The struggle to name lab-grown meat | Hacker News Reader

The struggle to name lab-grown meat

qz.com

14 pointslaurex48 comments

There's a parallel issue with traditional meat farmers banding together to prevent labelling this as "meat". I agree with them when it comes to plant based meat imitators but cultured meat is a harder sell for me. This is actual meat tissue.

Lab-grown diamond faced the same issue, but now it's considered diamond just the same by the FTC, so I'm not sure what the farmers are hoping for.

The gap between lab grown diamonds versus those found in the Earth is much narrower than lab grown vs farm grown meat today. You need special technology to detect one from the other.

With time, it'll be an increasingly losing battle for the farmers.

> I'm not sure what the farmers are hoping for.

Effective subsidies, like when margarine legally wasn't allowed to be sold yellow:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/food/the-plate/20...

Force the vat-meat makers to call their product something unappetizing, and save the cattle yards.

If the French can stop you from calling your chemically identical sparkling white wine “Champagne”, I see no reason why meat farmers shouldn’t be able to stop you from calling your industrially-grown bovine cell culture “meat”.

If they called it “dead cow” I’d agree, but they call parts of nuts meat as well. Meat doesn’t mean dead animal.

Champagne is the name of a region, and the grapes and finally the wine inherit the name from that region. Because the taste of grapes are affected by weather the actual region of production makes a difference. I don't consider it quite the same thing.

That said, there is little consistency in how things are named and often it comes down to the relative power of one special interest over another. We shall see how this shakes out.

FWIW, the grapes aren't called Champagne. Champagne sparkling wine usually uses Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier or Chardonnay grapes.

What it's legally allowed to be advertised as and what people will call it are two different things.

So they should all get to sell natural and organic meat. ;)

Just use what William Gibson does and call it "Vat grown"

"Jesus," Molly said, her own plate empty, "gimme that. You know what this costs?" She took his plate. 'They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't vat stuff." She forked a mouthful up and chewed. - Neuromancer

What about "ethical meat"?

I love meat, but I still think killing an animal for food, when you don't really have to, is an ethical gray area. Lab-grown meat is the first time we don't have to consider the ethics of killing an animal in order to eat meat.

Fun fact: all the lab grown meat today requires fetal bovine serum - they literally kill newborn calves and suck the juices out of their hearts to grow these meats.

https://slate.com/technology/2017/07/the-gruesome-truth-abou...

Why not abort the fetuses?

No idea - I assume because it's easier? This isn't my wheelhouse. I just remember when I found out I was surprised it seemed nobody else knew (at least everybody else I told seemed surprised) since it's pushed so heavily as an ethical alternative to meat and they're still killing animals to make it.

Once the culture is started you don't have to kill more calves. Of course, accidents when growing cell cultures still happen.

But how much meat do you get from each culture?

It’s a peculiarity of modern American ethics that some people think that this would be significantly more ethical.

It would reduce the issue to ethics only though. Whether you agree with the ethics part or not, lab-grown meat will likely also require less resources and thus will be better for the environment (and it would also be cheaper if governments wouldn't support lifestock breeding with money). In my eyes that's the bigger advantage compared to the ethics question.

For the ethical part, I personally don't agree with the "killing animal for food" part. For me, it's perfectly okay to kill an animal for food and anyone who thinks I should stop eating meat is a problem in my eyes (if you don't want to eat meat, I won't judge, but please don't judge me either). Where I do have ethical concerns though is when animals are kept in bad conditions throughout their lives to minimize price. The impact is felt by humans as well, as those conditions often involve giving the animals antibiotics which leads to super germ evolution (and those germs land in the meat we buy to finally land in humans!). Hopefully we'll have minimum standards in the future for growing animals for food. Those standards will make "real" meat more expensive but most people won't care as they can eat lab grown meat.

the ethical bit is a small part to me. Hopefully this meat can be more nutritious, standardized, bacteria/infections/antibiotic free and overall a lot more economical as methods are improved.

I doubt it. In fact I foresee a lot of unique long-term health problems when people start eating this as a major part of their diet.

Think of it as the early versions of a huge and complicated piece of software whose coders just sort of hacked it together from reverse-engineered APIs with zero documentation.

I've been hearing it called "Shmeat" since almost 2008. Appears that word has been given a new definition since then.

Maet. "have some maet, mate"

(this is a riff on mylk which is what the nuts are doing over the dairy aisle)

Soy links are universally crap. Nut loaf is better. Not<x> is quite popular, but the meat aisle packers are now fighting back, ring-fencing the vegan fake meat options to a slum stand at the end.

Steal from science fiction: ChickieNobs

http://remotestorage.blogspot.com/2010/07/margaret-atwoods-c...

factory meat? ivf-meat? meat-that-may-or-may-not-contain-human-genetic-material? meat(lol)? bambi-approved meat?

I'd still eat it if they make it taste like wagyu tbh. Maybe they should popularize it by donating it to food banks and set quotas for it on food stamps.

Sure, if there’s one thing that will convince the masses that they should be eating weird vat-grown animal tissue, it’s telling them “Hey, all the poor people are doing it!”

Does it taste like sadness, like in Better Off Ted?

'Clean Meat' is my preferred nomenclature when describing it to people. They seem more open to it than anything else.

I guess Soylent Green is taken?

"Soylent" is an actual liquid food product. Wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting, name gave me a chuckle.

That was the joke.

'semen-free meat'

Synflesh

Feat

It’s Impossible!

DEADBEEF

Imeatation

Meatshift (makeshift)

Fabricow

Immicow

Tubesteak <-- Come on!

TVP?

TAP.

vpro

That's already taken by "textured vegetable protein".

Which is why I mentioned it.

ugh, just take a page from tech marketing. Virtual meat or Smart meat or Cloud meat or Meatless meat . Or just Frankestein Meat

The article side-steps the ethical issue lurking behind lab-grown meat. Many animals would never have had a life if they hadn't been raised for food.

So? Thousands of babies are never born every time a male mammal ejaculates.

Replace animal with human, if we had an organ farm in which we grow humans and then kill to harvest the organs, would it be ethical?

PS. I am a meat eater

There are infinitely many possible lives that didn't happen for infinitely many different reasons. I'm not sure it makes sense to value hypothetical lives.

That logic immediately justifies any number of absurd or horrific acts.

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