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Comment by parsimo2010 | Hacker News Reader

parsimo2010

I will be interested to see how this scales over time. Most of the world doesn't really care if their meat is cruelty-free (not enough to pay extra for it), but I think they'll move to lab grown meat if it has other benefits. Conventional livestock farming takes a lot of work to ensure that the food supply is safe (sanitation and testing), and I assume that lab grown meat has a natural advantage in this area. I would love if lab grown meat had a guarantee of less bacteria so I could cook my meat less. I would also love it if lab grown meat had customizable texture and fat content. That's stuff I'd pay extra money to have. Once the premium products see wide distribution I assume that a cheaper grade will become available.

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A lot of people won't care about being able to use lower temperatures. Anybody who likes steak medium well or higher, of course.

Fears of trichinosis decades ago led to pork being overcooked for a long time. I did sous vide pork chops for my parents and they said it was the best pork chop they'd ever had, but still weren't crazy about it. They just don't like pork, after a lifetime of eating it overcooked.

I've done chicken breast at low temp and ended up with a mushy piece of meat i didn't care for. Chicken breast is good in a relatively narrow band of temperatures, where it's neither mushy nor dessicated, and often you still need to crisp the skin. Technology has made it easier to get in that band.

It would be cool to do steak tartare at home, though!

Wait what's stopping you? We eat steak tartare at home all the time, just buying good new york strips and cutting them up. All you need is very good olive oil and a little vinegar, perhaps some shallots or capers if you have them, and an egg yolk. It's faster prep and cleanup than bothering to fry the steak!

> Most of the world doesn't really care if their meat is cruelty-free

I don't think most of the world views animal husbandry as having inherent cruelty in the first place.

Agree. This is a very West-coast American mentality. Frankly, the majority of the country doesn't see it that way, let alone the rest of the world.

And one often finds that the relationship to food is different outside of the US. It's somehow less of a commodity and more of a meaningful tradition. You'll be hard-pressed to convince Frenchmen to let go of Limousin beef, for example, and in a manner that's markedly different from Texans defending their meat.

Vegetarianism is growing in other parts of the world, like France, and for much of the same reason as in the American West Coast.

While you're right that there might be more attachment to 'traditional' and overall high quality meat, there's still a big movement for cruelty free meat as you can see by the impact of associations like L214 for example, or the fact that there was an increase of 25% for the vegetarian market in 2018

There's certainly more than there used to be, but the fervor endemic to the US seems to be absent from France.

Certainly ethical vegetarianism is a very specific counter culture against European/American agriculture.

I just happened to come across a mean farmer in my language bragging about a “tadpole massacre” in their ricefield that happens when the field is drained in an appropriate season, a very conventional, not at all industrial, pesticide free, yet apparently a cruel method for unwanted animals, used to produce entirely vegetable products.

Conventional ethical vegetarianism don’t offer a consensus around such animal cruelty involved in vegetable produces, it’s completely out of sight and out of scope.

I believe this is a solved issue in trains of philosophy/religions from India, where some groups of people have practiced partial vegetarianism for millenniums, which I suspect to be the actual upstream of various vegetarianisms, and the layman’s versions of it say you should accept the sin, reasonably try to minimize harm to all life, and leave animal processing to (enslaved) butcher classes. The slavery part is kind of creepy, but the former two parts solves this classes of controversies beautifully.

As you can see, most, if not all, known branches of vegetarianisms are specifically crafted rebellion movement against certain parts of western agriculture, and I think thus they are moot in other contexts.

Traditional animal husbandry? Probably not. Factory farms? Most people think of them as at least somewhat inhumane.

Most of the world doesn't even consider it cruelty. Certain barbaric religious customs notwithstanding, modern slaughtering is quick and painless by nearly instantaneously destroying the animal's brain.

It's not the slaughtering that's the cruel part. It's the conditions the animals are raised in.

With mass production AG, absolutely.

But go visit a family owned ranch in Wyoming and tell me those cows don't have it just as good as the elk grazing alongside them.

Also, for the cows, chickens, pigs, etc themselves, the options are a life under husbandry or no life at all.

I would like to see meat substitutes become good enough to displace the low quality stuff (fast-food, etc), but a world without high-quality natural animal protein is a dull one...

I agree with you that a world without high-quality natural animal products would be a dull one, but most meat sold is unfortunately from mass production AG.

I don't know for the US, but in France 82 % of poultry, 90% of pigs et 99 % of rabbits come from mass production.

So if you live in the city and cannot really know the origin of what you eat, you can bet it's been mass produced.

I think that's why there's such a hype around vegetarianism and veganism right now : not so much because eating animal is an absolute evil, but because most animal products available do not come from a family owned ranch in Wyoming but from places like this one : https://animaux.l214.com/poulets/elevage-poulets-duc-yonne-2...

Wouldn't the quality of lab grown meat be better? You can clone the cells of the tastiest cow, grow them in perfect conditions, and guarantee that the meat has zero pathogens (allowing it to be eaten raw).

The lab grown meat is just a single cell type at this point, correct? A perfectly lean mono-steak would be awful. Until the lab can figure out other basic things like how to grow fat and then get it marbled through the steak, we're a ways off from getting lab steaks that anyone wants to eat.

Seems like a lot of effort to recreate a mechanism that nature has already perfected. The tastiest protein comes from animals that have natural lives and diets. I'm not convinced a lab can truly compete with the efficiency of the natural process (at least in our lifetime).

We just need to consume less and go back to more natural production of what we do eat.

> grow them in perfect conditions

Sci-Fi reader part of myself wonder if there could be some information theory aspect to a perfect-mess of meat, that the food must grow within a context relevant to the consumer, i.e. a perfect piece of meat or a carrot from 100 years in the future or past is not perfect to us in present.

Well, I think it is both. I find it quite cruel to kill animals. Even more cruel to breed animals just to be able to kill them later. It's quite a twisted moral towards a sentient being. No animal wants to be killed.

They don't know it's coming. They wouldn't live at all if we weren't raising them for food.

If they could be raised in humane, unlike mass production conditions, then one could argue convincingly that it's better than not doing it all from a purely compassionate viewpoint.

It's still tremendously wasteful of land and resources, but that's a separate concern to address.

It's the massive destruction of existing biomes and ecosystems to make way for monoculture soy, wheat and other grain farms that go into cattle feed that is the issue. Free range cattle in non-savana bushland like we have here in Australia is a pretty profitable business, and has caused large scale species extinction, landscape degradation and general misery to everything and everyone not chowing down on delicious burgers 3 times a week. If the meat in there comes from MeatChowCorp's basement, no problem.

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