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Comment by dilemma | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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