Recently tried an Impossible burger and nuggets and thought that if nobody told me it wasn’t meat, I’d have thought the patty was made out of a weird kind of meat, rather than make a connection with the taste and texture of plants. Honestly, I might not complain if that was the only kind of “meat” I could have for the rest of my life.
Well, maybe I’d miss bacon.
I’ve yet to find the opportunity to try lab-grown meat, but I for sure would like to try it out and don’t see much wrong with it as long as it’s sustainable, reasonably priced, and doesn’t have anything you wouldn’t expect in a normal piece of meat.
Also, with imitation and lab-grown options, I’d no longer have to deal with the disgust factor of handling raw meat (esp. the juices) or biting into gristle. I’ll happily devour a hot dog, but something about an unexpected bit of cartilage gives me a lingering sense of revulsion.
I haven’t tried any, but it seems like an inevitable endpoint. I’ve long held a rule that I can’t meet a cow in person because they look so cute on the internet and if I met one, I fear I’d have no choice but to go vegan.
I feel like the ethics of meat consumption is inarguably bad, but it’s a fundamental part of my diet and meat is some of my favorite stuff to eat. If I could eat meat like stuff that’s indistinguishable from the real stuff, that would be ideal.
If it makes you feel better, cows themselves are opportunistic carnivores.
I’m all for it.
Gimme that vat grown cloned shit. I don’t care. Meat is meat. If my guts recognize it as protein then that’s all that matters.
If I had my druthers I’d get rid of industrial meat farming entirely. It is a major contributor to climate change. Plus all the death involved.
And while I was at it I’d end industrial farming all together. We could convert a state or 2 worth of farmland into hydroponic and feed the world. Instead we engineer scarcity and guarantee starvation for profit. It’s fuckin disgusting.
I feel like Impossible nails it with their nuggets. The patties, not so much. Morningstar does a remarkable job for franks and corn dogs, but again, not patties. The best patties I’ve found so far is Beyond Meat.
Imitation meat is very highly processed food. I’ve never had lab grown meat, I’d need to know the details to judge it
I do like me a good bean burger though…I make big batches of dried beans and mash them, it’s great on rice, as a dip, you can fry it, you can add whatever you want to make infinite variations
But every once in a while I like to have a good burger. Like a few times a year… Honestly, if anything, meat tastes better because I rarely eat it.
Imitation stuff just doesn’t compare, maybe you could convince me it’s meat, but you’ll never convince me it’s better than “ok”. And plenty of meat is just ok… Most of it even
I’d rather eat my beans every day, and eat my steak and tuna a few times a year and enjoy every moment of it
I think it’s okay, the Impossible stuff gets pretty close to what they’re imitating.
But I also think I’m not really their target audience… like I’m okay with a veggie burger tasting like veggie. I’m not really looking for something that tastes like beef or whatever. These products like the Impossible burger aren’t targeting vegetarian/vegan shoppers, maybe their niche are the meat eaters curious about trying to cut down on meat consumption which is okay.
There’s definitely an opportunity to lower or even eliminate all the factory farming and animal abuse if some sort of meat replacement manages to catch on in a big way. We’re not quite there yet but you never know how things will work out in the future.
Why would you want to eat lab-grown and imitation meats? Next thing you know, you could be eating stuff with exoskeletons, which would actually be very unhealthy for people.
I’m sorry, but I’d rather my beef and chicken, thank you very much.
Lol, I wish edible insects were more available for purchase in the states. They are delicious and chock-full of protein. Might have to farm my own.
Even without diving into ethics, lab meats avoid all the inefficiencies of a complete animal, while providing effectively the same product. Especially beef, no need to clear forests for pasture and worry about cow burps.
I can’t tell if you’re joking or not, but people do already eat plenty of animals with exoskeletons. Insects, lobsters, crabs, etc.
Certain insects I could see being viable (almost any locust), but other bugs… just why? That’s been proven unhealthy, and is actually an intolerance of mine (food intolerance, and I would get sick for eating).
I find it so strange that people think handling meat and biting grissle is revolting, but not the fact that you’re eating a dead creature that had a life. There is clearly some weird compartmentalization happening separating “meat” from living creature.
I think part of it is the fact that raw meat gets you sick, and people are afraid of the germs more so than the ethics of it.
the كبة نية enjoyers would like to have a word with you.
As far as I understand it’s best to eat raw meat on the same day it is cut to lessen those risks. And speaking of cuts, it may also be that not many people witness the animal being killed, skinned and cut to be turned into food, so it’s easier to consume.
Why would you write in Arabic and link to the Arabic article?
Plants are living creatures as well
If living and creature are the characteristics we have issue with, we’ll be left with mostly fruits and nuts to eat. Is there a more specific description to your objection? It feels overly broad otherwise
I’m a vegetarian. I’m just going to continue eating beans.
Can’t wait for a future, where all livestock is raised on free-range farms, and treated like pampered pets, with all their earthly needs, more than satisfied. All that would ever be required of them, is to provide the occasional tissue sample to keep the cloning stock fresh. But other than that, they would live long and happy lives, under the care of kind and gentle human attendants.
Sorry, best I can do is the sci fi dystopian option where we grow entire cows in vats, but we make it humane by just growing them without brains.
Imitation meat and lab-grown meats are quite different. I would be more psychologically uncomfortable eating lab-grown meat knowing that it’s real animal cells, not plant cells, even if it was never sentient. Not to mention that the disgust factor you mentioned would still be present for lab-grown meat as it’s supposed to be biochemically identical.
Imitation meat is ok and I will eat it from time to time, but I don’t like how much vegan eating is centred around mock meats. I prefer stuff that doesn’t try to imitate animal products; it generally tastes better to me, and it’s way cheaper. Nothing against imitation meat; if you like it, go eat it. Just not huge on them myself.
I’m sceptical that lab-grown meat can ever become sustainable, but if they can pull it off I won’t try to stop them.
If it was never sentient, what’s the fundamental difference between eating the animal cells as opposed to plant cells? Not trying to argue, just genuinely curious what the issue would be
I’m not saying there’s an ethical issue. Just for many people who haven’t eaten meat in a long time, the idea of eating meat in any capacity feels disturbing. The same way a lot of western meat eaters would feel uncomfortable with eating dog meat despite it not being ethically different from other commonly eaten western meats (pigs are generally considered more intelligent than dogs), or you’d be uncomfortable with consensual cannibalism, because it feels wrong regardless of actual ethical implications.
If they’re tasty, no less unhealthy, and affordable, I’ll eat ’em. Grown muscle tissue isn’t connected to a nervous system, never mind a brain. They’re no more “animal” than tofu as far as I’m concerned.
But I can think of a couple of major likely problems:
- They’ll probably still require more resources (energy, water, etc.) to produce than plants, so I’d probably limit my consumption.
- Given the history of capitalism and the meat industry, I’d be suspicious of them still harming animals behind the curtain somewhere, somehow. The industry ought to be heavily regulated to ensure they aren’t doing that, but again, history shows that under late capitalism they probably won’t be.
I’m very much not up-to-date on the lab grown meat industry (so take this with a grain of salt), but I have done cell culture.
There’s a reason most scifi with food grown in vats references bacteria, yeast, and algae. Single celled organisms have to be relatively self sufficient. You can grow more yeast/bacteria by feeding plain sugar to it. There are other nutrients eventually needed, but they can be given in simple forms (e.g., oxygen, inorganic salts, etc.) that you can isolate or create through simple chemistry alone.
Vertebrate cells are part of a highly complex system where they require sugars/salts/etc, but also growth factors, antibodies, and a whole host of other proteins, fats, steroids, etc. Some of those can be created in a lab with chemistry or special bacteria/yeast, but for the most part, scientists use fetal bovine serum. It’s a byproduct of slaughtering pregnant cattle, and it contains a lot of those things that are just too hard to create otherwise.
Cells also need to be given the right niche do grow and differentiate into the target cell type, so muscle needs to exercise, arteries need pulsatile fluid flow, nerves need electrical signals, etc. Without an immune system, everything needs to be done in a sterile environment.
All of that adds up to an ecological footprint that’s extremely difficult to reduce below the natural product.
Lab grown muscles don’t need exercise, nor do they need arteries or nervous systems
Your conclusion is simply wrong. Much of the resource requirements in a natural product is the non-muscle portions of the animal, and most importantly the cost of keeping all those cells alive until slaughter
It’s incredibly easy to reduce the ecological footprint, because most of it is not necessary for lab grown meat
no less unhealthy
Yeah, given the history of capitalism, that will not happen. Look, they even made real meat unhealthy just to increase the profit (meat “yield” from animal), with lab-grown meat they would cut corners even further.
Chickens we are given today weight at least 5 times more than chicken 50 years ago (or “heritage breed”) and reach that weight in 6 weeks vs a year. To even buy a heritage breed chicken you need to have time, money and know-how, and you’re still likely to get just a 100 days old chicken.
I can’t even predict how they will enshittify lab-grown meat if it’s ever perfected.
Imitation meats have never impressed me. They get close, but they inevitably fall just enough short of tasting and feeling like real meat that it feels to me like a wasted effort. I think I’d like them better, oddly enough, if they didn’t even pretend to be meat - if they were marketed as something else entirely.
I love the concept of lab-grown meat, and it seems as if it should be without issue, since it basically is meat in all senses, except that it’s grown in a vat instead of inside an animal’s skin. But since I haven’t had a chance to try it, I can’t say.
I love a good impossible burger over a normal burger for the big reason of how I feel after. Eating a normal burger as I am getting older means that I feel full in a gross way after, like I can feel the fat from the burger slowing me down, and I feel tired both physically and mentally and I sometimes feel borderline sick for an hour or so after. But with the impossible burgers I can just feel full in a healthy way. I love it. I will admit to also getting it with bacon though for that extra flavor.
I an pretty anti factory farm and love the idea of cutting out at least burgers from their industry. I also enjoy their sausages. Highly recommend them if you have not tried them. I try to cut out bulk meat eating for the environment and keep it to occasional, smaller portions, and even then it is normally chicken. Impossible meat helps scratch that itch if I want some meat but don’t want to commit to blowing my personal weekly allotment of red meat.
I’ve had a few miracle burgers. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. It just kind of tasted like a mediocre fast food hamburger. I don’t eat burgers that often anymore so when I do have one I want it to be really good so I probably won’t get another one unless there’s some great innovation in plant based meat in the future.
I suppose it accomplishes its goal in that it does taste like a hamburger, just not a particularly great one
I kinda feel like the name is part of the problem there. If someone says they’re serving me something called a “miracle” burger the expectation created is that it will taste exceptionally good, or at least better than average
Yeah, this is one of those areas that capitalism really screws us over.
The natural and most obvious use for these lab-grown and imitation meats are for filler meats. Think a ground beef replacement. Something that would be added to a casserole, a burrito, or any other dish where meat is present, but not the primary focus of a dish.
But it costs money to develop lab-grown meats. And to pay that investment back, for-profit companies have to target the luxury market first. It’s like how Tesla started with building an expensive sports car. Then they used the profits from that to build a cheaper next generation car, and so on. That’s what the lab grown meat companies have had to do. The ideal market for products like these would be things like chicken nuggets or the meat inside hot pockets. But those are also the cheapest form of meat sold, and they need to target the upper end of the market to have any hope of profitability.
Lab-grown meat can’t come fast enough.
I’ve never seen it being sold in the supermarkets,
but I agree with what one tv show host has said it best:
“Why would anyone have more contanimation concerns of meat grown in a clean lab when this person eats meat cultivated in a dirty stall with poop on every wall?”For imitation meat, the stuff that’s cheaper is not better.
It’s cheaper nonetheless.
And the only better-than-the-real-thing imitation meat out there is a more expensive hamburger.
