Afraid of high-tech food? Get over it

It's just the typical arrogance from people who refuse to acknowledge that we can't see all the ultimate results of technological changes we make.

Other examples: drugs like thalidomide that caused birth defects, side effects of amiodarone; importation of non-native species that then caused issues, such as kudzu, Burmese pythons, snakehead fish, etc. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/invasive/what-are-invasive-spec...

"Afraid of Kudzu? Get Over It" could have been written in the 1880s by this guy's great-grandfather...

When I was young, my mother forbids me and my siblings to eat cup noodle straight from the container. Instead we had to dump the content to a bowl.

The instruction is to add boiling water to the plastic cup. I reasoned that must be safe, and she had to "get over" her fear of plastic.

Now that I'm aware of xenoestrogen, I'm thankful for her fear of "new" stuff.

I'm getting tired of the self-righteous arrogant tone from journalism these days.

Even if they are right, they aren't winning hearts and minds this way.

"we’ll need to get used to [artificial meat] to avert a climate catastrophe."

Or we could just eat traditional vegetarian dishes, which are superior from the perspective of health, water/land use, and - in my humble opinion - flavor.

Sounds exactly how baby formula was pushed to replace breastfeeding in the 20th century to sell more milk. Same language and arguments were used.

Needlessly inflammatory, I hoped that people might have learned that forcefully projecting their beliefs onto other people in a condescending way doesn't work. I say this as someone who would have no issues with eating artificial meat replacements as long as they were affordable to the average Joe and taste roughly the same.

Taste is arguably the most important factor, people don't want "chicken" or "beef" that doesn't brown when cooked and only vaguely resembles the real thing with weird off-flavors. Pushing this hard, this early, for people to adopt "high tech" food will just delay the progress in the long term.

I don't have any deep rooted aversion to genetically modified food either, but it needs to undergo an appropriate level of studies to show that the food is safe in the long term. Move fast and break things isn't an appropriate approach when it comes to feeding hundreds of millions, or even billions of people.

I'm not afraid of the food, I'm wary of the corporate governance and legal framework that allows a corporation more freedom than I, and will never face ramifications if what it sells has material side effects to literally anything. It's not the food, it's the organization created to product the food that ends up being, frankly, yet another corporate predator one has to watch and be aware because at any time they can be purchased and start behaving opposite from all their previous values.

This is a weird take. The author accepts as unchangeable the fact that people don't want to eat more plant-based foods (a reflection of their preferences and values) but urges that they should change their preferences about novel engineered foods. Both of these preferences contribute to climate and environmental impacts -- why accept one of those as a lost cause and the other as something they must get over?

this is ridiculous: the author presumes synthetic meat must replace animal meat, and entirely ignores (for example) lentils and grains.

I find so many who argue for synthetic meat have NO idea that it's not the grams of protein, but the presence of particular amino acids that matters. a synthetic meat with 1000 grams of protein might be entirely useless to human metabolism, but still be 1000 grams of protein.

I’d rather not live in a society where progressives are forcing me to “get over” a dozen different things every year. How about you get your hands off my things? Who made you the arbiter of truth?

Afraid of PR pieces posing as news? Get over it

I find it strange that the author is clearly trying to convince some kind of audience, but then goes about it in the least convincing way possible.

The self-righteousness and arrogance won't help relay their point to the people they want to convince. I'm not sure who the article is for, to be honest.

Alternative take: high-tech food needs to be better if we want to people to start eating it

We don't need meat. We don't need dairy. [0]

We eat it only for the pleasure, for our taste buds experience, and because it's convenient and we don't want to learn to cook differently.

We choose to ignore environmental and moral impacts of doing so, because we believe the stories we've been told (culture), because we don't want to face our cognitive dissonance [1] and/or because we simply choose to be lazy and ignorant.

High-tech food is a thing for such people.

It's not for the vegans of today, who are perfectly happy eating beans and veggies. It's for people eating meat and dairy, who think that they can't live without it (and how mistaken they are).

Insisting that "the only real thing" is the one with all the chemicals, land degradation, endotoxins, stresses and suffering ... that's really hard to fathom.

Why not take the "real" cells and let them propagate in the aseptic tank, same as we grow our beer, for example? [2] I for one don't believe we have time for such a solution, that it can come in time to stop us destroying the environment completely, but what's so unnatural about it?

If you're against it, or against veganism, you're like the caveman, insisting that the only real substinence is the mammoth meat, everything else is subpar and that you'll eat only mammoth, no matter how few of them remain, your progeny be damned.

Nobody shall take away your freedom (to destroy all life on earth), you want to eat mammoth!

[0] https://talkveganto.me/en/facts/suitable-for-all/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Meat-eati... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_fermentation