Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

This movement towards synthetic meat seems very antithetical to the natural foods heuristic. Isn't what we've learned over the last half-century or so that processing food in an attempt to make it more nutritious/uniform/etc. generally involves a reductive analysis of the value of the food and in doing so destroys most of the actual nutrient value?

The "shopping at the edges of the market" thing is a tolerably good heuristic for avoid foods that have been modified based on outdated or incorrect theories of human nutrition. The push for heavily processed synthetic meats seems like a huge step backwards.

View on HN

It’s at least more efficient and doesn’t result in killing animals. This is probably way more sparing of water use, for instance. Whether someone wants more nutritious food or not is a secondary concern from decoupling meat consumption from current (horrible) practices.

Exactly. I see the benefit of this kind of food even if it is somewhat weak nutritionally if used occasionally in an otherwise well balanced diet. Sure, don't do this for every meal, but maybe don't it with regular sushi neither anyway. Enjoy your occasional sushi without the ethical / environmental drawbacks of eating actual salmon, and remain healthy by diversifying food.

I'd be glad too, actually.

What i see and taking in account the higher comments about economics of scale is that at some point synthetic meats will become cheaper that natural so food manufacturers will start replacing it with a tiny disclaimer “may contain synthetic meat” and that if the FDA forces them to.

I hope the disclaimer will say "is synthetic meat" if it is actually entirely synthetic. Uncertainty would ruin it!

It isn't really "heavily processed" any more than artificicially selecting seeds for edible plants and growing them through aquaponics or other "unnatural" settings.

Lab-grown meat implies that most of the basic cell chemistry of these cells is going to occur as usual. To me that kills many of the stronger arguments against processed food.

"Basic cell chemistry" is a term that is very reductive. Long-held wisdom is that we don't eat animals that have died of natural causes. But a dead animal's cell chemistry is largely functional for days to months after its death.

So yes, I would argue significantly more heavily processed; edible plants need to be biologically viable in order to be useful for food production. That is not a guarantee that it will be safe or good, but as a heuristic I think it's a solid one, since the changes are within the bounds of the variability that is achievable through natural reproduction.

While I definitely understand your concern, I also think we can see this as a fascinating opportunity to improve the nutritional value of meat. These muscle cells in culture will generally speaking continue to produce the proteins, ECM components, etc. that they normally do, but we can also take advantage of genetic manipulation, metabolic engineering, and nutrition engineering to make them achieve more. A paper came out last year (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109671762...) in which mammalian cells (bovine primary and immortalized murine muscle cells) were modified to produce plant proteins without loss of phenotype. From the abstract:

"... to endogenously produce the antioxidant carotenoids phytoene, lycopene and β-carotene. These phytonutrients offer general nutritive value and protective effects against diseases associated with red and processed meat consumption, and so offer a promising proof-of-concept for nutritional engineering in cultured meat."

It may also be worth mentioning that cultured meat offers other potential gains in the arena of human health -- no need for antibiotics in a sterile manufacturing setting (so not contributing to antibiotic resistance), vanishingly low risk of foodborne illnesses and novel viruses like covid-19, etc..

All due respect, I do not feel like you understand my concern.

"Improving the nutritional value" is exactly what I am railing against. The idea that we understand human nutrition in any quantitative way is not realistic. It involves attempting to reduce complex systems to a small set of things that we can understand (making the system more "legible") is dangerous and represents a huge failure of what James C. Scott calls "high modernism".

By the time that we figure out that one of the nutrients presented is harmful unless it is accompanied by mediators naturally present in real foods it will be too late to fix these processes.

You're right, I misunderstood your initial comment, so I see that my response was completely antithetical to your thoughts on nutrition. Sorry for the miscommunication!

> This movement towards synthetic meat seems very antithetical to the natural foods heuristic.

I can't take that heuristic seriously while eating any kind of fruit or vegetable, given how selective breeding has turned them all into utterly unnatural creations, even the so-called non-GMO varieties. At that point, "natural" just means "not using any technology developed after an arbitrary cutoff date" and it's meaningless.

For what it's worth, most modern food animals and plants are still capable of producing natural offspring and sustaining life on their own. GMO presents some interesting challenges, but the main thing is that modern offshoots of wild organisms are bred to produce these outcomes, but they are bred, which means that they are within the range of variability of the population in question, even if they're out in the bell curve a bit.

I think there's a significant qualitative difference between cheese, for example, of any variety, and "processed cheese" which is designed to mimic cheese properties but make it uniform over time and region by substituting simple chemicals (i.e., reductive by definition) for ingredients which came about by co-evolution in our ecosystems.

I’d take it any day over the gross conditions animals are raised and butchered in. I’m not a vegetarian but am unbelievably excited for this to become normal place. It’s many years over due.

Sort of, but not really. Nutrient deficits are pretty rare in developed countries; I'd bet there are more anorexia cases than scurvy, goiters, etc. The main lesson has been that processed foods have been engineered to taste better, often because of added sugar, salt and fat, are less filling, and are more likely to cause weight gain because of that. Golden rice is a food that was engineered to be more nutritious, and if not for politics and GMO fears, it would be a nutritional game changer for the developing world.

This isn't to say modern agriculture practices are good, it's that it's hard to say people aren't getting enough nutrients in their diet when micronutrient deficiencies are rare and there's an obesity epidemic.

> The push for heavily processed synthetic meats seems like a huge step backwards

Regardless of how accurate that is, "ultra processed foods" is a recent, poll-optimized anti marketing campaign keyword from the American meat industry.

Wait till you find out how unnatural most meat is. Its totally full or hormones and ammonia...And just to get ahead of the inevitable response, no, the vast majority of consumers do not buy grass fed / free range / whatever. Its a dodge and impossible to scale to current consumption levels based on land availability.

I mean, the animals that the meat is made from are living creatures, capable of reproduction and all the usual functions of those animals. We have not been able to shortcut biology in this regard; we are just working on the fringes of natural variability.

In other words, the fact that we have biological systems that are achievable by breeding natural stock is a backstop against producing "food" that did not co-evolve with us. No guarantees, of course, which is why it's a heuristic and not a hard-and-fast rule, but I'd much rather have meat from living animals that have to survive than lab-produced meat that we have reductively arrived at by trying to mimic the observable properties of meat from biological organisms.

GMO presents significant challenges to this, as does clonal propagation of mutant varieties of fruit trees, both of which result in things that, while not necessarily bad, have developed outside the range of what natural variability could produce as viable systems.

Isn't what we've learned over the last half-century or so that processing food in an attempt to make it more nutritious/uniform/etc. generally involves a reductive analysis of the value of the food and in doing so destroys most of the actual nutrient value?

Pretty much.

I had a boss who was very sanctimonious about her lunches. She would hover over other people and say, "I never eat processed foods."

Then she'd put a fake chicken patty in the microwave and slather it with vegan mayonnaise.

I've found that the louder someone is about their eating habits, the less likely it is that they use logic to choose their food.

I've found that the louder someone is in general, the less likely it is that they use logic in general. :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com