How do y’all feel about lab grown meat? Any opinion of any kind welcome.
Taking too long to get to my plate.
I think lab grown meat is a real potential solution to end factory farming and eventually all of the torture and mass killing of animals mankind does. I’m strongly in favor of it. Veganism is growing, but not quickly enough. And people are resistant to it. Lab grown meat is likely to be a solution to many issues we face because our agricultural system as it is is causing so many problems.
I think we will need to push for it. I think conservatives are going to be against it until it’s normalized. I think we will need to regulate the hell out of it to make sure it’s healthy.
And it is not healthy, probably. Obviously not as healthy as a whole foods plant based diet. However, it has the potential to be healthier than normal meat in many ways. If you’ve paid any attention to how meat is processed, it is incredibly underregulated as it is. And Trump worsened that. And likely will continue to. And while I enjoy the benefits of eating healthier on a vegan diet, I care far more about the suffering of animals.
It has potential but until it’s significantly less resource intensive I don’t see it going anywhere.
Ethically, it is probably a holy grail. Plants are showing more and more signs of awareness within their environment. It seems all complex life basically is a vessel for a microbiome in recent research.
Since we’re talking ethics, what if we could grow an entire animal, minus the brain. Would it be ethical to eat the meat?
I wouldn’t say that plant and fungi responses to damage or reaction to stimuli counts as “awareness,” but then again 20 years ago I would have said something similar about shellfish. There was a study that found arthropods and molluscs don’t have a nervous system that feels pain or consciousness in the same way we understand it. Turns out that study was mostly wishful thinking, and those animals do indeed experience being butched and cooked alive, and it’s far more humane to kill them swiftly if you’re going to eat them.
So if I was wrong about that, I could be wrong about plants. But that brings me back to the brainless animal. Lab-grown “meat” is basically just protein fibers that resemble animal muscle and fat. There’s no nervous system at all. But what if there was a partial nervous system? Like how much is too much? What would be the difference between a brainless cow and a plant?
Apologies if this has already been asked and answered.
I think it would be pretty horrible to grow a nervous system in lab grown meat. I agree about the shellfish. We aren’t even sure the role our own nervous system plays in our thoughts. There have been all kinds of theories all the way down to that our gut flora influence the way we think. Many of those theories probably don’t stray too far from fact. I don’t mind consuming proteins but the idea that we could have created some form of life that feels pain for our consumption is some twilight zone black mirror horror.
I ahree with you, but devil’s advocate, would it matter if you didn’t have a brain? Like, we use novacaine to block the nerves between our teeth and our brain, and have no problem doing heinous things to exposed nerves. No pain, no sensation at all, no problem. So, if you were to grow an animal with no connection between the brain and the nerves, you would know for certain that the animal doesn’t experience pain. Without a brain, it wouldn’t experience fear or loss. Does a reflex response to damage count as suffering?
Damn. That’s a great question. It definitely wouldn’t bother me personally. The dentistry point has me all messed up. Might get back to you on this.
From what I remember reading it was a VC exploitive scam basically. It’s not feasible on a large scale. I could be wrong though.
Wasn’t that veg based meat though, e.g. beyond meat et al. This is meat proteins grown in the lab.
No. It’s the case with the meat protein grown in the lab. Right now it is incredibly resource intensive mostly because of the medium the proteins are grown in and it has scaling problems.
It will probably work well for ground beef / chicken nuggets / fast food. I doubt it will replace things like T-bone steak, ribs, etc.
As a vegetarian, I doubt I would eat it. It’s been so long since I’ve had meat that I just don’t see the point. The texture would probably be a turn off and it would probably just upset my stomach.
I’ll try anything once, but it’s going to boil down to the texture. If they can nail the texture, all else can be forgiven.
In my mind, Impossible burgers do that, the taste is not ground beef, but the texture absolutely is.
I tried it and impossible burgers, contrary to the company’s claim, do not replicate the taste. Far from it in fact. The Asian vegetarian alternatives hit closer to home.
Impossible tastes better than Beyond, I’ll give them that, but neither hit the taste of ground beef.
But for me it’s the texture on impossible, my mouth was fooled, good enough for me!
