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?
Only if I could put my own DNA in it so I could eat my own ass
I… really don’t have a reply to that. Autophagy? Perhaps?
Labs be like
Fair
Only if the culture medium for the meat cells is not made of living animals.
The only thing I’d wait for is for the process to be refined enough to be more eco friendly than just eating real meat. I’d do it, but until there’s proof of it being more sustainable and won’t tank my blood thin/thickness levels (blood thinners sometimes suck), I would be down to try it at the very least.
Though I would receive resistance in changing my diet until either my dad changes his eating habits or I move out on my own because my dad absolutely refuses things like plant based meats, so I know he’d most likely resist lab grown meat as well. It’s also hard for my mom and I to switch to a healthier dinner diet since both my dad and older brother wouldn’t dare change their diets to something like a Mediterranean or some other healthier because they can be picky eaters (especially my older brother).
I would be wildly optimistic, but very cautious.
I’d want to see multi-year randomized control trials comparing the bioavailability of not only protein, but also vitamins and minerals from the synthetic meat and liver, to natural meat and liver.
Assuming the RCTs show no issues, then I would happily move over.
Modern meat products are on a spectrum as well, it’s not just having the meat, it’s what the meat ate before it became me that’s important. Grass-fed, versus grain fed for beef. Insect, and protein for chickens, grain fed for chickens etc. antibiotics, hormones being supplemented into the feed to improve yields.
One massive problem the industry globally suffers from is overpromising. Just like multivitamins, which are very poorly bioavailable, and mostly peed out, they promise a lot but don’t deliver much.
Factors I would look for:
- can somebody sustain life eating only the synthetic meat for multiple years?
- oxidative stress, and oxidation in the synthetic food?
- The temptation to engineer sugar, and carbohydrates, directly into the meat to increase sales yields.
Green sustainability:
- can the synthetic meat be produced globally?
- Will poor farmers in the middle of nowhere be improved or hurt by this? Will they have access to the synthetic meat?
- in the event global logistics fail, like an a war, will moving over to synthetic meat severely hurt critical infrastructure and ability to feed populations?
That was a very compreensive answer. You gave me a few thinking points.
We don’t eat red meat at all, so I would probably try it out fairly quickly. Actually we don’t eat chicken or the like either, only fish, which is something I miss a bit more now and then. We have a dried product called NoChicken that is actually pretty good, so that’d probably be sufficient for me to wait a bit to see how it goes long term (I.e is it truly safe to consume).
But every now and then, I miss game. Moose and wood grouse mainly. That’d probably hook me enough to try it quickly.
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.
still waiting for the mass to consume it and see what happen, also waiting for the price too
I eat tacos bell
its 3am and i laughed my ass off. why?
If it were indistinguishable from other meat sources, and priced similarly (preferably less!), then of course. I expect it will take a very long time to get to that point, though.
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!
In a heartbeat. Although I’d prefer meat alternatives to lab grown meat. Like impossible burgers.
I don’t eat a ton of meat, and I’d like to eat even less. this option would help me feel like I’m not making animals suffer just so I can survive.
Impossible burgers are extremely unhealthy, full of processed flours and additives. It’s best to not eat any “meat” at all, and instead eat whole vegan foods, than eat these things. Lab grown meat, if it’s like real meat, is much more desirable health-wise.
Lab grown beef isn’t going to be healthier than vegan fake meats, you can’t make saturated fat be good for you even if it’s from a lab.
This fear mongering about veg replacement meats is mostly manufactured and not a mainstream view among dietitians.
Saturated fat is not evil, this is an old idea that has been debunked by latest research.
Mixed research has come out, if it was debunked it wouldn’t be nearly so mixed. Regardless, the idea that plant based food is unhealthy because it uses ‘processed flours’ (literally all flours are processed?) is a fringe view.
Processed food is bad, this is common knowledge. Saturated fat is nothing compared to it. These fake burgers are ultra processed in order to feel like meat. Just do a search about processed foods on the guardian and nytimes in the last year. A LOT of new research has come out about it.
Yeah. If it’s the same, of course. I don’t like killing cats for food.
there’s a not so small possibility that development of meat growing tech and patent expression will give us a niche market of not-available-before-for-ethical-reasons meats, like white rhinoceros burgers, cat and dog steaks, human fillets.
There are so many wrong things on that sentence.
protein isn’t the issue, it’s all the bio-available vitamins and healthy fats that have already been converted.
if it’s a 1 for 1 replacement, depending on how we deal with the massive and now useless animal populations, I would totally switch.
What do you think supplements are for?
corporate profits.
Exactly.
There’s tons of plant based proteins already. Having already added more vegan meals to my diet I think this would just be another option for me and one more for novelty than anything else
Yeah, that. My preferences go: chicken > steak > pork > beans == lentils == hamburger > impossible meat > lab-grown meat > mechanically separated meat > starvation > insect meat
If also taking into account environmental concerns, test tube protein sinks further while beans and lentils rise to the top.
Edit: Why is this getting heavily down-voted without any reply?
First insect meat I ever ate was some kind of BBQ tarantula in Cambodia. It was amazing. I don’t shy away from insect meat at all now. I’ve even been to a Michelin Star restaurant that has insect based dishes. It’s a cultural aversion, I get it, but the right insects prepared the right ways are great
Edit: Why is this getting heavily down-voted without any reply?
Bugeaters.
I absolutely don’t believe you’d refuse a worm meal burger over starvation. You say that because you’re not starving.
Some people just need to not be told what it is and have it pepared to resemble something they’re familiar with. My family wouldn’t try calamari, but when I took them to a place that had it looking like noodles on a buffet, they tried it and liked it.
edit: Also, lots of people actually like anchovies and eat them on Caesar salad and in sauces without realizing.
edit: Also, lots of people actually like anchovies and eat them on Caesar salad and in sauces without realizing.
For what it’s worth, I like some foods in certain forms but not others, such as pureed but not whole. A plain anchovy (yum!) is far more powerful, bone-filled and salty than in sauces.
Then there are foods where I only like certain varieties, or they’re very different when you have them in different regions, so someone can think they don’t like a food but in reality they’ve only experienced a crappy version of it so far.
I mean, I want people to understand what they are eating more, not less, as well as the consequences of producing it. So I’m not a fan of tricking people.
I wonder how much of people’s disgust over certain foods is social rather than any ingrained revulsion, and if normalization will therefore make it a non-issue for the vast majorities.
Of course. Same reason why most people don’t eat dog but eat pig. There’s no other reason other than cultural and emotional.
