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Comment by qyv | Hacker News Reader

The ethical argument for the adoption of artificial beef is always brought out during these stories. But they forget to mention that the lab grown meat only contains lean meat cells and in order to make it taste good they need to add animal fat. As in, fat from farmed and slaughtered animals.

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Human fat. Just build the meat lab next to a liposuction clinic. Problem solved.

In fact, if you build a burger joint there as well, you've got a perfect Fat Cycle. People can go to the clinic to get their flab hoovered off, then head into the restaurant and eat it all back in burger form.

Thanks Tyler.

A couple of days ago, I got a DVD-R in my mailbox. When I looked at was on it, it appeared to be a list of conspiracy theory videos. The file names of several of these alleged that aborted fetuses (human) were used in the meat industry, by McDonalds specifically.

I decided not to watch them.

At least its fat neutral

Shouldn't creating artificial fat be easier than creating artificial meat?

(I confess I have the impression that it would be easier based on a mere hunch... fat just seems less "complicated")

With zero knowledge on the subject my guess would be that they've focused on the protein structure and not the fat structures in their efforts. I suspect there are a lot of similarly shaped fat structures that taste differently which makes it seem like a similar but different problem.

In short, my guess would be that they need to focus on that after they solve this problem. The value of the meat is probably higher than that of the fat though so the ordering makes sense.

Can't you use plant fat?

Yep, or just cook in butter.

Well, that's animal fat. Which is his complaint that this will still require raising cows.

Traditional butter is made by churning milk, so while a cow is still required, it doesn't need to be slaughtered to make the burger.

I wonder if it would be possible to cook it in soy butter?

Dairy cows are typically slaughtered before 5 years of age and are sold as beef; at that age they are considered 'spent' and no longer meet production standards. Also, they must be forcibly impregnated in order to produce milk, and their male calves are either slaughtered for veal or raised and slaughtered for beef. Supporting the dairy industry is supporting the slaughter of cows.

There are plenty of choices for more 'organic' and 'animal friendly' and 'cruelty free' and what have you milk. While the cheap milk is indeed farmed at high intensity and not very animal-friendly to put it mildly, it doesn't have to be that way. Whereas a burger - well you have to kill the cow to get one.

Don't kid yourself. There is no animal friendly way to produce milk on any economic scale. Even if "organic" farms didn't forcably impregnated the cows (which most of them still do), they still take away the calves and hand them over to the veal industry.

Yes yes there's always a true Scotchman argument to be made about how something isn't 'really' animal friendly, but between being butchered for meat or being milked when living on a pasture, using butter to fatten up artificial meat would be a huge improvement in animal welfare.

I know it's culinary heresy, but unless you're eating it raw (like spread on a piece of baguette) it doesn't matter much what kind of fat you cook with in most preparations. If you were to take 99% lean ground beef right now and soak it with a few spoons of olive oil or canola, it would probably be pretty rich and moist.

The kind of fat does matter for cooking and flavor. Different smoke points, water contents, caramels, etc. Much as crisco was developed in the early 20th c as a vegetable-based substitute for lard, someone could develop something crisco-like but specifically formulated to be marbled together with vat meat, and to sizzle within roughly the same parameters as steak fat.

Given that soy butter is marketed as similar to peanut butter, and has about 1/3 the fat of butter, I'm gonna go with "probably not and what were you thinking?"

(I mean, sure, it's possible to cook your lean beef in peanut butter, so fine, technically "yes it's possible")

Peanut butter isn't a butter though. It's just a spread with a confusing name. In dutch it's called "peanut cheese". Doesn't make it a cheese.

Presumably referring to the soy and vegetable oil based vegan butter replacement products.

Lots of methane from all those cows that we will raise and look after.

Is Avocado butter a thing yet?

do you think there will be a way to replace actual animal fat over time with another source? Is it cost holding it back or is it scientifically infeasible?

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