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Comment by blizkreeg | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for lab-grown meat but I do question if you'll ever fully satisfy the meat lovers. In my opinion, a better approach would be a hybrid meat/fake meat option which would still make a huge dent in factory farming but appeal to the palates of those who love their cheeseburger.

If we can cut down "real" meat consumption by even half, you could in theory make all cows free range.

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I don't know about other meat lovers, but yours truly can't wait for lab-grown meat to be a thing so he can finally stop killing animals for food.

Out of curiosity, what's stopping you from going vegan or vegetarian in the interim?

Pretty much only this equation:

meat tastiness * degree it affects me > immorality of killing animals * degree it affects me

Yeah, "vegan in the head but not in the plate", I think our ranks are growing haha

Exactly that. One of these days, someone will give me a choice between a normal, horrifyingly-grown slab of meat and a slightly-more-expensive-but-ethically-grown one, and then we'll see who's a hypocrite!

I'm all for lab-grown meat but I do question if you'll ever fully satisfy the meat lovers

I dunno, how much worse could it be if it is substituting the meat in, say, a McDonalds hamburger? By the time the cheese and special sauce are added, does anyone notice the difference? Sure, one might have special occasions when you go spend $200 for a real, dead cow dinner. But I’ll bet most meat consumption isn’t in the form of “slab of ribeye” but ground up to be unrecognizable Taco Bell meat and chicken nuggets. I’m also willing to bet the person placing the order at Taco Bell is not in meat conisseur mode, but in “fill the hole so the grumbling sounds stop” mode.

Why don't you think that lab-grown meat will satisfy meat lovers? Lab grown meat is still biologically meat.

perhaps it's my ignorance as i haven't tasted it.

Okay. I was wondering if you thought the labelling would turn people off. (America has a lot of random fear-of-science. See: anti-GMOs, anti-vaccine, anti-evolution sentiments.) Or maybe that it would be that people wouldn't actually be able to reocognize what cut of meat it was from, and it would be some kind of uncanny valley problem. Or a kind of macho attitude like "if a pig didn't die, it doesn't count as breakfast". (I've seriously heard a guy say that!)

Yeah, if you're only concerned about taste/texture/juiciness, I think that's the easiest concern. lab grown meat is still the same muscle cells. I would bet a lot of money that it's going to taste awesome.

It's even better. Unless you really want to have it attached to a rib, or fat chunks in between for some reason, I believe it's going to be the best quality steak meat. Basically a mass produced perfect filet.

>America has a lot of random fear-of-science. See: anti-GMOs, anti-vaccine, anti-evolution sentiments.

these sentiments are not random when you consider the history of Monsanto, of DuPont, the tuskegee syphilis experiments, etc. You don't need to look far to find reasons to distrust global corporations and governments.

Lab-made synthetic flavors* are readily distinguished from non-lab flavours. Getting lab-made flavors right must be an easier problem than growing a steak in the lab... and we still still can't do it.

* a.k.a. artifical and natural flavours - the only difference between artificial and natural is the starting ingredient in the synthesis

Idk, I'm not convinced. You're comparing two very different processes--- artificial flavors are a matter of organic chemistry and if we [humans] are guiding the process, then we have to get every single fraction of chemicals exactly right.

Whereas, when you have cells, you already have a system that grows and does the chemistry via it's own enzymes. The dream is that you "just add sugar / water / salt" and it'll grow. I'm not saying that there won't be problems. (Like, maybe the meat tissue think that it's stressed or has been cut, if it's exposed to water/air? Maybe stressed tissue will taste bad or produce bad hormones?) But they will be very very different problems.

Okay, fair enough. Do you agree that getting factory farm meat to taste as good as pastured meat is an easier problem?

As an example, given a pastured chicken, a factory chicken, and a lab chicken, is it easier to get the factory chicken to taste like the pastured chicken, or to get the lab chicken to taste like the pastured chicken?

I have never tasted a factory chicken that compares to a pastured chicken, and I'm skeptical about whether it's possible. But nevertheless I believe that's an easier problem than getting the lab chicken right, which of course implies that in my opinion a good-as-pastured lab chicken is exceedingly difficult.

But I'll readily agree we can make something that most humans would identify as meat in the lab and that a large number of them would be happy to eat it. After all, people enjoy eating all sorts of processed food as it is.

Given this, I guess the real question is, can you make a lab chicken taste as good as a factory chicken? I don't know, probably...

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