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Comment by ppseafield | Hacker News Reader

For certain definitions of "free" and "naturally". But certainly not free of side effects on the environment: land and water use with deforestation and water crises, pesticide runoff, pesticide resistance, increased transportation costs and pollution for supplies and feed, increased transfer of disease (swine flu), increased CO2 and methane production. And also increased animal suffering.

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those are process problems that already have solutions (which reduce profit somewhat). the biotech process has a bunch of unsolved scale problems, will likely have it's own externalities, and cost significantly more.

I'm thinking of the solar panels and batteries that would be needed and the environmental costs tied to creating them. They may be better allocated to replacing other sources of energy consumption in the near term.

I agree that the likely result is that lab-grown meat will most likely cost more. I'm just not sure that not-lab-grown meat will stay cheap. The unseen environmental costs of raising livestock are not currently well-represented in its price, which is also heavily subsidized (both financial subsidies and unhandled environmental externalities). And there's not enough land in the US to put all of its livestock to graze. There's water supply problems for livestock and feed (which takes 10x resources to grow compared to simply growing plants). So if, on top of that, you introduce mitigations that reduce profit somewhat, the price will have to go up even more.

Factory farms are also currently benefitting from economies of scale, something that plant-based meat manufacturers are only now catching up to. Plant-based meat's ingredients are generally pretty cheap compared to the cost of raising livestock, so theoretically they could potentially beat the cost of meat.

My non-expert hunch is that its externalities of lab-grown meat will be somewhat different from factory farms. Time will tell if they're better, more sustainable trade-offs.

Regenerative agriculture uses livestock to increase viability of soil. If used correctly theyre already a sustainable ag tool that uses waste and grazing as a benefit to plant production and carbon sequestration, not just a meat generation source. Lab meat will become less efficient at high scale not more efficient according to the history of previous biotech scale up attempts, most of which use more viable organisms than animal cell culture.

If we can assume that the meat labs could overcome all their serious challenges if only we tried hard enough, ISTM certain problems related to traditional livestock agriculture could also be solved with some effort. Vote with your meat-purchasing dollars!

My main reason for staying with meat is that we evolved to eat it and not these plant based or lab grown alternatives. There is a very complex biological process in nutrition that we probably don't understand barely at all.

> we evolved to eat it and not these plant based or lab grown alternatives

Can I ask if you avoid soda, beer, cheese, every vegetable oil, artificial sweeteners, cookies, pastries, cake, pasta, and so on? Many plant based meats come from protein extracted from peas, wheat, soy, plus some oil, binders (that generally are also used in non-plant-based foods), and seasonings.

Do you avoid soy- and wheat-fed meat? Doesn't that affect the nutrition of the meat, since the animal had not evolved to survive on this diet?

Which ungulates have such delicate constitutions that they can't eat soy or wheat or (what they actually eat) corn?

I didn't say they can't eat it - obviously they can. The post I replied to specifically called out that they were sticking with meat because humans hadn't evolved to eat plant-based or lab-grown meat, and then implied their nutrition would suffer if they gave up meat. If that's correct, it must also then affect livestock's nutrition, since they didn't evolve to eat a soy/wheat or, as you correctly call out, corn diet. So I asked if they avoid meat fed on this "not evolved to eat" diet as well.

Certainly their outcome does change based on diet. You can compare corn fed, grass fed - corn finished, grass fed and finished, and wild game.

In all cases, there are nutrients and proteins that you cannot find in plant based alternatives. If you are vegetarian or stronger, you have to supplement with pills to get the things that are not in your diet. It is unclear whether lab-grown will lack nutrients found in natural meat, or if artificial supplementation is really equivalent.

Hence the desire to stay close to our evolutionary roots. Same idea as walking a lot and squatting to duce.

Can we assume that? And if we can, can we assume that the kinds of problems lab-grown meat has are the same problems as factory farms?

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