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Glad to see that right-wing idiots have found yet another topic to be outraged by. I am not saying that lab meat is the best of solutions but it seems incrementally better than what we have today.
Incrementally better? If they can get lab grown meat to scale it would be far more ecologically and ethically sound than farm raised meat.
I say that because:
- Eating plants directly is always going to be more efficient than eating lab grown meat which was fed on plants (because there are going to be waste products).
- Eating plants directly is also healthier. Cancers, heart attacks, blood pressure issues… some very common health issues partly stem from humans in industrialized nations eating way too many animal products. Lab grown meat won’t magically be healthier.
- There’s still a chance that lab-grown meat doesn’t pan out because it’s hard to scale up.
- Lab grown meat is going to be high-tech for a while. This gives a lot of power to a few select companies. Lab-meat shoppers are going to be dependent on a few startups and eventually a few multinationals which have bought up the startups.
- This also means prices are going to be dictated by this oligopoly of companies, most of which need to serve investors. Often that’s going to be tech investors who expect a lot of growth leading to a lot of profit.
For anything that progresses civilisation, or even provides some preliminary indication — conservatism is, by definition, against that thing.
Conservatism exists to maintain social, economic, religious, and cultural power structures. It has no other purpose.
Farmers have become like religious figures in the developed world. Nobody dares to criticize them, out of some kind of misplaced guilt for living in cities and shopping in supermarkets. Well, we need to get over this cultural cringe towards farmers because it’s killing us. The subsidies they receive should be going to their poor compatriots. The tariffs that protect them should be abolished so that their competitors from Africa and elsewhere can get a leg up at last. And their disastrous industrial techniques need to be regulated to oblivion: pesticides, nitrate pollution, over-irrigation, and obviously the moral catastrophe that is factory farming. Farmers have too much power just about everywhere, partly because they’re over-represented in politics yes, but we only tolerate that because so many people still think that agriculture is special in some mythological way. Well it’s not. It’s a sector like any other and farmers are just ordinary citizens with too much power. They need to be brought down to size.
I agree with a lot of your points but first world countries rightly protect local farmers because relying exclusively on foreign food is not a smart idea.
There’s much more to food than just the farmer. There’s a whole supply chain, and every link in that chain has as much power over the foodsupply as the farmer. Farmers are not special!
In the Netherlands the farmers recently blocked highways because politicians dared to put the meat-industry under stricter environmental regulations. The farmers argued that it would risk the foodsupply in the Netherlands… Guess what? 80% of their meat-produce is being shipped to china.
Personally I’m not sure I like the idea of a zero-sum world where every country is zealously protecting its own food resources.
what if the farmers are on their last stand, because society has already lost its path to protect people of so many other walks of life? if i was them, I might also be stressed about monsanto-bayer lab meat. our society really loves to make sure only the super rich can be relaxed while everyone else is sweating towards the next bill… that said I’ll try to switch to lab meat asap, for the environment. I’m just trying to highlight that I’d wish myself some care and respect by the government
monsanto-bayer lab meat
I don’t think that Monsanto has anything to with growing meat in labs.
no, but with farming in general a lot. this is an extrapolation.
You got a point. Are they protecting the farmers or the multi billion dollar companies living off them?
On the other hand, Putin has shown that it’s important to grow food locally.
We need any help we can get to net zero carbon emissions, and lab-grown meat is one of the many things that moves the needle in the right direction. Not everybody is going to ride a bicycle and switch to a vegan diet, so the more low-carbon alternatives we make available, the better.
This is dumb and will only lead to disputes with the EU as soon as they approve it.
And I guess nobody cares. The only purpose of banning something that’s not yet available is to appease a few electors, nothing else.
I live near the border, I’ll just sit on the edge flinging lab-grown salami at passing motorists
What an extremely stupid thing to do. Anything to pander to the farmers I guess…
it just means that Italy will be woefully behind and will have to import quite a bit in a few decades when someone cracks the vat grown meat problem & its crazy cheap everywhere else.
crazy cheap with healthier custom options. Beef is low fat as chicken or with good fats.
This isn’t exactly a head-of-lettuce issue here, but how long is this ban realistically going to be tolerated? 5 years? 10 years? The quality and availability of meta-meat are only going to go up, and the price is only going to go down relative to traditional meat. I can’t imagine that in 20 years, one generation, that people would tolerate a ban such as this.
Til the next government, then it will be reversed.
Friendly reminder that the meat will still be sold, cause due to EU they can’t stop that, so the only thing this law does is to stop italian companies to enter the market. smort
banning the production, sale or import
Even importing and selling those products is illegal.
They can’t do that, so they will get huge fines every day (for years) again or they will change this (which they will)
I hope this to happen but it won’t.
trust the plan.
- Lagarde
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Lab-grown meat won’t available to the general retail market anytime soon, 15-20 years can pass before anything of what we’re discussing about happens. I don’t even expect society to exist in 20 years, let alone the EU… But let’s wait and see. In any case the current government has plenty of time to destroy the country 😅
Fuck you Italy
Non molto bene, molto stupido
The possibility of lab grown meat in the future is such a nice excuse to keep exploiting animals and destroying the climate, keep it up for next 20 years!
Mandria di ritardati
Più o meno il mio stesso pensiero, condivido e sottoscrivo
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“Italy is the world’s first country safe from the social and economic risks of synthetic food,” said Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida.
The head of the big Coldiretti farmers’ organisation, Ettore Prandini, at one point confronted two MPs from the opposition More Europe party, calling them “criminals” for opposing the ban on lab-grown meat with placards that condemned it as “anti-scientific and anti-Italian”.
Centrist colleagues called on the farmers’ lobby to apologise and the president of the lower house of parliament, Lorenzo Fontana, said that “differences of opinion should never descend into forms of violence”.
He praised MPs for backing the new law, which came in response to a petition organised by the Coldiretti lobby group.
Critics point out there is nothing synthetic about lab-grown meat, as it is created by growing natural cells without genetic modification.
The law is also a blow for animal welfare groups, who have highlighted lab-made meat as a solution towards protecting the environment from carbon emissions.
The original article contains 543 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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