about lab grown meat. Perhaps you are simply hesitant because it is a new technology?
You could grow solely A6 wagyu ribeyes. We’re not there yet. But the combination of precise control for quality and zero additional waste is there.
> It is delicious and have long proven health benefits
It’s better than corn-fed beef. But it’s no panacea. We could engineer beef that contains, for example, less saturated fat, or a higher fraction of healthy fatty acids.
Indeed, I'd love to see the day where we could natively grow interposing constructs of beef muscle and fat to produce a wagyu the likes of which is hitherto unknown on the planet, simply because, just as no natural diamond can produce just the right compounds in just the right order, just the right cows cannot produce just the right order of fats to meat ratio.
How can stuff made in a factory be healthier than its equivalent made biologically for which we have millions if not billions of years of genetic adaptation to?
The best case is that is it as healthy as the real stuff, but that is an asymptotic goal.
You seem to massively underestimate the chemical composition of biological matter. Meat is not three chemicals mixed together. It's billions. That nutty taste in serrano ham? It's a set of molecules creating that taste, that are not present in lab grown meat. So even just any sort of taste will be created by adding artificial spices and taste enhancers to the finished product, which are much less healthy than the real stuff.
And what about the myriad of micronutrients? A grass eating cow has in its meat a different set of nutrients than those eating grain or grown in a vat. So again, add in artificial enhancers to the product.
Lastly, the unknown unknowns: all the good stuff in biological food we still have not even learned about, so cannot supplement when it's grown in a vat.
I would rather eat bug flour than lab-grown meat products. At least the bugs have a nutritionally-complete chemical profile, and cannot be trademarked and sold as a "product."
I don't underestimate the complexity of biological matter. I'm not stating anything. I question the statement that factory food will most certainly be less healthy. I'm also not assuming anything about lab meat processes. I don't know how it's done, how the taste and the nutrients will be kept.
Now, your last comment is certainly convincing and I understand your perspective better. Thanks for taking the time!
I'm not labeling "from lab" as "healthier". I'm arguing that "from nature without human intervention = healthier" is not automatic, but also not saying "in factory = better".
Also, I don't see the link with autoimmune diseases.
This not counting that limiting carbon emissions would likely have huge health benefits worldwide.
Now, of course, short term health benefits might be limited. I guess there's less risk of bacteria contamination for lab raised meat, which is always good to take (edit: maybe not, see children comments about this). I would guess that like meat, not eating too much of it would be advisable.
But why limit benefits to such a narrow thing? This feels like a way to say "ok, but apart all the nice and obvious benefits this has, what are the benefits?"
Just recognize the benefits, it doesn't mean there are no drawbacks :-)
Various contaminations is one of the big problems with lab meat. Immune system in any animal is extremely effective. And outside some parasites normally grown meat is very safe from viewpoint of bacteria.
In this whole thread, it feels like you are trying hard looking for the drawbacks while actively rejecting the benefits.
What you are doing is called confirmation bias.
I would suggest you to open yourself to perspectives foreign to you. That's the whole point of HN for me, aside from learning new things.
And no, it's not yet a reason to avoid lab meat. Let's actually find out if lab meat is actually less safe in practice? Because contamination of meat as we are producing it today is a thing and still relatively common and this we know it for a fact.
Well, I am happy HN works the way it is for you, but I hope we have your kind permission like everyone else to seek truth the way we do it, don't we? I beg your pardon if this comes across as rude, it has no intentions to be so
Whether to avoid or not and under which arguments it's individual decision. Some people believe in reducing pollution with lab meat or climate change. Let the have it, it's ultimately whatever individual thinks is good.
> Let's actually find out if lab meat is actually less safe in practice?
I am all in, but how this can be practically assessed?
Indeed. It is rough when those we thought were arguing in good faith were actually not doing so, ie their antivaxxer or generally anti-science comments. In this case, there is nothing we can really do to stem such advances towards us. And yes, I do not agree that "both sides" are equal in merit.
Their comment is dead now [0] (which you can see if you enable showdead in your HN settings), but they are an antivaxxer, in my experience with these kinds of people, it's not really worth discussing anything of scientific importance with them.
I mean, no more animals slaughtered is the obvious one… also you can have any meat you want ‘on tap’ without any consideration for local demand or environment or local anything really.
If I want a corn dog made with dog meat, or even a human steak, boom, no fuss no muss no ethical issues. That’s a marked improvement on our current farm/slaughterhouse/butcher situation.
Plus there’s consistency to consider - every steak you order at your favorite steakhouse could be absolutely identical, those ribs you love so much could be perfectly proportioned every single time, because they’re all essentially perfect copies / clones.
Some people still missing the phrase about health benefits. Would be good to avoid ethical discussions since it's beyond the topic.
I don't need consistency or ribs being perfect - I just want them to be ribs, not some unknown substance. Humans were eating ribs over thousands of years without any ethical issues so I struggle to understand why it is suddenly a problem
I consider the ethical considerations to be significant. Many people have had them for a long time; vegetarianism is centuries old in the West and even longer among some cultures. Plenty of other practices that were one time considered ethical by most have come under scrutiny: slavery, racism, etc. I believe that animal suffering may one day be in the same category.
But if you're OK with that, and your primary concern is health, then you can be reasonably sure that there are no advantages on that score.
Ethical discussion is beyond the topic because you framed it like this, but ethics and environment is what is actually motivating lab meat production, you can't really discard this.
We have a sub thread answering your health-related question.
It's the meat growing industry lobby, even though lab grown meat is the best of both worlds when it comes to making people eventually reduce their carbon emissions from traditional meat consumption.
My understanding is that it is actually quite far still from both ecological and economical standpoint. Complexity of growing cells at scale is very very hard.
Where as meat at lowest productivity is essentially self-caring.
Yep it is still quite a ways off. Perhaps in 20 years it'll be identical, and perhaps in 50 years these lobbyists will die out and it'll be legal again in these red states.
that's very debatable statement. I personally never tried it (and can't think of any possible reason why would I) so where the "best of both worlds" come from?
I am against banning it, just would vouch for huge labels to avoid makers mimicking it as natural meat.
It's biologically the same as meat (unlike all the plant based alternatives) yet it has ~99% less emissions since you're not making a whole sentient animal when all you want to harvest is its flesh, a very inefficient process (commercially at least, not when we were pastoral and couldn't eat grass but animals could, essentially becoming a factory that inputs an inedible product and outputs an edible one; today's commercial farms are vastly different in that they feed animals essentially grains which humans can also eat).
In this way, you get people to become vegan without actually having to make them change their behavior, because, let's be honest, most don't want to, regardless of any arguments one posits.
For your second question, you don't have to, of course, but the vegan philosophy is to reduce animal suffering and to improve emissions. If that is something one believes in, it behooves them to make more people follow their tenets.
> vegan philosophy is to reduce animal suffering and to improve emissions
Vegan philosophy is not consuming food of animal origin. If someone likes to put some virtue signalling to it like reducing emissions and sorts that's fine by me.
On the first one, animal suffering has very little relation to do with veganism. You don't need to be vegan to do something about it and certainly being vegan doesn't make you reducing the suffering.
> Vegan philosophy is not consuming food of animal origin
Wrong. This is literally the core tenet of veganism, so much that they do not eat animals whom we know don't have adverse effects on their psyche, such as bees' honey or clams or shrimp. If you are looking for those who would like such an effective boundary, those are vegetarians.
> Vegan philosophy is not consuming food of animal origin
Vegan diet is not consuming food of animal origin. In French we would qualify someone following a vegan diet "végétalien" / "végétalienne" (vegetalian doesn't seem to exist in English).
But usually people have reasons to follow a vegan diet. Usually philosophical/political reasons. And those reasons are usually animal well-being and environmental concerns. that's when we start qualifying people "vegan" in French (though the words are are in practice somewhat used interchangeably of course). OP specifically said "vegan philosopy", they don't refer to the diet specifically, which is only one part of the package.
And virtue signaling is not always (rarely?) the main motivator, or a motivator at all. You need stronger motivation than that and people do not always act selfishly to show they are better. They want to actually be better (as defined in their perspective).
It seems like we are drifting away from main topic. Vegans can have any reasons they like to follow the idea or philosophy like you have said - climate change pollution or anything they like to pull. It's totally fine as long as they not pushing everyone else to follow. If they like to eat lab grown meat - I cant be happier.
More important question here is whether lab meat objectively (and objectively is a key word here) has any benefits over traditional meat.
>yet it has ~99% less emissions since you're not making a whole sentient animal when all you want to harvest is its flesh
source? The only way I can see this being true is for cows, because the live animal produces methane during digestion, but for other meats (eg. pork/chicken), I'm not sure how you can get 99% reductions in "emissions" (whatever that means).
