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Comment by VelNZ | Hacker News Reader

I am really really excited about lab grown meat making it into the mass market and ultimately becoming cheaper than traditional meat. The environmental benefits will be insane; how much of the earth is currently devoted to either raising animals or growing feed to feed animals? If we can centralise the production of meat, suddenly we have huge swathes of land that, perhaps naively, I hope can be reforested.

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Am I the only one here who probably wouldn't buy artificial meat? I'm not a massive meat eater, but when I go shopping, I tend to buy better quality stuff without caring too much for the price. I'd give it a try, but would probably still buy "the real deal".

> Suddenly we have huge swathes of land that, perhaps naively, I hope can be reforested.

Those plots would still be owned by farmers, and planting trees on them would bring in close to zero revenue.

If there's a larger benefit to planting trees, then it would make sense for the government to offer incentives to plant trees, so they could make money.

I imagine that would be a one time subsidy, not annually?

Forest land still needs to be maintained, at least to a degree.

Depends, if the benefit is from having them remain there then an annual tax credit or similar seems reasonable. You probably don't want a situation where you get paid more for annual logging and replanting then maintaining a forest in place.

You might, if the harvested wood were used for permanent structures. The whole operation would be a carbon sink.

> Those plots would still be owned by farmers, and planting trees on them would bring in close to zero revenue.

There are lots of farming subsidies out there. Even subsidies for letting the land return to (and maintain it in) its "natural" state.

Source: Family members do this in Iowa.

Trees are enormously expensive for large trees, tree farmers do make decent money.

Probably not as much as other forms of agriculture, though.

I would expect that a similar thing that happened when humans went from hunter-gatherer to agrarian. Exponentially more humans. We'll need that land to house all those people.

You'll probably change your mind. If/when synthmeat becomes both economical and palatable, it will rapidly become socially unacceptable to eat real meat.

I'm not sure about the social aspect of it, but I can see it becoming more of a "real meat for special occasions or if you're rich enough". Demand for real meat, especially for processed meat products, will drop.

It will probably be similar to having real fur coats, vs faux fur. Distasteful in some social groups, but other people still do it.

Just like it has become socially unacceptable for the wealthy avoid tax? Or to burn coal for energy? I'm not sure I believe that. Might be good for the planet, but it very much sounds like wishful thinking to me.

If there are two products, one being the original and the other being artificial, I assume there will always be a market for the original. It'll just lead to a price increase.

I would compare it to how it became socially unacceptable to own slaves. The number of individuals who think it is unacceptable to treat animals as commodities, and use them for palate pleasure or convenience is rapidly increasing, and I believe it will hit critical mass in the coming decades; specially as alternatives become more accessible.

I'm looking for alternatives. If you can create something that reacts to heat like meat and provides the same or a similar flavor profile, and that contains similar macronutrient ratios, then I would jump ship.

As it is, whey doesn't have the right flavors and cookability, tofu doesn't have the same flavors and has a lot of carbohydrates, and mushrooms don't have any protein in them.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Totally disregarding the morality of eating meat, there are many examples throughout history of things that were previously considered morally acceptable that are now frowned upon or are outright banned. Your prediction seems like it could very easily come true.

You don't need to go all the way to "socially unacceptable".

All that needs to happen is for the synthetic meat to test better than regular meat.

test, or taste? Have there been cases of things where the artificial equivalent is better than the original?

'better' is questionable and largely undefinable, but certainly lots of cases where the artificial equivalent is more popular. Although in most of those cases price is a big factor.

Yeah, taste

Wouldn't that completely depend on the quality? Sure if it ends up being slimy crap then you'd avoid it, but what if they manage to engineer it so each cheap steak is Kobe-beef quality?

But people who refuse to eat lab meat will eventually die off. I mean, there are still people buying newly harvested fur, but they seem to be few and far between. Real meat will probably carry a social stigma as soon as fake meat becomes just as good or nearly as good.

I doubt that. Thousands of years of cooking tradition will not disappear any time soon. If it's cheap enough, lab grown meat will mostly occur in heavily processed food because the consumers of that food don't give a shit about what they eat anyway.

I do a lot of home cooking. For something like a nice steak or a whole roast chicken, I would probably stay with the real thing,

But for spaghetti bolognese, a good stew, anything where the meat is minced or cut into bite sized pieces, I would go for lab-grown like a shot, assuming the quality, taste and texture were there.

People are still using real vanille, whereas in most products a sort of vanilla essence is used. I think it might turn out the same with meat; the people who can afford it will get it, others will get the lab grown meat?

I will eat whatever is delicious. For example I find "The Loving Hut" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_Hut) pretty yummy and even though I'm a meat eater if I'm near a Loving Hut I'm happy to choose it because of taste.

If fake meat is yummy and doesn't have any bad side effects (gas) I'll be happy to eat it. If I can't tell the difference between it and a real burger I'll be happy to switch. If I can tell the difference, if it's yummy I'll still eat it, just as a separate type of food.

As an example fishballs, meatballs, and various kinds of things made from ground meat of all kinds are common.

https://www.google.com/search?q=fishballs&tbm=isch

https://www.google.com/search?q=%E3%81%8A%E3%81%A7%E3%82%93&...

Heck, other processed meats are very common throughout western cuisine as well. Just walk into any deli section and look 100s of them.

My point being even if they never get the burger a 100% the same as real if it's delicious they can sell it to me as yet another processed product and like sausage/pâté/terrine/galantine/ham I'll eat it.

I'm with you. I too don't eat it often but would rather buy organic, grass fed, local. I also wouldn't buy synthetic meat for spiritual reasons: I actually want to consume a real dead animal that had a soul. It is much more nourishing for me to eat animals than be vegetarian, and I don't just mean physically nourishing.

> I actually want to consume a real dead animal that had a soul.

I can't tell whether this is sarcasm or not.

If not, do you also apply this principle to other things? e.g. do you prefer your clothes to be made from baby seal furs? Perhaps toilet paper made from the wood pulp of ancient sequoias?

Probably some religious non-sense.

I think it was very well written sarcasm.

Why are you assuming that the meat grown in a vat in perfect conditions with a chosen ratio of muscle to fat, perfect marbling, in the ideal size, with absolutely no additives would be worse than something grown naturally?

Personally I'm assuming I won't see that in my lifetime. I suspect lab-grown meat will be good enough for fast food/processed food use within 2 decades, perhaps eventually something as good as a cheap, frozen supermarket steak/chicken breast, but I doubt we'll see something that can hold it's own against high end meat within 5 decades.

Honestly I suspect the fake meat people will produce something I'd want to eat instead of a really nice steak before the vat meat people.

In the case of the Brazilian rainforest, it's not necessarily owned but just illegally occupied by the farmers.

I'm currently looking at my bag of Cheetos and there is a largish 'warning'/statement on the back that says : "Produced with Genetic Engineering." Economics aside, I think you are going to have to put something like that on every unit of lab-meat that is sold, if not those words exactly (depends on the tech). People, for some reason, have gotten onto the 'Organic = Better' bus. Lab-meat is going to have to go against that zeitgeist. We already know that people will pay a lot more for 'organic' beef burgers, so I think we can say that the ethical issues are not in fact issues for most consumers, the health ones are though. Lab-meat, for most American consumers, is a no-go. Say McD's uses lab-meat, and they can undercut the price of a 'cheeseburger' by, what, 25%? A lot of people are still going to go to BK, as their marketers will gleefully and truthfully advertise that their burgers are 'real.' Outside of Sodexo, frozen dinners, and HotPocket, the only people that are going to buy lab-meat products are the dreadfully poor ones. A large market, unfortunately, but not one that you can reap big margins from.

>If we can centralise the production of meat

Sounds like a huge disease risk.

You should tour a factory farming operation. Lab grown meat could be as safe as vaccine production; both done in controlled, sterile environments.

EDIT: Seriously though, don't do the tour if you ever want to eat meat again. Doubly so for walking a slaughterhouse floor. There are some things you cannot unsee.

I can't upvote this enough. If you're worried about disease, you do not want to see where your meat comes from. There's no way lab meat could ever come close to this scale of filth.

(not talking about $50/lb locally slaughtered meat of course)

I don't doubt that the factory is going to be a grim sight. I was more thinking about the centralization aspect, which would cause massive damage if the lab covering an entire state or country was contaminated.

My point was that they're both centralized, but you have far more control over a lab setting (http://i.imgur.com/KW1LrLg.jpg) than something like this: http://i.imgur.com/SDUbUBQ.jpg

A factory is not going to produce a states worth of meat. Possibly a small city's worth, but Americans eat 1 billion pounds of meat per year an this stuff is going to take at least hours if not weeks to grow.

I think you are off by quite a bit on how much meat Americans eat.

214.8 lbs per capita per annum * 318 million people = ~68 billion lbs per annum

See: http://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/sta...

There are 50 states. So, a states worth of meat should be around a billion pounds. Granted, some states have a relatively tiny population.

Every farm animal has vaccine production built-in, so it does not matter.

This is not true. They can produce their own antibodies, but will still become infected.

Most of these infections are easy to detect and cure with vitamins and antibiotics. For billions of lbs of meat consumed monthly in USA, how often this is the problem? Diseases are not a (massive) problem when animals already have quite effective immune system.

> how much of the earth is currently devoted to either raising animals or growing feed to feed animals

Probably just as much of the Earth as will be needed to run this operation. Power, plant mass, and people aren't free resources.

The energy required to sustain and grow a life form (the cow) is orders of magnitude greater than the energy in the final product (steak). A lab can improve on that ratio.

Not even close. Cattle are labor and space intensive as well as guzzling feed and water. All of the latter has to be shipped via trucks and pipes.

It feels that way, but estimates look quite promising. If lab grown meat ends up using 1% of the land needed for animal production that would make a huge difference! http://phys.org/news/2011-06-lab-grown-meat-emissions-energy...

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