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?
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.
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.
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?
Rimworld player found
a celebrity.
Negative. It is a meat popsicle.
Lots of comments along the lines of “only if it tastes the same” but no one seems to consider the possibility of it tasting better. Like what if lab grown meat is an orgasm for your mouth?
Baseline for the average person will be the make-believe-meats already on the market. Can’t blame them.
Personally, if you want to cut back on meat consumption, just cut it and enrich your diet with other ingredients and new dishes and cooking styles. For me, the entire industry of the meat-that-isn’t is an ugly grab for the wallets of people, not something necessary.
Meat should be a luxury.
It already exists. We need to be pouring subsidies into it. I would absolutely switch, if it was widely available.
Not only is it better for the environment, but it’s also not loaded with antibiotics or been exposed to fecal matter at the farm.
1st of January of 2025 it is announced that an advance making possible growing any kind of animal tissue in laboratory conditions
Let me tell ya.
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. 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, highly 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.
Depends on whether if it can be integrated into any of my recipes; or could be used in different recipes that taste good. Since it matches the price criteria for me; all that remains is the taste.
Jesus, people bitch about processed foods but have no issues with whatever shit has to be put into this to make it grow?
Most that bitch about processed foods have no idea what “processed” actually means.
Most of the ‘chemicals’ they’re worried about occur naturally at quantity in plants and fruit.
The lab-grown meat uses the same organics that happen in the animal to trigger growth.
That said, price-wise, real meat will have to become very very expensive before lab-grown meat will be competitive. Breeding cattle is expensive, but a lot of it is just making sure life happens. Cows are hearty, self feed and have immune systems.
That said, price-wise, real meat will have to become very very expensive before lab-grown meat will be competitive.
At least in the U.S., meat production/pricing is heavily subsidized.
That article is highly suspect. The prices of beef cows sans tax credits is readily available, as is the average meat yield. A Big Mac uses 1/5 of a pound of lean cooked meat (2x 1.6 oz patties). So let’s be generous assume that it’s one quarter pound uncooked. $30 per quarter pound would put your average beef cow up around $54,000. At that price, The farmers would be getting 1 million a year per 19 head of cattle.
And all that’s assuming that we’re just grounding up all the random beef into ground beef. Ground beef is generally taken from the trimmings of the steaks and roasts or we’re volume is required at least the cheapest of the roasts.
Certainly the subsidy is there, But it’s more like pennies on the dollar rather than dollars on the penny.
$30 per quarter pound
The second sentence of the article gives $30 as the unsubsidized price of one pound of hamburger meat, not 1/5 pound. You have to read it more carefully if you want to get into the details.
Setting aside the details for a minute, how would a subsidy of only pennies on the dollar even be plausible? One purpose of agricultural subsidies is to stabilize prices; pennies on the dollar can’t do that.
Ok, had to go to a computer to properly answer this.
First, subsidies aren’t explicitly designed to make meat cheaper. They’re intended to keep farms in business and provide a safety margin for food stocks. They subsidize cheese, wheat, meat, soya, corn, everything. In some cases, they pay farmers not to grow crops. It’s about food security. If a farm goes under, it becomes housing land, and we lose that growing capability. That said, most of the subsidies aren’t going to individual farmers, but we’ll get to that later.
A calf costs somewhere in the range of $300. They can have their first calf around 2 years old. And every year after that. They cost about $2-3 a day each to feed. Given there are veterinary needs, hay in the winter, After a year of growth, they sell for ~$3000-$4000 and provide about 450 lbs of meat. That’s somewhere around 30-40% profit calf to slaughter.
If you’re just buying them to slaughter, that’s $6-$8 / lb average, then butchering and transport. But that includes ribs, roasts, steak, filet, liver, and tongue. Tenderloin sells for $15-$20/lb. Steaks sell for closer to $12.
If you managed it calf to beef, that’s closer to $4 a lb at cost.
The caps on the subsidies to the individual farmers are insanely low (something like 150k / farmer). Most of those billions go to the mega-corps who can skirt the caps. Those subsidies are primarily funding the oligarchs.
So let’s reverse that again with the proper claim as you pointed out. $30/lb. 450lb/cow. That’s a $13,000 cow. They’re not getting that much in subsidies either. That would cap out at 11 head.
I think our problem is that the paper is trying to calculate a societal cost, while we’re arguing fiscal cost.
https://sentientmedia.org/government-subsidies-make-meat-cheaper/
It’s also frequently argued by vegan and food justice activists that the price of a Big Mac would jump from $5.00 to $13.00 without federal subsidies. This claim, however, is based on a misreading of the aforementioned UC Berkeley paper.
What the paper actually says is that a Big Mac would cost $13.00 “if the retail price included hidden expenses that meat producers offload onto society.” That’s a much broader category than just subsidies. It includes things like the health and environmental costs associated with meat production and consumption, neither of which are subsidies.
If you want to lump in health costs, every high-fat, high-sugar food skyrockets. French Fries, oils, eggs, bread, cookies.
Lab-grown meat will still have all those hidden health costs. The only true win is for the environment, and to be clear, I want lab-grown meat for all the environmental and ethical considerations, I’m just saying the article is trying to paint a picture that’s much worse than it really is.
I’d rather go vegan. Falafel all the way.
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!
No, I’ll stick to my delicious plants. I don’t really like meat.
I will let you all try it first. Going to pass on crazy mutation diseases.
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.
For seafood yes, but I’m unlikely to bother regrowing the necessary gut biome for other meats
