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Comment by orblivion | Hacker News Reader

As fake meat gets better, I have to do more double-takes as a vegetarian at restaurants. Are they pulling one over on me? Once it's lab-grown I'm not sure what I'll do, unless it's a vegetarian restaurant.

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> Once it's lab-grown I'm not sure what I'll do, unless it's a vegetarian restaurant.

As a religious person I've been curious to read up on what religious scholars of various faith traditions with dietary restrictions have to say about lab-grown meats. Sadly, very few seem to have very settled opinions about it. And it's really only the Catholic Church that has the infrastructure to actually consult credentialed scientists to consult on these issues.

Most of the Hindu sources I've seen maintain that meat is bad on two levels. One is the ethical dimension of committing violence to things that feel pain. The other is an internal spiritual dimension where they believe meat is intrinsically not Sattvic. So it's less bad than real meat, but still not good.

The little I've seen from Jewish and Muslim sources suggests that they don't really see lab-grown as being any different from regular meat with regarding kashrut or halal food.

> The little I've seen from Jewish and Muslim sources suggests that they don't really see lab-grown as being any different from regular meat with regarding kashrut or halal food.

What qualifies as a pig? What if it's a hybrid? What if it has only a little bit of pig DNA? Could be interesting times ahead!

>Could be interesting times ahead!

Seriously. If you genetically modified a pig to not have cloven hooves does it suddenly become kosher?

It's been interesting times for religious people for the last 400 years or so. Doesn't seem to faze them.

At some point you have to accept that relgious scholars can’t answer everything. There is simply no premise for this in texts written thousands of years ago.

There are religious groups that take a literalist stance on scriptures and interpret the rules therein as checklists of arbitrary codes to adhere to because reasons, but that's not really how most serious theology or religious thought works.

Generally religious scholars are scholars because they're trained in an intellectual tradition that involves understanding the underlying logic behind the rules so that they can be applied to the changing times and evolving contexts. That's the whole point of having a clergy in the first place. If it was just rote memorization of a rule book you wouldn't need them.

Talmundic law has managed to continue updating itself based on extrapolations of the underlying logic behind restrictions in the source text. Here is an example: http://www.kashrut.com/articles/buffalo/

And in Hinduism, the dietary restrictions are based on practical considerations around how the food is produced and its perceived metabolic impact on the body and mind. There is an established framework for evaluating any food by these standards.

> Talmundic law has managed to continue updating itself based on extrapolations of the underlying logic behind restrictions in the source text. Here is an example: http://www.kashrut.com/articles/buffalo/

Isn't the ban on pig products thought to have been based on it being a disease vector? Considering that this is no longer relevant with modern sanitation and medicine it would seem they're using it as a checklist rather than applying any sort of logic.

The disease vector is more modern speculation/post-hoc rationalization for the rules. It's not really anywhere in the text itself aside from references to the animals being 'unclean.' It's likely that a variety of factors went into the rules, not least of which were probably just wanting to maintain some social and cultural separation from the communities around them.

Unfortunately, they can answer everything, the only problem there won't ever be any logic nor sound reasoning behind it.

I apologize, but this is quite an ignorant thing to say. The way rulings are deduced can get very specific and intricate. There is a system and methodology behind how people arrive at rulings, how texts are interpreted and meaning derived from them.

It's still all predicated on believing in the existence of deities.

That is for the subject at hand here. The discussion is about logic and soundness on deducing rulings from texts

People draw analogies to things present at that time to derive rulings today. I read somewhere that way before the advent of flight, Muslim scholars thought about how would one pray if they were flying. Today, rulings about how to pray on a plane are derived from rulings about how people used to pray when they were traveling in caravans, riding camels or horses etc.

I have the same experience, especially as I don't really want my food to be 'meaty' - it's been decades since I ate meat. I am excited about the implications of lab-grown meat though, not because I want to eat it myself, but because it should mean a huge decrease in the amount of resources we channel into producing meat, and a huge decrease in animal suffering. Of course, what I don't see being discussed too much is that we would still expect the health implications of eating a lot of meat, from whatever source, will continue to be serious - people should still only have a couple of vat-burgers a week...

Seeing how there are many reasons to be vegetarian, there's bound to be some confusion as some people consider cultured meat vegetarian (due to it not infringing on animal welfare), and others not (due to others not eating meat for other reasons).

That confusion already exists, plenty of people who are vegetarians for animal welfare reasons also don't want to eat fake meat. People are complicated.

I look forward to the fake meat getting cheaper than the real meat so it's economically less attractive to pass off real meat as fake, however unlikely someone doing that would be in the first place.

You should avoid fake meat in general as a vegetarian unless you can personally verify the source, or otherwise accept the risk that sometimes you will eat real meat.

I went to a party once where a vegetarian was told a fake meat was used for some chili, but it really wasn't.

Some establishments lie. I've had a cynical attitude in the past. But then, I've had enough places actually come back to me with a correction about their menu that they could have gotten away with not making, or checked on something that I didn't even think to check on, that I have faith that people aren't total scum out there. Parties though? If people disrespect me like that at a party, those are not people I ever want to party with.

I'm only going to go so far to verify. I accept the risk, and at a certain point the blame is on them for lying to me.

My family has re-framed it as "plant-based meat". It's real food to us.

I imagine lab meat will develop a distinct name like "clean meat" to distinguish it from traditional animal meat and plant-based meat.

If lab grown meat becomes common, it will likely because it’s cheap. There’d be no real incentive for this sort of fraud.

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