World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day | Hacker News Reader

World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day

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233 pointshochmartinez339 comments

I always wonder about the morality questions. This is like a lab experiment for subjective morality.

For the sake of the experiment, let's assume the sci-fi writers are right, and eating animals will eventually be considered immoral. This is an extreme stance at the moment (hello PETA) but let's assume it will eventually be accepted as the only moral stance.

How long will it be between the introduction of lab-grown meat until killing animals for food is banned? Is this a generational thing (so older people still consider eating animals to be acceptable, while younger people do not), or is it a country-wide thing (countries move to ban eating animals one by one, driven by a general shift in moral attitude), or what? How does this change in morality propagate through society?

Will we get to the point where statues of now-famous people are pulled down because they ate animals? Assuming some variant of "cancel culture" exists then, will that act retroactively and currently-lionised people get cancelled because they are carnivores, even though the current culture that they exist in considers it acceptable?

Will we see clever re-interpretations of religious texts dealing with the eating of animals? Will we get religious divisions between different interpretations? Will some people refuse to accept the general moral stance on eating animals because their religious text says it's acceptable? How does this interaction between objective religious morality and subjective secular morality work?

It's going to be really interesting to watch this unfold.

Another question is, if its banned to kill an animal for meat, for various animals, how long until they go extinct? Many are co-dependent on humanity for their survival at the species level... Or at the very least how will it affect their evolution?

Good question. Another: How will the ranchland dedicated to their raising be used? In Montana, where the cows outnumber the people, the land they occupy is considered unfit for farming, largely because it’s not friendly for combines.

There’s also the whole infrastructure and supply chain dedicated to the breeding and raising of various meat sources. What will happen to them?

Seems fairly straightforward to predict, since this has happened dozens of times before as technology marched on: with no more business for them, they'll go bankrupt and the workers will eventually be assimilated into other professions. Maybe there will be a small remaining industry tending to hobbyists, similar to how horse shoeing and buggy whip manufacturing are very much a niche professions these days.

Have we had one of these "industry extinctions" in the last quarter century, particularly one at the scale of the meat industry?

Our economy and workplaces are significantly different from what they were when horses were replaced by cars.

Manufacturing and textiles, though they might have happened slightly more than 25 years ago.

> Our economy and workplaces are significantly different from what they were when horses were replaced by cars.

The 21st century isn't special and we weren't born a quarter century ago. The economy and our workplaces will continue to evolve, as they have since the beginning of time.

The 20th century may have been special. In a hundred years we went from riding horses to landing on the moon. If the 21st century is to advance on a similarly breathtaking scale we'll need some astounding changes -- immortality, say, or true AI.

About 27% of the world still works in agriculture, as of 2019 - the vast majority as subsistence farmers - down from 44% of the world as of 1990 [1]. That's over 200 million people that just began the transition from pre-industrial agriculture to a modern market based economy. Modern technology is so unevenly distributed that over two billion people are still fed without the benefit of industrialized farming.

I think you're vastly underestimating how much work there is left to do.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS

Well, down from 80% farmers in the Middle Ages. So we've come a long way.

You're right. I was thinking about the technological frontier. In terms of improving the average or the floor, rather than the ceiling, we've got our work cut out.

Consumer film cameras are extinct as they have been replaced by digital. They are only carried by specialty stores now as people only use it as a hobby.

The fraction of the population employed in agriculture has continued to decline precipitously over the last few decades as automation technology improves, continuing the trend that began with the industrial revolution.

https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture

The businesses will be shot down when they are no longer profitable. If the land has no other use it would seem obvious to convert it into parks or other wild preservations.

The big issue is the slaughterhouses, which would obviously die out but which also may be the only big employeer around, kinda like the steel mills used to be. The farms raising feed are not likely to employ a lot of people.

humans have kept dogs and cats and horses around even though many of them aren’t used for their original purposes anymore, so I’d be surprised if some sentimental folks didn’t keep a few cows or sheep or whatnot around just for fun.

Especially with cows, sheep and chickens, I suspect the market for their non-meat goods (milk, wool, eggs) will persist (perhaps in a progressively more artisanal market) for far longer than the killing-animals version of the meat industry.

I don't know about wool, but outside of artisanal situations the industry for milk and eggs is cruel from birth to death, not just at death.

For sure, my thinking is that those industries are likely to survive more in the "I have a coop with a dozen chickens in my back yard" sense.

Domestic animals are already going extinct[1] as agriculture standardizes on the most profitable, most stable, or lowest maintenance breeds. Most domestic breeds wouldn't survive transition to wild living, survive by outcompeting native wildlife. That's why we don't have flocks of wild chickens roaming North America but there feral pigs are a menace.

Based on this, I would bet that our current domestic meat animals would go extinct relatively quickly. There are some people who try to preserve various breeds in what are essentially zoos, but I can't imagine them operating in perpetuity.

1: https://www.livestockconservancy.org/index.php/heritage/inte...

I would expect to see pockets of domesticated animals survive in captivity across the world for various non-meat purposes. Even if all captive breeding is banned, I would still expect allowances for governments or organizations to maintain breeding populations as a living reminder of where our civilization came from.

Right. I've seen some zoos that already have a little "farm" section showing off some local heritage livestock breeds. I'd expect that sort of thing to take right off if it started to look like there was real risk of extinctions.

If humans only existed as mindless stock animals, bred for food, I'd prefer extinction. But I wouldn't care to make that choice on behalf of Bovideae Bovinae Bos taurus.

> Many are co-dependent on humanity for their survival at the species level

Can you list them?

It's a hard problem. I'd like to imagine factory meat will free up land for use as wild nature preserves, which are the only real way to, well, preserve nature.

But land has many other alternative uses. Until we value every one of those alternative uses less than we value preserving nature itself, we'll tend to use the land for something else.

Of course it depends on the land in question. Any land that is currently good for grazing and nothing should immediately be freed up once grazing stops being economical. Unfortunately, the land like that is not the most biodiverse -- it's rocky scrub, not forest -- but I'll be happy to see it added to the set of lands we don't want to mess with.

I think "meat from animals" will quickly become considered higher quality, or luxury.

We can kind-of see this now with seafood, where "wild caught" is more expensive than farmed.

I'm not so sure about that. Lab grown meat has the potential of offering consistent quality at consistent prices, something that's hard to do in fish farms. You're still breeding animals, but far from their natural habitat and far from their natural diet -- with lab grown meat, the equation changes in that sense.

That's the theory, but in practice, lab/factory meat will become (much?) cheaper than 'natural' meat, so even if in terms of flavor and consistency there is no difference (which I doubt), 'organic' meat will be positioned as the luxury product.

It will take a while for lab-grown meat to match the variety available for regular meat, especially on the high-end market. Consider a steak, and how many cuts of steak there are from the same animal: T-bone, filet mignon, ribeye, flank, brisket.. the list goes on and on. Then within that, there are different breeds and styles of beef, like veal or Wagyu. Then on top of that you even have alternative species altogether, like lamb, which also have different styles and cuts. Lab-grown might eventually catch up but there's a lot of ground to cover.

Lab-grown meat can exceed that thought.

You can make cuts that are bigger than they currently can be. You can adjust composition, fat content, potentially embed flavourings directly into the meat, or combine types of meat, or create types of meat that doesn't even exist today.

So I'm sure it will take time, but there's also a fairly good chance what will win people over will be that it'll be possible to provide products that just doesn't exist from "natural" sources.

Man made diamonds greatly exceed the quality of the ones dug up from the ground, yet there is still a strong natural diamond market.

People just form an emotional attachment to ‘natural’ things.

Yes, but how long will that persist for diamonds?

I also think this is a lot less likely to happen with meat. With diamonds part of the value is in signalling status. As such there is little incentive for customers to want to participate in driving down the price.

With lab-grown meat there will eventually be a number of outright benefits.

I think you're ultimately right, but let's not forget food has historically been used to signal status as much as anything else.

To an extent, but you can do that with lab-grown meat too, by producing "limited edition" meats that are arbitrarily exclusive. Want a steak that is "designed molecule by molecule" by a top chef? That'll cost you.

As my parent comment quite rightly said, humans (like other animals) definitely use food to signal status and other social cues.

Lab-grown meat will no-doubt eventually become a common ingredient once it is economically viable. However it'll likely start off in highly processed foods where consumers are not especially discerning or seeking to signal status through consumption. This would include products like ready-made frozen meals and fast food.

It may eventually enter fine dining, but it won't obtain market dominance in our life times. People just get too set in their ways as they age, for instance the elderly in Japan drive demand for Whale meat. Older people tend to have the disposable income required for fine dining.

Maybe for the near term.

For the longer term I'd think it would be more like cannibalism which humanity likely widely engaged in early on but very few would even consider today.

Just gross and icky and "you'd eat an animal!!!??" (disclaimer, I eat lots of meat).

It is not a generational issue. Sometimes it seems like the Internet thinks that all the *isms have been invented after 2010. Studying newspapers or TV shows from the 1970s easily refutes that assumption.

Also, there is no correlation between goodness and vegetarianism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism

So, firstly, this:

> For the sake of the experiment, let's assume the sci-fi writers are right, and eating animals will eventually be considered immoral.

Also, is it vegetarianism if you only eat lab-grown meat? It's still meat, right, so you're still not vegetarian. Or is it the "not eating animals" that makes you a vegetarian now?

I tend to think that (e.g.) Iain M Banks is right, and that eventually eating animals will be considered immoral (and not the same as vegetarianism). You may disagree, and that's fine - everyone has an opinion.

The interesting question is not whether the future will consider this immoral, but whether if it becomes immoral in the future that applies retroactively and makes it immoral now? Does morality change over time, or regardless of time?

I grew up in the '70's so I've seen the change in morality first-hand, but that all kinda caught us by surprise. It's going to be interesting being more aware of the change in morality around this.

> Or is it the "not eating animals" that makes you a vegetarian now?

That's the point of ethical veganism/vegetarianism, yes.

So will you still be a "ethical vegetarian" if you eat lab-grown meat?

I know people self-describing as ethical vegans who eagerly await it. It sounds like a clear "yes" to me.

Why people take SF authors seriously about the future is beyond me. It's just people wishing for things. Part of the reason I stopped reading it is that it was so apparent that people used "the future" as a synonym for "Narnia" to tell their own stories or moral fables, and yet dated themselves tremendously and guessed wrong. They were more dishonest because they tried to make plausible magic, kings, and wizards instead of just realizing what they were asking for pretty much required it.

The culture has about as much chance of coming into existence as the fact that we discover unicorns. So why should we take him seriously?

You're completely right - SF is not about the future, in the same way that Narnia is not about wardrobes. It's an allegory about current society. Not trying to predict the future, but taking current trends and seeing where they go. The point is not really about guessing right or wrong, but making commentary on our current society and getting us to consider choices we may have to make.

Banks himself said that the Culture has no chance of being created by actual humans, that people would need to change in order to create it. But as a thought experiment for "what would a technological Utopia actually look like?" I think it's a very valuable contribution. There are very few Utopias that I've read about that I would actually want to live in - the Culture is probably the most attractive of any of them.

In this respect, the advent of lab-grown meat does pose the question of whether it's morally acceptable to eat animals. As far as I'm aware, only SF authors have considered this, because that's the kind of thing they do. A technological change has triggered a moral conundrum - this is the stuff that good SF ponders. It's not necessary to get the details of the technology right, or to correctly predict it. It's enough to get us thinking about this stuff before it happens.

I suspect reality will be a lot more boring.

Animals are a low efficiency method of converting plant material into meat, both in terms of calories and protein mass input/output. So with scale, eventually lab-grown meat should become much cheaper than traditional meat. At the same time, it will be higher quality. Sterile production will eliminate E. Coli, salmonella, antibiotics... Input nutrients will be tightly controlled. Environmental pollutants and parasites will be kept out.

Traditional meat will still be available, but it will be an expensive and morally questionable luxury product, like "foie gras" today.

You may be right.

There's this weird thing with some speciality produce clashing with EU regulations on food prep at the moment. Not to mention unpasteurised milk. It could end up in that basket. Strange clubs of weirdos meeting up to butcher and eat an animal, and everyone else thinking that's completely disgusting.

Don’t forget that the flavors and textures will also be optimized along the way. It will taste better to more people than animal meat.

And nutritional profiles! I read last year that beef engineered to have more B-vitamins starts to taste like fish.

Now it is less efficient but when we needed a hedge against crop failure it was essential. One large beast can be kept alive by eating scrub and can subsist a large number of people.

What we have going on right now is killing us.

This is spot on. (I'm a long time vegetarian, so I've thought a lot about this.) Hunting, fishing, and even specialty slaughterhouses will likely continue. The economics will cause mass meat production to go out of business, though. Beef first, probably. Engineering can evolve much faster than cows and chickens and fish can.

No politician, at least in the U.S. mainstream, is going to commit political self-destruction by going after farmers and making animal meat illegal. What will likely happen though is once the big restaurant chains and grocery stores start selling lab-grown meat that is better quality and cheaper than animal meat, the market for cheap animal meat will dry up. We'll have politicians trying to "save beef jobs" just like they are trying to save coal jobs today, due to more efficient and environmentally-friendly alternatives taking over the market. But unlike coal, consumers can still choose animal meat (you can't exactly choose your power plant), so it might be a long transition due to that market demand. Expect the Arby's and ilk to continue to tout how they use "real meat" with hypermasculine advertising for a long time to come.

The ironic counter-ads will be viscious: "Be a real man! Risk getting sick from one of our real burgers! Each one is made from the hormone-pumped flesh of a real baby cow that never knew its real mom!"

"back in my days, salmonella wasn't a big deal anyway, these younglins are too fragile in modern times"

So basically White Castle?

Sounds closer to Raw Water

"Think smaller. More legs."

Meat advertisting/propaganda uses "Eat natural whole foods (ignoring all the unnaural things they do to the animals and meat), not processed fake meat foods".

And to some extent, they have a point. But of course they don't invite you to eat natural whole plant foods instead of meat.

Here's where I'd like to insert the friendly reminder that all plants are living beings. You, as a living being must eat other living beings. Plants are intelligent and pass information to eachother via the web of mycelium and other unknown ways. Morality about eating only living plants, vs eating meats has always been flawed. As were the arguments about eating pescatarian and only eating fish because they "are not intelligent and can't feel pain." Don't fool yourself. You are eating living beings and you are not on some goofy moral high horse.

While I agree that not eating meat for moral reasons is pretty low on the list, (environmental and health reasons are so much more important) your argument reads like a pro-life argument. There is a clear distinction between having a nervous system and “passing information” with regards to intelligence. There’s a reason why we send people to jail for murder and not mowing their lawns.

There will also be a visual sterility on top of the practical one. For some of my friends, the idea of eating a chicken drumstick with its bone and dark veins and bits of cartilage makes them shudder, but they will put away a dozen processed sterile looking chicken nuggets with no hesitation.

Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition.

For example, goats eat almost any plant, including many natives. Unless you think humans are going to be able to eat chaparral.

The fact is that modern edible agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuel and mined fertilizers. Until we solve that problem, it's better to stop growing too many plants, let native vegetation regrow and set loose the troops of goats and chickens.

People have this idea that plants and vegetables are clean..they're not

If you want meat at the scale we eat it at now, let alone the one we'll eat it at when China and India have twice their current incomes, free range isn't going to cut it.

I don't disagree. I understand arguments for less meat. What I don't understand is abolition...that's just silly and a huge environmental catastrophe.

How is it a catastrophe? Why does the environment need domesticated livestock? Why does the food chain need us to be a predator?

To be able to produce the calories currently made by meat using relatively meh land, we'd have to heavily increase our fertilizer use and deforestation to be able to grow enough human edible plants (grains or legumes really, since tubers are difficult to transport).

It's been my impression that eliminating meat consumption would produce less need for farmland and fertilizer, not more.

This is a laudable goal, but it can't scale to the level we require today, nevermind when we have 10 billion people later in the century.

Um okay... Wel then we better get ethically okay with crowded pigs fed our food scraps.

Humans eat like 5% of the actual plant matter we harvest. The rest is composted which just releases more greenhouse gases. If you feed it to a pig, then you at least get that car on released after feeding a human.

The 'plant based' push is once again feelings without science.

Don’t ever bet against the advancement of technology. People were saying the same about electric cars for example.

How do you advance technology with free range livestock? There is no technology, that's the point of it.

Most steaks come from cows than never tasted grass.

Source? I know CAFOs are a thing, but AFAIK they're typically only used in the latter half/third of a cow's life.

That’s not how cattle are raised. Yes, most cattle are finished on grain packed in a small area, but they’re born and raised mostly to maturity grazing on grass or (eating hay where climate dictates).

I swear half the people responding have never driven past a cattle ranch.

That doesn't seem to be the norm any more. Feedlots outnumber grain-fed operation.

Citation for this??

> Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition.

And survive in a very complex and hostile environment, adapt to changing conditions, procreate, and build all the structure and tissues and organs that requires. That's a lot of energy that bioreactor-grown steak doesn't have to expend. At scale, and with some genetic optimization thrown in, can we do better? I don't know for sure, but I don't think it's an impossibility, given that most of the current meat supply is already grown in factories.

Organs are edible. You should try it sometimes. They are not waste products. No wonder Americans find these things wasteful. In my experience, even something as simple as chicken. People do not actually eat the whole thing. Half of it is thrown away, just like everything else.

It's very strange to me, because growing up, we'd eat everything. But I married into an American family, and I'm often picking stuff off the bones they throw out. We were raised to eat everything, even the marrow.

> That's a lot of energy that bioreactor-grown steak doesn't have to expend

Sure, but the bioreactor is (1) heavily affected by supply chain issues, (2) dependent on an external source of energy, (3) requires complex chemical inputs that have to be synthesized themselves oftentimes. No one takes into account the whole thing.

Also, monoculture is always going to be less resilient than an actual population of cattle, or pigs, or chickens. But, I guess this is a problem that affects the whole industry.

I don't think your main points here are true.

> Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition.

Animals are pretty inefficient at converting plants to calories, e.g. see https://learn.uvm.edu/foodsystemsblog/2014/07/10/meat-vs-veg...

Most of the energy spent getting grains to the table is in transport/processing. If you just compare the production, grains are way more efficient than animals.

Even though I'm sure goats are better than cows, they aren't as efficient as plants at producing calories, and in all cases you still have to process and transport them.

However if you've got some data showing otherwise I'm open to being convinced here.

> Until we solve that problem, it's better to stop growing too many plants

I think this is making perfect the enemy of the good. Plants use less water, produce substantially less GHG emissions, and so are still a net major win on environmental terms vs. the status quo.

> Animals are pretty inefficient at converting plants to calories, e.g. see ...

That is not what that graph shows. That graph purports to count all energy 'inputs' into the system, including human labor. This is not about 'how many calories did the cow / pig eat, versus what it produced'.

Here's an example.

Consider wheat grass. Both a cow and a human can eat this grass. However, the human can eat the seed, the cow / pig / goat can eat the entire plant. If you burn the entire wheat plant, and count the calories released you will get some number. Let's call it Y. If you count the calories in the seed that we eat, it'll necessarily be less, let's say X.

Ideally, if we're going to produce Y calories in the grain, humans ought to be able to consume as close to Y calories as possible in order to get the total benefit. Since humans can only eat X, and X < Y. Then it makes sense to feed Y-X calories to a low maintenance animal (so not beef), and then eat the animal. This will yield some number N < (Y-X) that humans can consume. This also provides a complete protein, fats, and other nutrients not found in grain (B12, which is not found in plants period, for example, thus preventing yet another synthesis process).

X + N < Y, but it is much closer to the actual amount of energy in the grain plant than just X. And then we'd need to count the energy expenditure getting the B12 and Vitamin D produced and distributed as well. And then the supply chain risk costs. All these things have costs that never get considered.

It's true that most of the food consumed by livestock isn't edible by humans - [0] says 86% - but livestock are so inefficient at converting food to edible nutrition that they still generally consume more than 1 human-edible Calorie per Calorie of meat produced. For cattle, Diet for a Small Planet [1] cites 16 Calories per edible Calorie of meat and 8 grams of protein per edible gram of protein produced, other sources seem to be in the same ballpark - both higher than the ~7:1 ratio that's implied by that 86% figure. The ratios for chickens are better, but they also generally get a much lower share of their feed from human-inedible sources.

Also, even that 86% isn't "free" - it's not all pasturing, and it takes a lot of effort, energy, and equipment to get hay, inedible by-products of human-edible crops, etc. from the field to animals' mouths.

[0] https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/fao-sets-the-record-s...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Diet-Small-Planet-20th-Anniversary/dp...

> cites 16 Calories per edible Calorie of meat and 8 grams of protein per edible gram of protein produced.

Two things. Firstly, those are 16 Calories that would otherwise quite literally go to waste. They would be metabolized by bacteria, used to grow a bacterial mat in a compost bin, and then be released into the air in the form of CO2.

Secondly, I'm not sure what 8g of protein per edible gram of protein produced means. Ruminants like cows convert carbs and other compounds into protein by hosting gut bacteria. Without a cow or chicken or something in between, these amino acids would have to come from somewhere else. Same with B12.

Don’t we grow food specifically for livestock though? That must consume a lot of resources (oil, water, etc). I think the argument is the cut out the middle man (beef / chicken) due to inefficiencies.

I personally suspect the real ratio is less than what’s being cited just because I’m a cynic, but there seems to be some logic to it no?

> Don’t we grow food specifically for livestock though?

I think that’s the central point of this thread where folks are talking past one a other.

In a hypothetical scenario where animals are more or less only eating food that humans can’t, it makes a lot of sense (from an environmental if not ethical standpoint) to include animals in the mix of foods people eat.

The impression I get is that in reality, animals grown for meat consume quite a bit of human-edible food (or food that could be trivially replaced with human-edible varieties), although I have no idea of the actual percentage.

Yes, lots of agriculture is growing animal feed.

Animals get feds lots and lots. Here's a description of finishing cattle, from a beef marketing perspective:

https://www.highlandcattleusa.org/content/Grain%20Finished%2...

Casually talks about feeding cattle their weight (or 2x) in corn over the last 3 months of their lives.

I agree that 86% of those Calories would otherwise go to waste. But considering how bad animal agriculture is for the environment just in terms of direct impacts, I doubt that feeding them to animals is an improvement over the alternative you mentioned, and I highly doubt that it's the optimal solution across all the potential alternative disposal methods we could come up with.

The plants that cattle and many other livestock eat - including grasses, corn, and other feed crops - contains protein. The exact amount depends on the plant, its age, and growing conditions, but it's often 10 to 15% by mass. Cows apparently consume about eight grams of protein for every gram of protein that makes it to humans' plates, with the rest of the amino acids presumably making up inedible organs and/or being used for bodily functions while they're alive.

> animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition.

I disagree. Average caloric and protein efficiency is 7%–8%. For beef specifically, it is only 3%. I don't know how efficiently a cultured meat factory could convert grass into beef, but I bet it could do a better.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...

This article is not about converting land from meat to not-meat. It's about converting from beef to chicken.

No one doubts that chicken is more efficient than beef. I have not argued that beef is the best animal.

Having eaten goat a few times I'd say a goat is still pretty near inedible so there is no realized gain. Tastes may vary though.

You don't like goat? Most cultures / people love it.

Naturally, this will instill a dependency on labs and their patented technologies.

I'm surprised I don't need a Monsanto license to bake bread at home.

It should be added that a large portion of the world already eats processed meat. That chicken in chicken broccoli isn’t straight chicken. We’ve already shown we care very little of what is actually meat if you put the right sauce on it.

I think an interesting comparison is lab-grown diamonds.

To me (and I suspect a lot of others here on HN), the idea of getting a mined diamond is just lunacy. Why on earth would I pay twice as much for something that is literally the same at the atomic level?

And yet enormous numbers of people still do. I'm lucky to have a wife who is a scientist (she would've slapped me upside the head if I had wasted money on a mined diamond), but there are a lot of women out there who would be very upset to receive a lab-grown diamond.

So while I very much agree with what you're saying here, and it just seems crazy to me that anyone else wouldn't, I do wonder what percent of folks will continue to demand "real" meat even when lab-grown is superior along all dimensions.

I like the idea that capitalism will just outweigh any questions of morality, because it'll be so much cheaper and better than anything else.

As Gibson wrote in 1984 (a few years earlier actually):

"`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."

Artificial diamonds are cheaper and more pure than the real thing.

> Will we get to the point where statues of now-famous people are pulled down because they ate animals? Assuming some variant of "cancel culture" exists then, will that act retroactively and currently-lionised people get cancelled because they are carnivores, even though the current culture that they exist in considers it acceptable?

Perhaps, if those statues were originally erected in honor of their diet, and to remind the vegetarians of the time who was in charge.

I know the false equivalency isn’t really your point, but come on.

We're busily pulling down statues of various slave owners, none of which were erected to honor their slave ownership.

Well, no. Many of those (Confederate "heroes") were more principally known for treason, sedition, and waging war in defense of slave ownership rather than their personal predilection toward owning slaves.

Thomas Jefferson statue pulled down in Portland: https://www.opb.org/news/article/thomas-jefferson-statue-pul...

Congrats, you found a single counterexample, namely the founding father that was by all accounts the worst human being of the bunch, what with the likely raping and impregnation of his slaves and all.

I'm all for replacing TJ statues with ones honoring better human beings.

Which ones? Most of the statues were specifically erected decades after the Civil War, by KKK and friends, as part of an intimidation campaign against black people and in support of Jim Crow -style laws and resistance to the progress of equal rights legislation.

I wasn't really referencing the US statue-pulling-down because that's a lot more fraught and convoluted. It was more the thing with Cabot in my home town of Bristol (UK).

But fair criticism, it's not an equivalence. I was struggling to find a decent example.

Though I can totally see a PETA stunt of pulling down a statue of Elvis because he ate meat.

> Though I can totally see a PETA stunt of pulling down a statue of Elvis because he ate meat.

Oh most definitely.

I get it, and I really debated whether it was worth posting and opening the whole can of worms. From an American POV, I figured the can was already cracked and it was worth airing it out all the way rather than let it sit. It’s a sore spot.

Gotta say I think the wider point about how things we take for granted today may be viewed in the future is a good one, and can be applied across our social/economic relations. I for one hope to be considered a barbarian by our ancestors.

> How long will it be between the introduction of lab-grown meat until killing animals for food is banned? Is this a generational thing (so older people still consider eating animals to be acceptable, while younger people do not), or is it a country-wide thing (countries move to ban eating animals one by one, driven by a general shift in moral attitude), or what? How does this change in morality propagate through society?

Just because they ate meat? Maybe not, but they may not look kindly on those that did large scale killing with less than humane practices. I could see this individuals being more likely to be "Cancelled."

Maybe those that fought vegans or fought against animal rights activities?

Those opposing change for the better or were active participants in things we in the future see as bad.

Remember that most people cancelled were active participants, rather than passive bystanders going with the flow.

True. We tend to cancel slave traders rather than slave owners, because if we were to cancel the slave owners then we'd have to cancel a lot of people.

I should clarify. I'm not criticising cancel culture. I'm interested in how the shift in morality happens and how it propagates, and what that means for us now. Is morality retroactive? Am I an immoral person because I eat meat, even though it's common practise now?

I wouldn't be surprised if this nuance were lost in the hypothetical future cancel culture, but I think anyone giving careful consideration to present circumstances would realize the terrible choice we all have to make.

It's easy to judge someone for complicity in the mass murder of countless animals when you have the luxury of having been saved from that choice by more advanced technology.

>I wouldn't be surprised if this nuance were lost in the hypothetical future cancel culture, but I think anyone giving careful consideration to present circumstances would realize the terrible choice we all have to make.

It already is lost among many people today so that's not a stretch in the slightest. There are an egregious amount of people that use the morality of the present to judge the decisions of the past when the whole system and culture was different. All simply because these people were spoon-fed and told "this is bad because of 'x'" without explaining from a mindset of why people thought the way they did at the time. I mean the simple fact that there is a concept of "leftism" is enough to state that there is an ideology that someone can measure you against on how "woke" you may or may not be. It's exactly no different than the Catholic church setting up a mock trial to determine if you are a heretic! Except it's not a centralized theology. But clearly it has enough adherence that there are some aristocrats that are willing to kowtow to the belief system.

I don't think eating "from animal" meat will become too controversial within the next few decades yet.

However, there will be a few shifts. Any meat that is unrecognizable as cuts of meat - hamburgers, sausages, etc - will be 'cut' with factory meat as a means to cut costs (assuming factory meat will become cheaper than livestock, which I'm confident it will with scale), similar to how it's now filled with water, MRM and other fillers, or how a few years back there was a big controversy in the UK when it turned out ground beef contained horse meat.

It'll be awhile before legislation catches up to make it mandatory to indicate the source of the meat.

But, if this scales up, I think total meat consumption will only increase.

OK, but hypothetically, assume it does become immoral, and then illegal.

If you eat a burger now, with lab-grown meat not really available, are you behaving immorally?

If you eat an animal in (say) 10 years' time, when lab-grown meat is readily available, are you behaving immorally then?

If you eat an animal in (say) 20 years' time, when that involves quite a lot of effort (finding a butcher who sells it, paying the price premium, etc). Are you behaving immorally then?

If you eat an animal after they ban killing animals for food, is that immoral? (i.e. is it the law that makes the action immoral?)

At what point does our (presumably moral) action of eating meat become immoral? Is that up to us as individuals, or is it up to our churches, or government, or what? Who makes this decision, and how is that communicated, and is it retroactive?

(Disclaimer: I am not a vegetarian)

I see it as immoral now, and immoral in twenty years. It is just socially accepted. Most of the meat-eating people I know don't even try and justify from a moral standpoint. They usually say "I know it's wrong, I just like meat". So in twenty years they will say "I knew it was wrong, it was just how life was back then".

Switch meat-eating for slave-owning and you're starting to justify tearing down those statues of Washington and Jefferson.

Cancel culture will always exist. I learned that Hitler identified it as an essential method for success in establishing a political party (Rise and Fall of the Third Reich). He employed it extensively and discovered it through analyzing the success of the socialists--which he hated and was seeking to displace.

Whatever you call it, it is just highly obnoxious behavior that uses rethoric to defame the target. It works and people will use it until it doesn't.

Hitler also was a vegetarian and really liked his dog.

Anyway, after Hitler blew his brains out, he was "canceled", and that went just fine. It's a tool that works for positive ends just as well.

And then the Synthianians will appear - that’s the ones only eating lab grown food, since plants are living beings as well

That's interesting, I've not heard that term before, thanks :)

So if you assume that at some point in the future everyone becomes Synthianian (Synthian?) for moral reasons, is it immoral to eat plants now?

I would say it is less immoral to be a vegetarian because you only kill the plant instead of killing an animal that killed and ate the plant ;-)

> Will we get to the point where statues of now-famous people are pulled down because they ate animals?

Could you tell me any case where statue of famous people were pulled down because they used cotton products made by slaves?

eating meat is not equal to agitating for keeping slavery. so I think meat eaters are safe :)

on the other hand, hardcore people who insist on killing animals without consideration for alternatives could be condemned later after 50 years or something, but I think it's fine. bigger problem is when people keep insisting on immoral things without consideration of alternatives.

overall it's really interesting to see such a big focus on "cancel culture" in this comment.

Probably so. But one thing is for sure. We’ll soon start seeing an apparent grassroots movement against lab grown meat, complete with talking points about its dubious manufacturing process and how it’s actually more unsanitary and now that we mention it morally questionable than good ol beef/chicken/pork

A quick google search told me that 12 US presidents where slave owners. So far I think none of their statues have been torn down because of the fact although slavery is almost universally outlawed and condemned. For shorter term analogies I think something like gay-marriage fits. "Progressive" countries allow it, while the more "backwards" or religious countries fight it. I guess it will play out something like this (And you habe to factor in that in case of lab-meat it will probably more expensive at the start, so people and countries have to be able to afford their morals - or eat vegetables I guess).

Andrew Jackson is being cancelle^Wremoved from the $20.

It might not be a coincidence that he was targetted as being perhaps the most racist genocidal President.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_twenty-dollar_bi...

In reading up on this I had a good laugh when i discovered the URL for the "Bureau of Engraving and Printing" is https://www.moneyfactory.gov/!

His (undoubted) role in the Trail of Tears aside, it's not at all clear why Andrew Jackson belongs on money anyway. As far as I've read, it's not even clear how the decision to put him on the $20 was made, except that one fan of his at the mint thought he should be.

All that not to mention, it's ridiculous to be putting someone who didn't think the US should have a central bank on the US's money.

Statues, money, and the like are how we communicate to the world and ourselves reminders of those whose lives we find worth emulating. As our morals change and we start to find things like slavery, forced death-marches and ethnic cleansing abhorrent, is it really wrong for us to update our imagery of whose lives we should emulate? At least to stop idolizing those people who were most notable for, or even raised arms in insurrection in support of, those acts?

> it's not at all clear why Andrew Jackson belongs on money anyway

He's the reason the Democratic Party exists, sure that's worth something…

I'm hesitant to praise anyone who helped congeal us into the political duopoly we live under.

It's also not clear to me that, its whole ~200 year lifespan considered, the Democratic Party has put its average in the green relative to historical atrocity (nor, for that matter, have the GOP).

Woodrow Wilson’s name got removed from a Princeton college and they stressed it was because he was particularly abhorrent even for his time.

Maybe the same will happen with meat. Veal, foie gras, shark fin, octopus, endangered animals, etc. Most of the blame will fall on producers, but “carnivorous” over eaters like Ron Swanson from parks and rec might age poorly.

Whenever people bring up gay marriage legality, I think it’s also important to show this graph. https://xkcd.com/1431/

Expect live meat to be overwhelmingly abhorred before you see a ban.

> So far I think none of their statues have been torn down because of the fact

Even Abraham Lincoln's statue got torn down in Portland, OR last year. Not because he was a slaveowner but because he oversaw expulsion of Native Americans from their land and executed 36 Native prisoners. I would not assume that any president's statue is safe from public ire.

To be honest, I think what will happen first is a multi-pronged marketing assault on "natural" meat from an environmental, animal rights, cost and quality angle.

E.g. producers of lab-grown meat has an interest in:

* Pushing for taxes or reduced subsidies on "natural" meat with environmental reasoning. This will get easier the more people switch.

* Pushing a "our meat never had a face but is still real meat" angle.

* Undercutting on price.

* Providing "impossible" meat. E.g. cuts that are impossible, compositions that are impossible. Species that are impractical or annoying (e.g. quail and many other birds have so little meat relative to bones that while they're tasty they're a nuisance to eat - lab-grown meat can potentially be "better" than natural meat that way), or meat with other ingredients embedded directly in the meat. Marketing "old meat" as "old fashioned", boring and lower quality.

* Pushing a "do you know where their meat has been? We know where ours has been" angle.

I don't think a ban will happen until a ban is mostly pointless. That is, I think lab-grown meats have to succeed first, and then when most people have stopped caring because they mostly eat lab-grown meats, it's possible a ban would get sufficient support.

I've considered stuff like this a lot lately, as there seems to be a lot of hypocrisy amongst commonly held positions (including mine).

I find it odd that people who truly believe in evolution, and that humans are just smarter animals, and that animals are also capable of sensing pain and emotion, can be deeply concerned (rightfully) about things such as trans rights, gender discrimination, etc. for humans (that are very high on "Maslow's hierarchy"), and yet are perfectly content to pay for meat they know was the product of an industry which is pretty horrific in its treatment of billions of cows, pigs, etc. a year.

Similarly, I have friends who regularly rail against the "wealthy" and how it's immoral to have so much money when people are suffering in poverty. Then the same day will go spend $200 on a handbag or $20 on a cocktail or $1000 on a weekend getaway to Hawaii without blinking, knowing full well those unnecessary purchases cost as much as several meals or vaccines for those less fortunate people that the "rich" should be taxed to help.

How do so many people act contradictory to their stated positions? Are they dishonest with themselves? Haven't thought it through? Or do people just want the world to be a better place... as long as it's not an inconvenience for them personally?

Objective analysis is proportional to the distance from the observer.

> Are they dishonest with themselves? Haven't thought it through? Or do people just want the world to be a better place... as long as it's not an inconvenience for them personally?

All of the above plus performative outrage / signaling. I'm definitely a healthier person after getting off social media and honestly just caring a lot less about my stances on things and whether they're perfect and holy.

> I'm definitely a healthier person after getting off social media

This. So much. Facebook was destroying my mental health.

> are perfectly content to pay for meat they know was the product of an industry which is pretty horrific in its treatment of billions of cows, pigs, etc. a year.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?

What do you think happens to animals in the wilderness? Do you think they live a happy life, retire and have a peaceful death among the loved ones? The answer is no, they get brutally murdered by a bigger animal. Did you ever have a cat and witnessed how they can torture a mouse?

That's just the world we live in. I can't change it, and no one can, it's just how it works. Am I supposed to cry in the corner about this unfortunate reality? So yeah, I'm perfectly fine with killing animals for food, as long as it's not done in a dumb way ie. making them go extinct, or in some sadistic manner.

So I guess the answer to your question is that I try to have a realistic worldview and not just what sounds nice. The universe doesn't care about hypocrisy, morality or principles. It's really good to organize a society around it and it's good to have principles, because we have to somehow live with each other, but that's not what it's about.

Animals in the wild live a much nicer life than most animals in factory farms today. It’s not a 1-1 comparison at all, just because both can be brutal.

I think it's going to be interesting simply because in order to ban killing of animals for food, we're going to have to almost genocide livestock in order to make their continued existence feasible.

People didn't seem too fussed about the mink mass killed because some were infected with Covid. "Had to be done" works every time.

It’ll probably come gradually, without any sudden jump. More and more people will switch over because of convenience, so most of the market left will be there for higher quality products, and then they’ll ban the most egregious factory farming that isn’t being used anymore, and so on until only the most boutique animal farming is left, at which point no one will care.

It might turn out to be easy to get to a lab-grown product that is 90% as good as natural, but the last 10% could be tricky.

There are countless examples of products where competitors have tried to approach the quality of a market-leader, and almost got there, but not quite.

Meat is also a good example of a product where humans are exceptionally good at detecting minor variances in quality. Objectively speaking, these are variances that shouldn't matter, but somehow xkcd 915 still emerges.

The western world hasn't had a famine in decades, mainly eats for satiety - not survival. No hunting necessary. If we are in a position where we are starving and have animals at our disposal, morals will fade.

Why does everything have to be a slippery slope?

It's a pretty binary decision (eat animals or not). What does the slope look like?

Eating whales. Or dolphins. Or dogs. Or chimps.

True, I hadn't considered that. The "should you eat horses?" question.

So if there is vat-grown pork but they never manage to get the beef quite right, will it be acceptable to eat cows but not pigs? I guess that's the slope.

So yes, this has to be a slippery slope ;)

Your version: Lab grown meat -> everyone agrees eating animals is immoral -> various extreme examples of society completely changing

It's also entirely possible that lab grown meat becomes prevalent and simply coexists with raising animals for food for the foreseeable future.

I don't think that's how humans work. There's a possibility of moral high ground here, so someone is bound to take it.

It won't be accepted. If anything it probably will be treated like veganism, which is mostly moral grandstanding. People who consume boutique products to show their virtue. A lot of us simply don't lose sleep over the suffering of factory animals, in the same way we didn't lose sleep over the starving kids in china our mothers used to berate us about when we didn't finish our vegetables. That doesn't mean we constantly try to make things like a hellscape, but you can try and treat everyone morally and not get in a tizzy over "someone is being oppressed somewhere! See! Our moral guardians of the media are showing us!" The idea of telescopic philanthropy and being a Mrs Jellyby needs to be remembered.

If it got to the point where it was mandated, we'd probably be in some form of dystopia where everything was in the pursuit of either survival (animals no longer exist or are possible to eat) or sort of a planned world where our governing or elite classes mandate their virtue on everyone, and it would lead to a lot more lifestyle changing that not eating meat. I think the latter is fairly likely, China for example seems to be doing pretty well at a basic form of that.

Your comment starts presenting an interesting debate but you steer towards some kind of partisanism or tribalism that is quite stange to witness.

You do not need to hear any kind of moral guardian to do and conduct yourself knowing that every single person is responsible of the actions they make and though I am not responsible for those starving children I am responsible for many of the atrocities commited for the burgers I ate.

It is not about virtue, it is taking responsibility of your own actions and checking your own ethic to decide if it is correct or not.

It's not partisan in the sense of right or left, the "starving kids in china" was pretty much the same thing on the right. Jellyby was definitely a moral conservative, and victorianism is surprisingly bi-partian. Usually its the fashions of the rich, if anything. HN in particular is unaware of how they imitate it, with the sudden rediscovery of Stoicism and Aurelius a bit much.

I don't agree that easting meat is an atrocity. I think it devalues words to use them like that. I think a lot of veganism is the same reaction to the existence of suffering a lot of religions have had or deal with; it's a form of going to the desert as a monk or mystic to escape the contradictions of the world. That is up to everyone, but the difference here is the monks want to make the entire world the desert now.

> eating animals will eventually be considered immoral. This is an extreme stance at the moment (hello PETA)

There are a lot more vegetarians and vegans than just PETA. It looks like around 5% of the US and hitting 10% in many countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country). Many parts of India have very high vegetarian rates.

> How long will it be between the introduction of lab-grown meat until killing animals for food is banned?

I doubt that it will be about banning animal meat anytime soon. However, I think we might see many countries start to tax the environmental cost of meat which will make it quite expensive. This is unlikely in the US, but I could certainly see it in many countries whose politics are different.

> Will we get to the point where statues of now-famous people are pulled down because they ate animals? Assuming some variant of "cancel culture" exists then

I think this isn't a useful thought right now and just feeds into the "cancel culture gone mad" ideas. Few people have been canceled. Yea, Harvey Weinstein has been canceled...for rape. Kevin Spacey has been canceled...because of sexual assault against underage boys. Most people who seem to complain about being canceled are sitting on Fox News taking home giant paychecks. Tons of people encouraged riots at the Capitol and are making millions off it.

Yes, at some point in the very distant future, we might decide that killing animals for food isn't an acceptable behavior. A hundred years ago, a man couldn't be guilty of raping his wife. 200 years ago, a lot of people owned slaves. 60 years ago we had racial segregation. 40 years ago, it was acceptable to say that gay people deserved to die from AIDS. Things change.

But it's not like it's going to happen overnight. It's not like 2017 came along and Harvey Weinstein was like, "omg, is rape wrong now? Things change so quickly and I didn't know!" Attitudes will probably change over decades or centuries.

Like, we've spent hundreds of years getting to the point of "Black people are equal and you shouldn't be racist" and people still often aren't getting canceled for racism. I've seen posts of police officers covering up explicitly racist tattoos saying that in the current climate they feel like they need to be careful. It's been over half a century since the Civil Rights Movement, but now they're like, "oh, I guess I might get in trouble for being explicitly racist in a position of power." The idea that someone would be canceled for eating an animal in our lifetime seems unlikely. It certainly won't happen as some surprise.

> Will we see clever re-interpretations of religious texts dealing with the eating of animals?

In Judaism, a lot of people hold the belief that we won't eat animals in the messianic era (when the messiah comes). People are only allowed to eat animals because Noah saved them from the flood. Before the flood, people weren't allowed to eat animals. Part of the messianic era is that it's supposed to be how the world is meant to be.

This idea isn't a left-wing Jewish idea either. I would note that it's not widely known in the Jewish world and usually more known by orthodox people who do eat meat. Judaism often has a lot of things that might be a little less official, but nonetheless have some weight and resonance.

I think we also see some of this in Christian stuff. I feel like Christians like Isaiah 11:6's "the lion will lie down with the lamb" (yes, I know that technically that's not quite the animals in the text, but it is how I often hear it said by English-language Christians). I think the idea that predators might not be predators in some world-to-come isn't something that has to be creatively reinterpreted.

> Will we get religious divisions between different interpretations?

Yes. I mean, we have religious divisions over really tiny things. This is certainly larger than a lot of religious divisions we've seen.

> Will some people refuse to accept the general moral stance on eating animals because their religious text says it's acceptable?

Do religious texts say it's acceptable? Jewish texts certainly do - and they have a lot to say on how. However, rabbis have modified it over the centuries. Chicken was once acceptable to eat with dairy and now it isn't. I think the big thing for the Jewish community would be that many rabbis would say that lab-grown meat is more in the spirit of how we're supposed to live combined with the fact that it's likely to be so much cheaper than kosher meat tends to be. Given the likely price difference, even people who might be in the "it's fine to kill and eat animals as prescribed" are likely to be buying the lab-grown meat simply because it will make meat accessibly priced. In fact, chicken was deemed to be "fleishig" so that people could have an affordable "meat" for Shabbat meals (the category of "meat" from a Jewish perspective is slightly different from "animal" and doesn't include fish...it's a long story outside the scope of this comment). I think Judaism also evolves around community standards that do change. The Bible condones all sorts of capital punishments, but the rabbis rid the religion of them all a long time ago.

I can't really speak for other religions, but if lab-grown meat becomes available at a cheap price, has better food safety than the current system, can offer better consistency and taste, and causes slaughtered-meat to become niche and a lot more expensive...even if you don't have qualms about killing animals, do you want to pay for it?

Manufactured goods are so cheap because we can manufacture them. Growing animals is hard. It requires a lot of labor, a lot of land, a lot of water, a lot of carbon emissions, a lot of food, etc. I'm sure there will be some market for "real" meat for a long time, but it will likely get expensive. Manufactured meat is likely to get pretty efficient and cheap.

I think it's less about whether religions will continue to support killing animals and more about whether anyone will want to pay for it. "Hey, here's this $1 lab-grown burger that you know will be consistent and delicious and here's this $20 bespoke cow-slaughtered burger." The fact is that most people aren't going to want to pay a premium for the cow-slaughtered burger.

Personally, I'm a vegetarian and have been for 15 years. I'm also Jewish. One thing I will note as a difference between semi-religious Jews and non-Jews is the difference in meat consumption. Many Jews, even if they aren't that religious, still won't mix meat and dairy and many won't eat non-kosher-certified meat. I have lots of friends who haven't been to a religious service in years, but still kinda do this out of a certain cultural thing or inertia. One of the things that this means is that they often don't eat meat with most meals. Meat is something they eat 2-4 times per week. By contrast, I'll have lunch with non-Jews where burgers, pizza with meat toppings, salads with chicken, etc. are the norm. Meat is a part of almost every meal.

The difference isn't a moral one: my non-vegetarian Jewish friends don't think eating meat is wrong. Eating meat is simply inconvenient and expensive for them. So they eat meat with a minority of their meals. The fact is that it's likely that slaughtered-meat will become expensive and inconvenient compared to manufactured-meat. Taco Bell or your local pizza place isn't going to spend a lot more money on slaughtered-meat if they can get a wonderful, consistent product at a cheaper price.

Regardless of whether slaughtered-meat stops being a thing or not, it will likely become a much smaller part of people's diets. This will be very important as we deal with global warming. Even if you're the type of person that's like, "I will always love a real steak on a grill and that's going to be every Saturday in the summer," the fact is that you're likely to also be eating a lot of lab-meat when you grab something at Burger King or getting deli-meat for sandwiches.

I think people like thinking about "zero", but for me lab-meat is about the 90% of "well, I just wanted some meat texture and protein in my meal." I'm hoping it'll take off and we'll see a huge reduction of our dependence on slaughtered-meat and the environmental impact it causes. I think it'll take time, but I think it's hard to bet against manufacturing efficiencies.

> I think we also see some of this in Christian stuff. I feel like Christians like Isaiah 11:6's "the lion will lie down with the lamb" (yes, I know that technically that's not quite the animals in the text, but it is how I often hear it said by English-language Christians). I think the idea that predators might not be predators in some world-to-come isn't something that has to be creatively reinterpreted.

There's sort of a verse that deals with it. The context is in eating meat sacrificed to idols, aka immoral meat. It's not clear on what that means, where it's eating meat in a ceremonial service or buying meat in the marketplace that was resold donations to a pagan temple. Romans 14: 1-9

>>Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. One person's faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them. Who are you to judge someone else's servant?

>>To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand. One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind. 6 Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord. Whoever eats meat does so to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. 7 For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living.

I'm not Christian any more, but generally the spirit is more "your brother needs to be vegan, don't convert him or argue with him and do your best to strengthen his faith." Each person must do what he feels God has commanded him to do in his own way.

The new heaven and new earth is a radically different experience. Its not just lion laying down with lamb, its that "we shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, and be like the angels" which Jesus said in answer to people disbelieving in a ressurection. It's a total break from humanity in a sense, and trying to emulate it has led to a lot of cults engaging in self-destructive behavior.

Thanks for the essay :)

> It's not like 2017 came along and Harvey Weinstein was like, "omg, is rape wrong now? Things change so quickly and I didn't know!"

Within my lifetime (I'm in my 50's) it used to be acceptable to pat girls on the bottom in public, pressure them into sex, rape them if they were drunk enough to not be able to say no, and a whole slew of other nasty behaviours that we now rightfully consider completely unacceptable. The whole Jimmy Saville thing in the UK - the stories coming out of how his demands for young girls to molest as payment for gigs were met by "respectable" organisations - sounds crazy now. Yes, this has changed fast, and caught a lot of people by surprise. I'm not defending any of them; they deserve everything they got. It was always "wrong", and they knew it, but society tolerated it to a certain extent so they could get away with it. Until they couldn't, thankfully.

> Jewish texts certainly do - and they have a lot to say on how.

Thanks for the detail, it's really interesting. I'm don't have much knowledge of Jewish practices. I'm glad to hear that there's some adaptability there. In most of christianity there's a strong element of "god's word doesn't change" - morality is unchanging and immutable, laid down in the bible. There's a strong opinion that atheists cannot be moral because we don't have an objective moral code to follow. This is where I find the fascinating part of the religious aspect - what happens when society's morals change? To a certain extent we can see it with gay marriage - most of the vatican is gay but the catholic church still condemns homosexuality. But this is more about politics than morals - the majority of catholics live in countries where homosexuality is not culturally acceptable, and the church downplays the whole question in countries where it is acceptable. The anglican church faced this crisis a few years ago, kinda, the African bishops did not want to accept gay marriage, the European and American bishops politically had to.

But I think the eating animals question is different, as most people publicly eat meat at the moment. It's not something you can be "in the closet" about and pretend doesn't happen (though I guess that will eventually happen - small groups getting together to kill an animal and eat it secretly). Which is why I think it's going to be more interesting to watch. It's possible that in 30 years we'll have the whole "have you ever eaten an animal?" thing going on, but I doubt it because the vast majority of people have eaten animals at the moment.

For those that want to consume some amusing fiction on this I'd recommend the BBC mockumentary Carnage.

Given the concerted media push for lab-grown meat over the recent years, i think the powers that be have made the decision already.

There is no need to fight a culture/moral war - they will simply raise the prices of meat and add some nice marketing around the benefits of lab-grown alternatives.

> Future Meat Technologies says this facility requires 96-percent less freshwater than livestock production, as well as using 99-percent less land and producing 80-percent fewer greenhouse emissions.

Even accounting for PR hyperbole, it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do. This is a national security issue. We can choose to curse our younger generations with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future.

I’m all in favour of this for climate change and animal welfare reasons, but I don’t see how it’s a national security concern in e.g. Europe and America, given they already encourage farming overproduction specifically because food is so important, and that almost everywhere could already be more effective in how many people a given unit of land area or fresh water can support, both by encouraging vegetable-based diets and separately with more poly-tunnels, greenhouses, and aeroponics.

Overproduction is based on assumptions around how variable farm output is. Climate change increases variability.

Climate change isn't the weather.

Climate is the average.

We are in a global warming emergency and no one is doing enough about it.

Climate change is literally the weather.

Long term average weather. But yes, IIRC, climate change is causing more extreme variability, and that variability itself is a problem.

Though I do disagree with @airhead969, as the literally exponential growth of PV by itself looks to me to be enough to make us net zero in a decade or two (probably two, given exponentials are often sigmoids in disguise).

Climate isn’t the average weather it’s the expected weather. X hurricanes every Y years for example doesn’t change the average significantly, but their a major climate concern in areas at risk from them.

Well one mechanism by which this becomes a natsec concern is food scarcity in other parts of the world might simultaneously cause domestic instability as well as mass migration to more food-secure locales.

We should also do all of the things you mention here.

The greenest protein factory is the one that we don't have to build - even if it's 99% less land or 80% fewer greenhouse emissions than the traditional farming of cows, sheep and poultry. It's actually this: https://interestingengineering.com/the-explosion-of-insect-p...

We should do that too

Just eat the bugs...

dont forget to be happy...

It's always fun with these kinds of posts, because people never think what their total progressive future will be like. No cars, no pets, eating bugs for protein, taxed to shit to provide a social safety net, forced to clump up in cities for efficiency. Probably a lot more than that. Being an eco-serf.

This is the kind of sentiment that watching too many Alex Jones documentaries will give you. It's funny that you think places like America, which can't even manage to legislate sensible climate-saving policies, would ever get to an extremist state of banning cars and pets, or forcing you to eat bugs for protein. You are laughably out of touch with reality.

> sense of ickiness or masculinity

If they can keep the cost lower (2/3 or better 1/2 price) than animal meat, all of the stigma will just poof out of existence.

This is very exiting, but its a not solution to global warming (only small factor).

>> Methane has a large effect but for a relatively brief period, having an estimated mean half-life of 9.1 years in the atmosphere, whereas carbon dioxide is currently given an estimated mean lifetime of over 100 years

Still very exiting to possibly live through end factory farming.

Totally agreed - competitive flavor at superior price will make those other arguments disappear. That’s why I think we should view this as a foregone conclusion and get positioned to simply own the future, or at least not have our future owned by someone else.

...sure, like Carob was a foregone conclusion to replace chocolate:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/how-c...

As someone who actually had to eat Tiger's Milk bars as a kid, good luck at it.

We are not talking about alternative faux products, but meat fibres that are grown form actual animal tissue at the start (AFAIK thats how they do it).

In theory this should taste similar to traditional meat and in the future they will work out marbling etc

>ickiness or masculinity,

How is this related to lab-grown meat?

There's a certain squeamishness some have about eating something labeled as "lab-grown", as if it's somehow tainted with "unnatural" origin.

At the same time, there's a certain machismo, bravado, "manliness" associated with eating meat from an actual animal, mainly a vicarious association with hunting, but also by demonstration of some certain kinds of "alpha male" traits (access to resources to afford it, dominance, etc.). Lab-grown meat wasn't hunted or butchered, so may be viewed as "easier" in some sense--less manly, in other words.

I agree but also "protein security" reminds me of "mineshaft gap" from Dr. Strangelove

It is of course impossible to verify either way, but I am very sure these statistics of 96% savings in freshwater are total nonsense. Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc. Moreover, we have seen time and time again, the reporting of extremely high numbers for water usage in beef and milk production, but it turns out they are counting the water that falls as rain on the pasture land, or the rain/ground water used to grow the alfalfa. Should that be counted? Rain seems to be fairly renewable, but I admit that (in the extreme) society can harm ecosystems by diverting too much rain water (see Colorado River). Ground water renewability is a bit context dependent.

If the water savings is mostly nonsense, well then I also question the savings in GHG emissions. Land savings? Sure, fine, that makes sense... but farm land is orders of magnitude cheaper than land that has a fully functioning cell culture factory on it.

In the end, we will know if this works by what price it can sell at and make a marginal return. The jury is out on that one.

> Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc.

Given that this is all happening in a lab, is collecting and filtering for reuse an option?

Sure. But then you have to spend way more energy on the "filtering" part. It typically makes a lot more sense in terms of energy usage to just take tap water and run it through a polishing step (deionization and/or reverse osmosis), than to take the comparatively "dirty" water coming out of your process (dirty but not toxic) and try to clean that up.

An autoclave requires distilled water and an enormous amount of energy to operate. You could save the water but you'd potentially need to distill it again after. They use an enormous amount of energy and water overall.

The feed for the cells still has to come from somewhere too, and the growth of the cells is aerobic and generates CO2. That said, artificial meat is supposed to hit market parity price by 2026 and probably below parity after. [1] We will probably see a rapid transition to cultured meat within a decade. There are a very large number of these companies competing right now. [2]

[1] https://www.mitsui.com/mgssi/en/report/detail/__icsFiles/afi... [2] https://cellbasedtech.com/lab-grown-meat-companies

"supposed to". I am hopeful but I think we are very early here and it is going to be very difficult to actually meet these targets. We shall see.

I imagine a lot of the freshwater savings involves not needing to feed an animal. What they drink and eat takes large scale agriculture and processing operations which will be cut drastically.

But you have to feed the cells. And you can't just grow some plants and feed it to the cells, you have to manufacture a very precise blend of chemicals (amino acids, sugars, surfactants, antioxidants, etc.) at >99% purity for each one. Often extremely nasty solvents are involved in the production process. Usually, some sort of petroleum product is a feedstock. Those chemically synthesized materials are hardly green.

>but it turns out they are counting the water that falls as rain on the pasture land, or the rain/ground water used to grow the alfalfa.

Can we use that pasture-land (and the rain that falls onto it) to grow more useful crops? If so: I don't understand why that wouldn't count.

Pasture land is not, usually, crop growing land. Moreover, the rain falls regardless. You could grow no crops, and your "water usage" would be exactly the same. Why would you count it?

Regarding the weasel-worded "less land usage", most of the land that livestock use for grazing is unsuitable for conventional farming anyway. Only ruminants can properly utilize it.

> most of the land that livestock use for grazing is unsuitable for conventional farming anyway

Ah, but are most cows in the world actually grazing on pasture unsuitable for arable farming? I wasn't able to find an estimate of that number, but am willing to bet good money it's pretty low, considering that the number one driver of tropical deforestation is converting land to raise cattle, and the number two driver is soybean production mostly to feed said cattle: https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/summer-2018/ar...

>Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc.

There is an enormous difference in scale and efficiency between a lab scale process and an industrial one. Researchers (myself included) do what gets the job done quickly, not necessarily balancing the budget at the same time.

Yes there is an enormous difference in scale. Efficiency? In cell culture? In terms of GHG or emissions or energy use? I find that hard to believe. In my personal experience (not data, but relevant), none of the manufacturing scale processes were particularly optimized in terms of GHG/energy. Rather, yield was the primary target and consistency was the very close secondary target. Sometimes, vice versa. I 10x improvement of yield can very easily lead to higher GHG emission intensity, or no effect at all, e.g.

> We can choose to curse our younger generations with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future.

A false dichotomy if I ever saw one.

It is a false dichotomy currently because the in-between area is largely occupied by “do the economics make sense.” That is very clearly trending in one direction (towards “yes”), so at some point in the future it will largely boil down to something akin to this dichotomy. My framing is definitely dismissive of one side, but it does strike me as a set of arguments that are largely aesthetic on one side and the reality of food security on the other.

Every time I read stats like this I wonder what are the externalities the PR team decided to omit. One day you hear that farmed fish are eco, the next day you find out that gigantic trawlers are depleting Antarctic oceans for feed.

I tried to google the possible environmental downsides of lab-meat (taste/health aside), but couldn't find anything. Any suggestions?

There’s the question of what sort of feedstocks they’re using and where they come from.

I would assume that it’s something like what the animals they’re replacing eat, but presumably in smaller quantities since they’re only growing muscle tissue and not an entire animal.

There’s something to be said for a device that transports itself around marginally-arable land eating grass and pumping out fertilizer while creating edible protein. Especially if the alternative is intensively-farmed row crops like corn and soy that tend to require tons of fertilizer and herbicides.

IMO an equally exciting area of research is taking something like algae that only need water, sunlight, and some minerals to produce food. Which could then be further processed into lab-grown meat or be eaten as is.

> with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future

I think you're confusing a few things.

I'm very pro lab-grown meat, and I don't see why it would be either "icky" (if anything, it could be much more "pure", able to grow in controlled conditions without any pesticides, hormones or antibiotics) nor less "masculine" (a steak is a steak is a steak).

I'm very much against plant-based "fake" meat, because they're usually far from natural (tons of chemicals) and full of propaganda ("red meat is unhealthy" but conveniently conflating pure red meat with highly-processed stuff like sausages and salami, or "red meat is unsustainable" while we keep burning coal and importing plastics from China... don't get me wrong, I strongly support carbon tax, but want to be able to what to consume (drive car vs. eat steak) myself).

> they're usually far from natural (tons of chemicals)

I really object to marketing use of the word 'natural' and 'chemicals'. I don't mean to single you out - these concepts are widespread in marketing.

Plenty of 'natural' things are bad, like small pox, the Ebola virus and salmonella.

Plenty of 'unnatural' things are good, like antibiotics to treat infection.

All matter is made from chemicals. Whether a chemical like penicillin or salt is synthesised in a lab, or extracted from the ocean, holds no baring on whether that chemical is good for you.

- EDIT - Generalised the penicillin example.

I wouldn't say Penicillin is 'unnatural', there are probably better examples out there.

That's true, I just picked penicillin and salt intentionally as they both can be synthesised in a lab and in nature

Penicillin is a natural product of fungi against bacteria.

When it comes to food, I use the following criteria: could I make it myself in my kitchen? (Some "minimal processsing" like fermentation and curing therefore fall under "natural".)

I'm pretty sure the answer is "no" for most of the plant-based fake meat. It's also "no" for McDonald's burger so I'm not just hating on plants.

I understand this conversation is about Beyond Meat kinda stuff, but it's isn't no for the two oldest and most popular fake meats--tofu and seitan. And yet tofu especially gets beat up in terms of fake vs natural.

You can definitely make seitan in your kitchen, I am not disagreeing with anything you're saying though.

Tofu and seitan get "beat up" because (1) tofu is soy and seitan is gluten (many people dislike those, for various reasons), (2) they're often used to mimic (fake) meat, not made into creative meals of their own, and (3) for me personally, tofu is extremely bland.

As an omnivore, I love seitan - it's pretty common in Chinese and Japanese cuisine. I wish more vegetarian places in the US would use it, but it seems that only tofu has crossed over, which is a shame, because tofu generally doesn't have the texture and bulk of meat, but rather of soft, non-meltable cheese, and is not even as filling as that.

Lots of veg places in the US -do- use seitan. It may be your location that doesn't. It's very popular for vegan chicken sandwiches, fingers, wings, curries etc. I'm in LA tho which may be the current veg restaurant capital of the world.

It's definitely true highly processed foods correlate with poor health outcomes. This correlation is mainly because ultra-processed foods often contain added sugars, excess sodium, and unhealthy fats (source: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/processed-foods...).

There's an (open) question here of what the cause is; is this inherent to all food processing?, or is it the nutritional content of the food?

I would argue eating home-made potato chips, cookies and ice cream may lead to worse health outcomes than plant-based burgers with better nutritional benefits

I prefer the criteria "would a prehistoric person eat this?". Our bodies evolved with food you could pick off a plant and put in your mouth sometimes after applying heat. Or meat. This is "natural" food. Plenty of ingredients you buy in a modern store are processed like flour and sugar. You can make donuts in your kitchen and I'd call that one of the worst foods you can eat nutritionally.

I don't think you can dismiss the sustainability of meat-substitutes just because we as a society continue to use coal or import plastic. A bean-based veggie burger has a much lower environmental footprint regardless of those things. The major difference is that choosing to buy a meat-substitute instead of the real thing is a decision that people can individually make, even if just for one meal a week, while most of us don't have the ability to choose to close down a coal plant.

Not confusing those things, this is just a different argument against a different thing (plant based meat).

> a steak is a steak is a steak

would lab-grown steak be remotely similar to a good cut of steak? I'd guess for sausage (and other processes meat) lab-grown won't be different, but I don't think lab-grown will be able to reach real-steak level anytime soon

i don't see why not

It's more complex, but it's a matter of how soon, not if. And how soon, not if, lab-grown steak will be better than real ones, because you'll be able to tinker with the composition in ways you simply can't currently.

> it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do

This is hardly the only solution though. We can also shift to just plant based diets from crops which are not water intensive. Vegetarianism has been present in many parts of the world from a long time and those parts have also done fine with surviving.

We have a plethora of recipes as well which we can import from those parts of the world and add it with other highly nutritious vegan recipes. At least I have been far more impressed with eating those cuisines than eating fake meat as such.

You're foolishly projecting ideology and personal beliefs into somewhere so far removed from the consumer that it simply won't matter.

Commodities buyers don't care who's corn is ethical or who's corn is unethical. They don't care who's ground beef is manly and who's isn't. It all comes down to cost per results at the end of the day. Resource usage is just a part of that calculation. No different than the cost of shipping.

If McDonalds and Walmart can cut their existing beef with fake plant beef or lab beef without hurting their bottom line (by making their products less attractive to consumers) they will.

Will there be people who try and capture the high end market with some ideologically themed marketing in the meantime? Of course. But make no mistake, the long term goal for these new synthetic meat (both plant meat and lab meat) producers is not the high end market. It's the thousands of reefer cars that put that house brand 80/20 on a store shelf near you. Pandering to whatever the premium consumer wants to hear until you can make your product cheap enough and good enough to make real money is just a necessary part of bootstrapping that.

Putting the McDouble back on the dollar menu with the help of synthetic beef is what societal progress looks like.

I agree with everything you say here and if I communicated that the arguments against lab meat are durable, that was the opposite of my intention. What I mean to say is that it’s a foregone conclusion and we should be expediting its arrival and gaining an edge in that future.

I used to feel similarly, but now, I'm not so sure. What worries me is that lab-grown meat will allow big ag practices to continue, which will do more harm to our co2 emissions and world's soil health.

To expand on this further, there is active research and practices into sustainable farming practices that show diverse crop rotations along dense but short grazing across the land has the ability to rebuild top soil 10x than previously thought. Most importantly this top soil serves as a MASSIVE CARBON SINK.

Using this proven methods, we can leverage the world's farmland to sequester carbon while improving the health of our soil and the nurtition density of our food.

The catch is that we need the animals to restore soil health and presumably we need the business model of selling the meat to make this practice sustainable.

Further Reading:

Dirt to Soil - Gabe Brown

Alan Savory's Holistic Management Practices - https://youtu.be/q7pI7IYaJLI

https://www.marincarbonproject.org/

How many animals are we talking about in a scenario where all the animals were being used for crop/grazing rotation? I've heard about this and it sounds good to me, but without having looked into it at all, it sounds to me like something that probably wouldn't support the number of animals we're using right now for meat production?

Even if you could convert all the corn/soybean land in the United States to more regenerative methods, you probably wouldn't be able to meet the current demand for meat.

Additionally you have a logistical problem with the animals being distributed across an enormous area vs concentrated in a CAFO.

Now, you would easily be able to grow enough food for the country and possibly the globe, but meat demand cannot be sustained.

Do you have a source for not being able to meet meat demand? using which "regenerative methods"?

Gabe Brown uses 700k pounds of cattle per acre, but he moves the cattle daily. On his site, he claims the pastures are 15-40 acres. [1] So I presume 700k pounds of cattle per 40 acres would give you the figure you're looking for.

[1]: http://brownsranch.us/grazing/

Maybe eventually eating plant matter won't be considered efficient either, what with the massive expenditure of fertilizer and ecological damage of pesticide and herbicide runoff.

We will need to figure out to bio-engineer edible plant matter as well. Then once we've mastered that, we can start bio-engineering ourselves to photosynthesize from the sun directly, to cut out all middlemen from the food chain. Then we can bio-engineer a vacuum-resistant carapace and launch ourselves toward the sun to exist as truly self-sufficient organisms. Then we blot out the sun with our flesh, and find some way to go to a different star.

I think what the comment above is missing is that these are the metrics that the PR team chose to publish.

The lab meat might also use 100x the CO2 in other production materials. It might be more labor and energy intensive. The cost might be 10x higher - even at scale.

You cannot trust the PR numbers from a company looking to normalize their product.

This is why 3rd party analysis is required.

Depending on the capital requirements and cost of these facilities, and imagining them as semiconductor fab type facilities, a nation would really be putting all their eggs in one basket if their protein security relies on just a few dozen such facilities across the country. This major centralization could be done in by one ransomware attack or activist employee , whereas the decentralized protein production by tens of thousands of producers today is far less susceptible. Once food security becomes tech-driven, its something to worry about.

I'm excited for these to be readily available and around normal meat pricing - but articles never seem to show any photos. I'm really curious how they actually 'grow' it, what sort of form it takes, and then what the final product texture is like or how versatile it is.

For example, the '5k burgers' figure comes from dividing the mass produced by some nominal figure for a burger. But is it actually mince they're producing? Is it minceable meat that could also be sold as steaks or .. 'joints' or 'ribs' (-like meat without there, presumably, ever being a bone)? Are they (expecting to be) able to differentiate different cuts, sirloin, rump, etc. that are pretty different when naturally grown?

Or is it just a sort of vague meaty thing that you can have in whatever shape you want, but is pretty homogeneous, and like an 'average' chunk of meat, or whichever piece they sampled for it initially?

The cuts are exactly what I wonder. Burgers seem like the easy starting point for the same reason that the Impossibles of the world started with them - the texture is fairly easy to achieve.

But I would think here that it would be possible to grow specific cuts - start with pluripotent stem cells and get them to develop into the right thing. Whether or not that's what they're doing now isn't clear, and I'd love to know if that's a short step from burgers or a huge leap.

Then beyond that, I wonder if all steaks will end up being A5 wagyu grade. Is it more difficult to grow a steak that's more vs. less marbled with fat?

It looks like the lab-grown meat looks indistinguishable from real meat. They've even got salmon sashimi with the texture of real salmon. (source: captions in https://www.fooddive.com/news/cell-based-meat-plants-come-on...)

I doubt it tastes indistinguishable though, from hearing other reports of tasting lab-grown meat.

Oh wow, I hadn't heard of it being done with fish, that's great. Just earlier today I was looking at my (frankly ridiculous) dill crop and wondering what to use it with that isn't salmon.

Really cool they made it happen. I looked at the topic years ago, and was pushed away from serum (e.g. FBS) costs, and potential PR backlash coming from using genetic modification or cell line immortalizion to decrease unit costs. Alas, they seem to have done it w/o these modifications. I need to crawl into their patents.

There are clear advantages to produce animal protein via biotechnology, although I wonder if the formulation of more complex end product's (e.g. a bio identical steak) will be doable within the cost frame.

I love how they made the PR in the whole industry: very ideologic, almost like Apple. I wonder how the acceptance rate will be. Interesting times for pharmers.

At the end, it is just another technology leap like the Haber Bosch Process. Sustainable management of resources and human population control is what really counts.

I would also like to express pure excitement for this development.

Note that they are not yet "pumping" out anything. Their plan is to start selling next year, which means that it probably will take another few years.

I think that it makes much more sense to make meat and cheese directly from plant proteins, without going through the trouble of growing meat in bioreactors.

Assuming that both will have a similar endproduct (and Impossible shows that it's possible), making from plant proteins directly will always be cheaper, faster, require less resources and be healthier.

That said, I'm not against companies going in this direction. I think it's worth exploring. It's just a bit sad that this "high tech" gets much more press and hype than the more boring alternative, which is already here and reducing greenhouse gas emissions TODAY (which is the key). This is very similar to direct-air-capture technologies, which some day might be viable, but there are plenty of things that we can today that are just not as sexy and therefore don't get hyped in the media.

To be clear: I see a future where most meats and cheeses will be made directly from plants, and a small minority made using cultured cells.

> making from plant proteins directly will always be cheaper, faster, require less resources and be healthier

This is not clear at all. If you look into what goes into making something like an Impossible Burger, it is basically none of those things.

Which part is not clear?

For one thing, plant based meats require a ton of resources, and for another there’s no clear evidence that it’s any healthier than vat grown meat.

Ok, let's leave out the health part because nutritional health is a tricky topic. We could argue days and nights about this.

But what we can tell for certain is that it does not require a ton of resources. The cultured cells in the bioreactor also need energy and nutrtients from somewhere, they don't just create it out of thin air. The energy and nutrtients ultimately comes from plants.

Basic physics dictates that there will be a conversion loss. So it is always better to directly eat the plants than to feed plants to something else and eat that.

There are amino acids you can't get from plant protein.

From first principles, how is this possible? Food animals get their amino acids from eating plants.

Of course there are amino acids that don't exist in plants, but they are not essential (i.e. can be synthesized in the human body and don't need to be taken from external sources).

From first principles, it's possible because e.g. cows could make amino acids that are not found in plants, but those are not essential (I don't know if cows make any non essential amino acids that are not found in plants, this is just an example)

Clearly plants get them from eating animals.

All essential amino acids are found in plants, and some plant proteins (soy or hemp for example) contain all the essentials in a single protein.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, this is true.

Is it in a "reasonable" amount? As in, is the concentration comparable?

Yes, there is an index called the Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score which shows exactly this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_Digestibility_Correcte...

No, all essential amino acids can be found in plants. We have a long way to go if even people here on HN (which I would consider more educated than the average person) gets something as basic as this about nutrition wrong.

The price seems to be ~$3.90 to produce chicken breast. Given that I regularly find chicken breast in a store for $1.99, I'll assume that's still ~3x as costly as just farm raising chickens. It will be interesting if subsidies can change this though. The negative externalities of raising animals must be huge. The jobs tied up in these industries are enormous as well though.

3x the price isn't too bad. Plant based "meat" is usually a bit more expensive than regular meat, and for some people paying 3x to get "real" meat without the need to kill an animal will be a worthwhile trade. Add in the environmental benefits too and it could give some people some peace of mind.

3x not to torture chickens for their short lifespan in horrific conditions is worth it even if you're not a moral vegan. The poultry industry is horrendous, and dominated by demands of corporate boards rather then farmers to boot.

I already try to buy free range, but the grim reality is that label can't possibly account for the amount of production it supposedly represents. Taking chickens with nervous systems out of the entire process is preferable.

This is where I fall on the topic as well, and I think so do many others. This seems like an easy way to bootstrap and scale this, start with a premium on the product pricing and have people who can afford it fund the scaling. At the end, economies of scale will bring the price down for the rest.

I can also totally see people buying this occasionally to supplement their regular meat consumptions.

5k burgers a day is a long way from mass production. It seems completely reasonable to expect a 70-90% price drop from scale. Until then selling at a premium to people who love meat but don’t want animals slaughtered seems like a viable.

Where things get interesting is if it actually becomes cheaper than farm grown meat. Over half of all farm land is devoted to meat production, even a 50% switch to lab meat would have dramatic knock on effects. On possibility is a dramatic increase in bio fuel production.

I love meat, and don't have a problem with eating slaughtered animals, but I still might pay a premium for these kinds of products if the environmental benefits hold up and the taste is close enough. I think there's a massive premium market. Even more so if they can start producing speciality products that are "better" than real meat along some other axis (e.g. embedded flavourings; more perfect distribution of fat etc.)

I'm pretty sure that the poultry industry is already receiving major agricultural subsidies to get to that price.

Yep. Animal ag is both directly and indirectly subsidized pretty heavily in the US. If we removed their subsidies and moved them to lab grown meat, the economics work out in favor of the latter much sooner.

Not only benefits from human economical point of view, but traditional farming also help environment in certain area. Animals convert plants (grass and beans from solar energy) to manure for benefiting soil. It's human that didn't evenly distribute it well. Lab-grown meat doesn't have that yet.

ps. Not comparing wild ecology to human farming, just comparing traditional farming with lab-grown tech here.

That's almost certainly true, in the very least in the form of corn subsidies for feed. My point was more that there are millions of jobs in the poultry industry alone. This is an existential threat to an enormous job market. One that is likely to become very messy. I think the US will struggle greatly to embrace this quickly, but nations that don't have large farming populations have a huge incentive to create a strong lab grown meat industry and export it. Very big economic opportunity, as well as another impending wave of poverty and irrelevance for traditional players.

That makes it cheaper than many of the vegan substitutes I've seen. It means that even without subsidies, this is economically viable, not in the future but right now (unlike the $20000 burgers that I've seen mentioned a few years ago).

There are quite good predictions for each meat type to be disrupted by cheaper vegan alternatives in the future, but what's consistent is that it will happen in the next 10-20 years.

> I'll assume that's still ~3x as costly as just farm raising chickens.

3x? it's not even double

I'll assume you missed the fact that this is the store price vs the cost price.

If you can buy a chicken breast for $1.99 in a store then the actual cost for the meat is probably close to 80c-$1.20

I see free range chicken breasts for way more than that. If they’re targeting the consumers who buy based on ethics, they’ve already reached a not-unreasonable price.

It's possible, but I think that is a very difficult market to compete in. I'd wager most ethically minded buyers are wealthy enough to prefer buying free range organic chicken breast than lab grown meat, if they're purchasing meat at all. The long term play for this is almost certainly at beating factory farms on price, which has an added benefit of ethical and environmental gains.

If economies of scale exist, this is a no brainer investment opportunity. I wouldn't be concerned at all about their current price dynamics and need to earn a short term return.

> I'd wager most ethically minded buyers are wealthy enough to prefer buying free range organic chicken breast than lab grown meat.

I would easily pay more for lab grown chicken. Partly because I believe it's even more ethical, partly because I really don't trust so-called "free range organic" chicken (I already buy it when I can, but I expect the difference is minuscule).

Would you do so if it was cheaper to purchase from a local farmshare? Because it probably would be. I think I would not.

Yes, I think so. I mean, I'm not totally clear on the ethics of raising animals in a farmshare, but I am clear that the lab-grown meat is totally fine ethically, so I'll do that.

(To be clear, I eat meat now, but as far as I'm aware there's no easy way for me as a consumer to consume only meat from non-factory-farming methods.)

$3.90 is an incredible drop in price considering what it was just a couple years ago. I'm certain the price will come down more as more competition and the technology improves. At the rate the price is falling for lab-grown meat, I'd be surprised if it is not cheaper than animal meat in a couple years. https://vegnews.com/2019/7/price-of-lab-grown-meat-to-plumme...

>The price seems to be ~$3.90 to produce chicken breast. Given that I regularly find chicken breast in a store for $1.99

$2 Chicken is non-organic. Organic is ~$5 at Costco.

I worked in this lab! Would be glad to answer questions.

Have you tried it? How was it?

I haven't tried it personally (I worked in a different part of the lab), but I've been told that its pretty indistinguishable from ground chicken/beef.

Is it only burger style meat? Grinded? Or are they trying to replicate the shape and consistency of a steak too?

Future Meat is focused on ground meat/chicken products. There are other companies in Israel focused on more refined products, check out Aleph Farms. More refined products are wildly more expensive though as you can't easily grow it in vats.

Is it just meat or also fat? How does the nutritional content compare to say beef liver or a regular steak?

The main IP in the lab is replicating the fat + other stuff in meat. It compares to average ground beef by design.

From a comment above,

> But you have to feed the cells. And you can't just grow some plants and feed it to the cells, you have to manufacture a very precise blend of chemicals (amino acids, sugars, surfactants, antioxidants, etc.) at >99% purity for each one. Often extremely nasty solvents are involved in the production process. Usually, some sort of petroleum product is a feedstock.

How would you assess these statements?

I would say that's quite ridiculous. While the serum is very important when experimenting, later on the goal is to grow the cells serum-free (from what I understand). These types of cells would die from any high exposure to petroleum...

The article touches on water and emissions; I wonder how these products compare on electricity usage (and whether that's counted in the emissions estimate).

Cows don't use a lot of electricity, so it's got to be higher emissions. ...even considering the cow methane.

I love this project for the simple reason that it makes me think of the possibility for large crewed long distance space flights with onboard protein producing capabilities. Would also go a long way towards making life on mars more realistic.

This is kind of a weird question, but how exactly does anyone prove that this is actually lab grown meat and isn't just normal meat that has been turned into meat paste and then sold for twice as much as normal meat?

I mean, obviously, they wouldn't do this at first. They would wait until everyone was complacent and used to eating lab grown meat before they started supplementing their production.

As long as creating lab-grown meat is more expensive than growing real animals and butchering them, there will be an economic incentive for this sort of fraud.

The promise is that it should eventually be cheaper than normal meat, otherwise they'll fail

Realistically, even fake meat sold as "lab grown" could be cheaper than normal meat if what they are doing is turning low quality meat into paste and forming it into shapes and stuff.

You can ask this about a lot of foods. How do you know your baby formula isn't just crushed white building material mixed with water? (This happened btw, see melamine baby formula).

In the end big conspiracies like this leak out since there's a lot of employees in the supply chain and trust in the brand is broken. The Chinese go out of their way to buy Australian and New Zealand branded baby formula to this day because trust in their own local brands was destroyed.

So this is unlikely. Possible and similar short sighted things have occurred in management before (see Boeing) but it would be ridiculously poor management to let something like this happen.

What is lab grown meat? Is it alive? Are there any nerves? Does it just absorb nutrients in a pasty vat? Is there skin? Does it get cancer if you left it too long on there? Can you get it to soak up extra nutrients or make new meat types?

I want to know the answers to these questions, too!

The economic reason for brands is exactly to develop trust.

But also (and quite possibly more importantly), there is a lot of government oversight and regulation when it comes to food.

And also also, people could sue for fraud.

Does this meat have the same nutritional value, as in percentage of proteins and fats? Same taste as the real thing?

Pricing is a big issue. This is a complicated process. They're pricing their chicken somewhere around $30/lb.[1] This isn't a competitive product yet. This is a press release about a pilot plant.

Impossible Burger's process, by comparison, is simple and cheap. It's mostly soy and potatoes. The only complex component is heme, and that's a meat flavoring used in small quantities.

[1] https://www.foodmanufacturing.com/consumer-trends/news/21259...

How far are we from real meat texture as opposed to this minced meat for burgers?

I know we've got to start somewhere and I'm all for this direction, but wake me up when we're making synthetic meat products based on beef or pork cell lines.

Chicken's the one meat I don't feel too guilty about eating, especially in emission terms. Yet, anyway...

>At this point, the facility is already able to produce lamb, chicken, and pork products without using genetic modification or animal serum. Future Meat says that it will soon also be able to start production on beef, too.

So, they're not producing it commercially, but they can do pork. I'd say the day is inevitable at this point.

That's interesting - I thought that fat was the trickier element to replicate, which is a more important dimension in pork and beef.

Now then, the interesting question for an Israeli-company - would producing and then consuming synthetic pork be Kosher?

I wasn't surprised to see that beef was left out initially. Even without the religious objection, they aren't likely to have much of a market for vat-beef locally because cow-beef isn't desired locally.

But once they go more global, there's a really big market for vat-beef.

And I would love to know of the religious implications of this as well... Both for cow and pig, for various religions and other beliefs, such as veganism.

Why do you think that cow-beef isn't desired in Israel? We eat plenty of beef.

Ignorance of local customs. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about religions and where they're practiced, and just assumed wrongly. Sorry!

No worries. I thought you might be trying to suggest that Israelis eat less beef compared to e.g. Americans, which is possible, though no idea if that's true.

Have you seen the conditions that (most) farmed chickens are raised in?

Yup, and they live for about two months with a level of cognizance and culture that I can just about live with having killed on my behalf.

Such things are horrors to our eyes, because we know better. They don't.

Not saying it's right, not saying that I wish it weren't thus, but here we are.

- ed

Also, I'm in the UK, where we still have slightly better farming standards and access to free range/organic produce than some other first world countries. For the moment, anyway... .

Looking forward to all the new cancer cases due to this. <- obvious sarcasm

But, seriously, manipulating something the way God intended it to be always results in dire consequences. But of course, no one will care, it's all money money money

Which is why you only use natural fibers right, never synthetic ones? And you definitely don’t wear blends (directly proscribed by God).

Does lab-grown meat have a lab-grown immune system to prevent lab-grown contamination?

I worry that if the premium for lab grown meat is high enough, we'll eventually have unethical actors selling real meat as fake meat (with no easy way for the consumer to tell the difference.)

Article contains virtually nothing on what it is or how it's grown.

I wonder then if "vegetarian" will be expanded to include lab grown meat or possibly a newer "labatarian"? "I like green eggs and ham." has a new meaning now.

This post sparked nice discussion, but let's also acknowledge that slashgear is just regurgitating a PRnewswire article. I would take the statements with a grain of salt.

As a vegetarian, I always have a moral dilemma when choosing dietary supplements. Perhaps I don't have to face these dilemmas if I can include lab grown meat in my diet therefore obviating the need for supplements. But having been a lifelong vegetarian, it still feels odd. Objectively looking at it, lab grown meat seems to be a good idea. I'm not entirely sure of the "morality" or ethics of it. Will take some getting used to, but if this gives rise to innovations in the synthesizing of supplements such as collagen then I'm all for it.

I wonder why they're doing beef. I would have assumed a lion/woolly mammoth/T-Rex burger would have a much bigger market and markup.

How much research is being done into exploring "exotic" new invented fake-meats with different textures / tastes / etc. ?

Slow down! I'm not ready for Meech Munchies

I'm curious how healthy this is compared to grass fed animals.

They don't produce beef yet:

> At this point, the facility is already able to produce lamb, chicken, and pork products without using genetic modification or animal serum. Future Meat says that it will soon also be able to start production on beef, too.

Lab grown pork from an Israeli company! Is this kosher?

Kosher certification in Israel is a process, but it's entirely possible that they'll be able to get certification because it's not "really" from a pig.

Some rabbis seem to think so: https://www.newsweek.com/cloned-pigs-kosher-rabbi-yuval-cher...

Maybe don't use the verb "pump"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eCeX0oN4uw

The problem with most lab-grown meat currently is that it still requires fetal bovine serum, which you need to kill cows for...

FTA: >At this point, the facility is already able to produce lamb, chicken, and pork products without using genetic modification or animal serum. Future Meat says that it will soon also be able to start production on beef, too.

So seems like they’ve solved that little conundrum.

How do they prevent infections without an immune system?

sterile environments

Let's consider that cultured meats are okay as future historically-correct delicacies. We are religiously-attached to meat agriculture now, but we must kick the habit because it's killing us and going to kill us: resource utilization, climate change, antibiotics resistance, and pandemics.

How about we design a specific protein product that is healthiest first? And then second: how to produce it as efficiently as possible?

That only works if you can convince the 90% of people who are non-vegetarian to switch over. Assuming you won’t legally ban it (I presume you’re not planning a revolution), that means you need a product that people will prefer to normal meat, which means tastier or cheaper than normal meat.

Still high cholesterol but a good idea

I'm not sure vegans would touch this, but they've always been more akin to a religion than a diet. Vegetarians would largely go for this I think.

I'd be very happy if could get meat that was cheaper, safer, cleaner, and didn't have animal cruelty issues. This is the future.

Also does anyone else here remember the beef vats in Call to Power, the civilization knockoff game? It really feels like I'm living in the future when I read articles like this.

I really dislike the notion of throwing entire swaths of people into a single bucket.

Some vegans will eat it - others won't. I don't think you can say with confidence what portion of them will until there's some data.

Many are vegan on ethical grounds - which don't apply here.

> I really dislike the notion of throwing entire swaths of people into a single bucket.

Because there are always exceptions to the rule? Or because you think you can't generalize about any diverse group of people (yes you can, knowing that it obviously doesn't apply to every individual)?

> Some vegans will eat it - others won't. I don't think you can say with confidence what portion of them will until there's some data.

Yes that's fair. But remember the backlash against beyond and impossible burgers because they're grilled on the same grill as meat - as if meat were an infection. Some vegans are a special bunch.

> Because there are always exceptions to the rule?

No, because the exceptions are the few times they are correct!

It's a pretty bad generalization if it's generally wrong then.

I'd say the problem is with the flawed generalization then, not being able to generalize about groups in general.

Veganism is neither a religion nor a diet; it's a philosophy that impact various areas of consumption and usage beyond just food.

As a vegan, I'm thrilled about the prospect of this. This is the only realistic route to anything resembling the cessation of large scale animal farming.

Question though, would you personally eat it? Do you think other vegans might?

I know lots of other vegans would. I'm far more excited to be able to give my cats a cruelty free diet. I just hit 16 years and I'm honestly not sure that I'd want to go back to eating meat at this point - even ethically produced.

This still won't fix the fundamental problem facing the environment, which is over population, it also won't fix the problem that the environment is already locked into a number of positive feedback loops driving climate change.

Actually it fixes exactly that. A more efficient way to get food allows for a larger population with less strain on the Earth's resources.

Although global population is still increasing, the rate of increase has been declining since the 1960s, so that's acceleration in the right direction: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth

> World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day

If this was true billion $ industries just ended. The stock market would collapse.

What they are really doing is amazing. But it's all a while off yet.

A key benefit of cultured meat is its minimized impact on the environment => And the key danger is its maximized impact on the body.

What impact?

Diverticulitis, gout, hyperlipidemia, halitosis, ...

How is that specific to lab meat versus regular meat, though?

how so? as far as i am aware, this is actual meat, compared to a substitute.

This is a great concept and likely to be the only way to continue to eat meat in a long-term future.

However, applying a cautionary principle, I would really prefer to find a detailed description of what ingredients are these meat cultures being supplied with during growth.

For example, cow meat is theoretically healthy but the previous outbreak of BSE started with cow feed that included other cow parts.

In the same way sea fish is theoretically healthy, however aquaculture fish feed includes a large portion of fishmeal which is again grinded dead fish guts and bones. The nutrional value of this (lower omega fatty acids content?) is to me not clear and the impact of this is perhaps insuficiently studied (Happy to read any sources others may suggest).

I am not arguing that a lab grown muscle cell is different from a muscle cell appended to a chicken. But I would very much like to see more detail on the supply chain of how that muscle cell is provided with nutrients.

Implying that natural products are always good for us, while synthetic ones are always bad is intellectual laziness. There is an abundance of toxic compounds found in nature that are unequivocally bad for us. Take bracken for example, a ubiquitous plant containing the carcinogen ptaquiloside, which is used in cooking in different parts of the world traditionally. It can also be absorbed up the food chain affecting milk that humans consume, and it is known to affect the water supply, increasing the rate of stomach cancer.

Perhaps, but suggesting that processed foods (which factory produced meats essentially are) tend to contain less (potentially important - we have no idea) micronutrients is not, and is a very reasonable concern to have.

I'm surprised at the claim that it does 80-percent fewer greenhouse emissions.

The recent research suggests that lab-grown meat may not be better than conventional meat (at least for beef) because a part of cows emissions are methane related that dissipates fast while majority of emissions for lab grown meat is CO2 that stays in the atmosphere for long.

From https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.0000...

>We conclude that cultured meat is not prima facie climatically superior to cattle; its relative impact instead depends on the availability of decarbonized energy generation and the specific production systems that are realized.

How do you reconcile your claim that "methane ... dissipates fast" with this:

> Methane is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane

It seems like a faulty way to analyze the problem in any case. Atmospheric methane devolves into CO2 in about eight years, "on average." CO2 emitted into the atmosphere appears to stick around for 300-1000 years. The heat-trapping of methane is obviously much greater during that eight years but then it devolves into CO2. I guess the only way to draw a real conclusion would be comparing the amount of Methane+subsequent CO2 resulting from traditional animal husbandry with the amount of CO2 produced by this lab process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

> The 20-year global warming potential of methane is 84. That is, over a 20-year period, it traps 84 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide (CO2).

For us, the well-off HN folks, there is no reason to consume meat other than to have a meal that tastes different than another meal we could have instead. We individually could choose to make choices that result in less methane (and CO2 as well) produced, by simply eating more plant-based meals.

> a part of cows emissions are methane related that dissipates fast while majority of emissions for lab grown meat is CO2 that stays in the atmosphere for long.

Methane "dissipates" into CO2. It's strictly worse in terms of its affect on the climate.

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