What's the point of lab-grown meat when we can just eat more vegetables? (2020) | Hacker News Reader

What's the point of lab-grown meat when we can just eat more vegetables? (2020)

theguardian.com

> But the coronavirus pandemic has shown that, globally, we are able to make enormous changes to our behaviour when faced with existential crisis.

Funny because I thought we saw the exact opposite.

Not to mention COVID didn't require most people to make actual permanent changes to something as personally important as their diet.

Plenty of people wore masks, distanced, etc knowing the special safety measures would end eventually.

Huh? How so?

I'm not OP but...

I'm English. There hasn't been a single time I've gone to the super market and seen everyone wear a mask. I've been at least 100 times. Probably more. This is excluding anyone with an exception and any kids etc.

The same for taking the tube into London the few times I've been.

Multiple government ministers have been caught breaking the rules and kept their jobs. They've been caught ignoring scientific advice multiple times. They've gone out of their way to make it clear that breaking the rules is A-OK.

>I'm English. There hasn't been a single time I've gone to the super market and seen everyone wear a mask.

This is interesting, because obviously the US varies a lot, but this was normal (everyone wearing a mask) for several months where I live, at the supermarket I usually go to. I live in a smaller urban area (about 1 million people) of a larger northeastern state.

I imagine even more rural areas of the same state might have been different.

I wonder if this changes per region. Here in the west midlands, it's pretty rare to see someone breaking mask-wearing rules within supermarkets.

I'm assuming they wanted a higher percentage of the population to change their behavior and fully comply with lockdowns/masks/vaccine passports/etc. in response to a coronavirus with a 99.98% survival rate.

Did you forget to multiply by 100 for the percentage or something? I just calculated the survival rate for the US as 98.2%

2.5% death rate here in England.

112k deaths from 4.4m cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_England

2.5% is not accurate. 4.4 million confirmed UK cases. It's widely known that a large number of cases were never reported/confirmed.

Op says the death rate is 0.02%.

We have a whole bunch of figures for the death count, all around or above 112k but let's take the much lower 85k excess deaths for just 2020 [0]

85k / 0.0002 would mean 425 million people had had covid in England. England only has 55 million people.

[0] https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1137

If you don't like my number, please suggest your own. But anyone saying 99.98% survive is being silly.

600k excess deaths in the US, which is 0.02% of the 328 million population - ie, 99.98% of the us population survived the virus in 2020. Is it silly ?

Edit : it is, my bad, added a zero. It should read 0.2%, not 0.02%.

Another way to look at it is that in January, when things were worst, weekly deaths from everything were about 50% higher than "normal" for 2015-19.

That's not precisely the same as covid-19 deaths, nor does it represent the whole of 2020, but it's pretty staggering and suggests what would happen if it was left untreated.

Errrrr you do know you don't count people who haven't had the virus in survival rates, right? If they haven't had it, they haven't survived it.

There's also the discrepancy that the UK counts deaths within 28 days of a covid diagnosis. So while it's statistically likely that most people did die due to covid, some won't have

I wonder how much those two even out

What's the point of The Guardian when we can just read something else?

Seriously. Why have a car when you can take a bus? Why have a house when you can live in an apartment? Or a small pod?

For activists, it's not about fixing the planet's problems. It's about making sure everyone displays endless contrition for anything pleasurable. There's no reason to feel guilty about eating a substitute meat product - and that's a problem when your brand rests on making people feel guilty.

You seem to be missing a key point, people don't eat meat because they don't have vegetables. They eat it because they want to.

The same reason people drink soda or tea, when there is water available.

There is a market for a product, and people will pay for it.

People also eat meat because they can't afford better meal. It's not a secret that in a discounter you get a pound meat for less than a pound apples...

That and a pound of meat is generally far more calorie dense than most other foods.

I eat a lot of vegetables and a lot of fake meat.

1. Vegetables have less protein (and fat)

2. Lab grown meat is essentially a vegetable for the aspects that make vegetables desirable.

3. Nearly every vegetable is already severely unnaturally genetically engineered.

By saying "unnaturally genetically engineered" do you mean (a) selectively bred? Or do you mean (b) laboratory enhanced?

If it's (b) then you are very mistaken. There is nothing wrong with (a) in terms of nutrition or food safety. We would not be feeding the world without (a) and it's a dangerous and wilfully ignorant statement to associate selective breeding with something like CRISPR.

I don't recall the keyword to search for, but I believe I've read there is a third option, neither (a) or (b) exactly, which was used prior to modern genetic engineering and arguably should be considered more risky.

That is using radiation or something else mutagenic to produce a lot of mutants at random and then selectively breeding them.

If this is not considered "genetic engineering" but "selective breeding" it would tend to support the idea that people are irrational about the label.

Mutation breeding, mutagenesis, or Atomic Gardening. You take a radiation source, grow plants around it, and breed the ones with interesting mutations. Ruby Red Grapefruit was bred this way exposing either the plants or seeds to radiation from a Cobalt-60 source. I believe there was also a process that involved exposure to chemicals that would cause DNA damage and induce mutations as well, but I don't know how successful it was.

https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/06/13/pasta-ruby-gra...

https://unbelievable-facts.com/2017/08/atomic-gardening.html

Your 3rd point doesn't really stand up as nature has been genetically engineering plants for far longer than humans. The sweet potato for example has had DNA implanted from other species via the agrobacterium. There are other examples out there.

Also nearly every vegetable has been modified via breeding as the wild counterpart is a lot less edible. For example bananas and watermelons used to have a lot more seeds.

Meat is the most delicious thing I eat in a day. I try to eat some everyday. Mushrooms get close but if you really want delicious vegetables you have to add a lot of dairy based fat and it’s still nowhere near as delicious as meat.

I like meat a lot, but over the last year I've reduced my meat consumption to about once or twice a month. I can make a delicious chick pea and lentil soup, or a simple tomato pasta sauce and i don't feel the need for meat.

Recipes like yotam otolenghis courgette terrine with tomato chutney is simply awesome. https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/sep/26/yotam-ottolengh...

I also replaced steak burgers with beyond burgers or similar and I don't notice the difference. I still miss meat sometimes but I eat for special occasions or barbeques.

Try any veg. indian dish and you'll be surprised how delicious vegetables can be prepared.

I used to go to a "Pakistani/Indian" restaurant (closed now) that had a fantastic spinach based dish. I always ordered it as chicken palak, though.

I'm not sure if it was any kind of standard thing because I've never had something elsewhere called "palak" or "saag" that was similar. Most places in my area have something more creamy, which this was not.

My point is, no matter how good the vegetables are, if I don't have to choose between vegetables and meat, I won't.

Most of the delicious vegetarian Indian dishes I've had are loaded with dairy-based fat and still not as good as the meat dishes. This lines up exactly with what the GP claims.

Swapping for a non-dairy fat is trivial and won't really affect the flavour.

I think this thread is exactly what the article is talking about, people don't want to make minor changed to their "normal".

It's not like it's hard, if you change what you eat in a few months your tastes and cravings change and you like the new thing just as much as the old thing. But people seem to just get stuck at "but I like this"

I used to feel the same. However over a few years I slowly reduced my meat consumption and learned how to make food delicious using vegetables. Nowadays I eat meat once a week when going to the pub with friends and otherwise not. Nowadays meat tastes kinda boring to me. Your taste change as your diet change.

Because cultural change is hard. It would take 30-50 years of intense effort to teach Americans how you make tasty vegetarian meals that are accessible to everyone. Right now we have fake meat vegetarian food and not much native cuisine. You basically have to switch to Indian food if you want stuff that tastes good

>It would take 30-50 years of intense effort

I think your stereotype of American food represents the period prior to the 1970s. Or, in other words, more than 50 years ago.

"Madhur Jaffrey CBE (née Bahadur; born 13 August 1933) is an Indian-born actress, food and travel writer, and television personality. She is recognized for bringing Indian cuisine to the western hemisphere with her debut cookbook, An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973), which was inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2006"

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

You ever been outside a major city or grocery store in a worse party of town? They don’t really carry many fruits vegetables mostly pre processed foods. So yeah affluent neighborhoods in Major cities have had a food Revolution but not so much elsewhere.

Also it’s still crazy hard to find passable vegetarian food when you go out so clearly it’s not very integrated into mainstream cuisine

I've never really lived in a major city and I do 90% of my grocery shopping at a supermarket in the middle of a smaller one. The greater metro area of the three smaller cities here combined is at best like a million people.

The area where I live has been compared to Appalachia. The grocery store that my family shopped at when I was growing up is in the "worse part of town", at least these days. An Indian restaurant that was a local fixture for over 30 years opened in the early 1980s.

These days there are multiple specialty grocery stores, as well as many more Indian and Chinese (not just American style) restaurants, some of which have "fusion" and regional dishes, not just the same old.

When I go to a supermarket in a wealthy area up north, things look new but cardboardy like I remember from northern VA, but no, I don't see a big difference in the produce, despite what a stock cliche it is. Quite possibly more "processed foods" at that. What they do have is expensive cheesecakes made by nuns.

There are co-op, vegan, etc. grocery stores and restaurants. I could get a whole durian without going out to the suburbs even. Again, it's not, say, Seattle, but it's not 1980 anymore either.

If I was big meat I'd sponsor this article.

Not sure if their marketing is that complex, but not sure what's worse, if they did or didn't.

Or sardines.

Seaspiracy made a great argument that, at the moment, all large scale commercial fishing is bad and not sustainable. I highly recommend to watch it.

I hadn't heard of this movie, thanks for mentioning it.

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