GOOD Meat gets green light from FDA for cultivated meat | Hacker News Reader

GOOD Meat gets green light from FDA for cultivated meat

agfundernews.com

114 pointsferriswil132 comments

Aren't there good arguments[1] that lab-grown meat is a long way from being cost-competitive due to fundamental thermodynamic reasons?

[1]: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...

Associated discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28621288

>For cell-cultured meat to be viable at scale, he said, “We think vessel size needs to be north of 200,000 liters, cell density needs to go up, and media costs need to be in the cents, not dollars.”

It sounds like they're aware of a few obstacles.

No, it fundamentally boiled down to two things: bovine serum costs, and hygiene costs.

GOOD claims that it already produces cultured meat without using bovine serum, in their Singapore facility. As we have no details on what they use instead of bovine serum, it's hard to assess the economic viability of what they're doing. But it also means that the entire counterargument focused on bovine serum costs is no longer relevant. And many required nutrients today are industrially grown in bacteria or algae (for example, most of the vitamins in a daily multivitamin).

And the hygiene portion was premised on using Class 8 clean rooms for production, i.e., the most hygienic clean rooms currently recognized. The difference in cost between a Class 5 clean room (the lowest level of recognized "clean room", and the one used by pharmaceutical production, nanotech production, medical device production, etc.) and a Class 8 clean room is like the difference between an integrated GPU and a 6090 TI Founder's Edition. The problem with assuming the absolute top-of-the-line equipment would be required is that this was the assumption that drove this entire portion of the counterargument, down to facility size, equipment requirements, etc., ignoring entirely how production actually occurs in the real world.

Do you have a link or could you explain more about the actual hygiene requirements? I remember reading the linked article at the time and the challenge of keeping cells bacteria free did sound pretty daunting.

Start cloning some animal thymuses and bone marrow. Fill the cultures with immune cells.

Just testing the viability of that one sentence would be a decade long research project for a large, well funded lab - and it would definitely not work as described.

Cell culture is hard, immune systems are incredibly complex. Bone marrow cells are very hard to culture, relative to other cells - we literally figured out how last year, just about, for one of the cell types in bone marrow niches. The collection of complex cell types in bone marrow and are only one component in a functional immune system.

In theory would it be possible (at scale) to design and deploy completely self contained pods? Essentially, seal them up and they run through a decontamination cycle then you use pre-steralized sealed starter kits from the Class 8 clean rooms?

Though, complete sterilization of even a sealed closed environment is hard, and if using heat can require a lot of energy. Then I guess you'd need to pasteurize all nutrients as well.

Makes me wonder if a form of fermentation could be made to work with meet growth? It'd screw with cell density of the meet, but perhaps you could create an artificial symbiosis. The fermentation bacteria inhibit growth of bad bacteria, but wouldn't take too much of the overall energy from the meat cells.

Wow, that's a tricky problem.

> Aren't there good arguments[1] that lab-grown meat is a long way from being cost-competitive due to fundamental thermodynamic reasons?

And cheap, fairly low processed, easy to make non lab grown fake chicken can look and taste like the real thing enough to be accidentally switched with no one noticing.

It would make more sense to try to make red meat - but I guess that is much harder.

I think it will be easiest to make fish muscles or even use cells from reptiles and insects. Those are less technologically advanced and sophisticated than red meat, speaking from an evolutionary perspective. And I heard at least some companies are trying to commercialize cultured tuna meat.

Even easier would be to identify the proteins that make up the taste of those meats, then use them in plant based meat replacement programs. Much of the satisfaction we get from meat seems to come from hemes, a class of proteins using iron to capture oxygen, and this is what makes meat red in the first place. There are also plant-based heme analogues. All of that is of course limited by consumer feelings.

How does the energy consumption of the bioreactors stack up against live animals?

There’s two different opportunities here — a suffering-free meat substitute and a meat substitute with a lower carbon footprint.

This can get us closer to the former, but it’s not obvious it gets us closer to the latter.

Theoretically it should be way less energy intensive as well, since there won't be an animal expending energy to live for months before slaughter. Nor will there be a need to grow feathers, bones, or blood that end up as byproducts. Of course, this tech is still being developed, so it probably hasn't reached optimal efficiency, but it doesn't have to be that efficient to be better than standard animal agriculture.

Well, if the cow eats grass, then you aren't paying for that energy input.

It's not the input. It's the output. Stock animals emit gasses (like any other animal) and it's non-neglectable footprint.

It's the main reason beef and lamb are so much worse in terms of CO2-equivalent than pork or chicken, and cheese isn't good either.

"Grass-fed" doesn't scale to the meat demand. It's a complacent luxury for some people, and that's all it's ever going to be until the Human population at least halves or becomes mostly vegan (so some people can enjoy better meat).

Does it matter? The carbon problem can (and IMO should) be fundamentally fixed by wholly transitioning electrical generation to non-carbon producing sources. Industrial/commercial processes that have carbon footprints beyond their electrical expenditure, can be offset by using additional (non-carbon producing) electrical energy to perform carbon capture and sequestration. Yes, that would raise the cost of everything, which is why few politicians seriously focus on this option.

The common component to pretty much every process, product and comfort in our our society is energy utilization. Most people are not going to give anything up just because "the carbon footprint is bad/worse". So let's work on making it so the carbon footprint isn't even a factor.

If the energy costs are higher than those of normal farming, the whole enterprise becomes hard to justify.

On one hand, you have a highly artificial process in labs with high-tech equipment, probably all patented and proprietary. On the other hand, you have a process that occurs completely naturally, that man has understood for millennia, that is open-source and public domain.

Which one to justify to consumers, farmers, and developing nations? Hmm.

You fail to mention that the second options causes immense amounts of suffering to both animals and slaughterhouse workers and absolutely destroys our environment due to GHG and manure runoff. It also completely fucks up the biodiversity on this planet as now 80% of mammals by weight are livestock.

It doesn't have to. None of that is an intrinsic property of animal husbandry. All of what I mentioned seems to be intrinsic to cultured/manufactured meat, though.

It is intrinsic to the animal production in the quantities we consume, though.

If we returned to 1950s levels of meat consumption (my parents and grandparents regarded eating a chicken as a treat), or grew chickens or cows in our own backyards, maybe. But in a world of 8 billion people with our diets, cruelty, pollution, carbon impact etc are all intrinsically tied to our meat consumption.

So lab-grown, cruelty-free, without the carbon impact especially for highly polluting animals like cattle -- it's a wonderful idea.

So it's not intrinsic; it's related to quantity.

Please have a look at the definition of "intrinsic".

Depends on your target customer. Some people are willing to pay more for what they consider to be "ethical meat".

It's unlikely we can virtue-signal our way out of any problem.

If something costs more, that's a good proxy for that product being more energy-intensive. And where thst isn't the case, the higher cost is likely lining someone's pocket, who will then go on to consume more, thereby generating more pollution.

What’s your definition of virtue signaling here that doesn’t just cash out into someone having different ethical concerns than you?

If something costs more, that's a good proxy for that product being more energy-intensive.

New products that come from new tech always cost more and early adopters tend to be people with money to spare. Unless you can come up with a source showing the higher energy usage -- one with a comprehensive lifetime comparison, not cherry picked -- this is a baseless comment.

Yeah we can also ban factory farming, like we ban murder.

The correct definition of murder is as such:

> Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse [...]

Animals are not humans, killing an animal is not a murder. Attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to animals is called anthropomorphism.

I mostly agree with you. But it seems clear that mammals do have a lot of the same emotions humans do, as those emotions evolved long before humans took the stage. We just inherited them from our earlier ancestors.

That's not the full definition of murder. Here's the rest:

- 1: to kill (a human being) unlawfully and with premeditated malice

- 2: to slaughter wantonly : SLAY

- 3a: to put an end to

- 3b: TEASE, TORMENT

- 3c: MUTILATE, MANGLE

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

Watch Dominion and tell us these animals are not being mutilated, mangled, tormented, slaughtered and murdered.

Animals do not want to die. The will ALL naturally cry, scream, run, fight and generally do anything possible to avoid getting killed. Killing them is murder. Discrimination or unjustified treatment of animals based on an individual's species membership is called Speciesism. The belief that humans alone possess intrinsic value or are the central entity in the universe is called Anthropocentrism.

Some people are willing to pay more for quality food period. If this meat turns out to be better quality by some metric having nothing to do with "ethical meat" memes, there will be a market for it.

This is the answer I think. My partner is vegetarian and sometimes I'll eat the Beyond Chicken Nuggets because they are just that good, often better than what I can make or buy store or otherwise.

One look at the ingredients in these things puts me off ever eating them:

“ INGREDIENTS: Water, Wheat Flour, Wheat Gluten, Faba Bean Protein, Modified Corn Starch, Natural Flavors, Expeller-Pressed Canola Oil, Pea Starch, Methylcellulose, Salt, Refined Coconut Oil, Rice Flour, Corn Starch, Yeast Extract Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, Pea Protein (Peas Are Legume, People with Severe Allergies to Legumes Like Peanuts Should Be Cautious When Introducing Pea Protein Into Their Diet Because of the Possibility of a Pea Allergy, Contains No Peanuts or Tree Nuts), Titanium Dioxide (for Color) Sugar, Dried Yeast Spices, Leavening (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Baking Soda, Monocalcium Phosphate), Sunflower Oil, Canola Oil, Paprika, Dextrose.”

What ingredients from this list are you specifically trying to avoid?

Do you eat pepperoni pizza? Seems to have a lot of same ingredients

ENRICHED WHEAT FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, AND FOLIC ACID), WATER, LOW-MOISTURE PART-SKIM MOZZARELLA CHEESE (PART-SKIM MILK, CHEESE CULTURE, SALT, ENZYMES), PEPPERONI MADE WITH PORK, CHICKEN AND BEEF (PORK, MECHANICALLY SEPARATED CHICKEN, BEEF, SALT, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF SPICES, DEXTROSE, PORK STOCK, LACTIC ACID STARTER CULTURE, OLEORESIN OF PAPRIKA, FLAVORING, SODIUM NITRITE, SODIUM ASCORBATE, PAPRIKA, PROCESSED WITH NATURAL SMOKE FLAVOR, BHA, BHT, CITRIC ACID TO HELP PROTECT FLAVOR), TOMATO PASTE, 2% OR LESS OF VEGETABLE OIL (CORN OIL AND/OR SOYBEAN OIL AND/OR CANOLA OIL), SALT, YEAST, SUGAR, MALTED BARLEY FLOUR, SPICES, DRIED GARLIC.

Most mass produce meat are loaded with antibiotics and live in pretty terrible and unhygienic environments. Having meat that's not loaded with antibiotics and mixed with unsavory parts of the animal during butchering too.

Just visit a factory farm sometime. They are pretty cruel. Even if it's removing that cruelty for the sake of our own humanity makes sense to me. It's interesting to me that the Old Testament prohibition on "You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk" appears to be intended to avoid this sort of wrongness/cruelty. As in taking something that's fundamentally meant to provide sustenance and perverting it to cook the child it's meant to nourish seems pretty messed up right? Even if the goat itself doesn't care (though I think they do have some level of sentience). The effect isn't huge, but you can imagine that it produces a bit of desensitization to things that are important to our own humanity.

One thing with traditional family farms is that you gain a connection with the animals. Yes, you'll eat them but you know the cost of doing so. Modern factory farms completely remove that.

Of course, I'll continue eating regular meat due to convenience. That said, I do eat more substitute as it becomes more available.

There are far more negative externalities to production of meat than energy expenditure, especially if the alternative can use renewables

Electrical generation is a small part of the problem.

Electricity generation takes up less than half of global energy consumption, I think the figure is 30-40%.

This means most fossil fuels are burned for purposes other than generating electricity, and even if 100% of electricity generation was carbon-free you would still have a ton of fossil fuel consumption, things like heating, transportation, etc.

Transitioning all of that energy consumption to electricity is a huge feat, AND you need a f-ton more electricity generation, transportation, and storage, and of course it needs to be carbon free otherwise the problem is just made worse by the inherent inefficiencies.

Chicken production is already super energy efficient (and probably also the cruelest). Beef typically needs more land, at least if that land can be repurposed for growing crops (to turn into biofuel)

Yes, chicken does make me feel a little uneasy.

Beef and lamb are probably the least cruel, at least when they are fed grass outside (and where I live, they always are)

I understand that grain fed beef can be more cruel, depending on how long they are kept inside.

You cannot repurpose almost all land that farm animals use to grow crop. This is marginal land where only grass grows, or hilly, rocky terrain where equipment is not effective.

The main energy input for meat from animals is the sunlight shining on the plants that the animals eat.

The efficiency of that is utterly terrible. That's also the reason why any form of bioenergy from crops has such huge landuse requirements. It is likely almost impossible to do any worse with any technological process.

That's not really true. The energy used in the cultivation of their feed usually has the highest carbon footprint of the whole equation. "Grass-fed" and similar approaches don't scale up to the demand of meat. They require more land and more labor, all of which increases prices and increases competition for labor and arable land.

The food industry is highly regulated. A couple of key points:

“The key takeaway here is that with this landmark decision, we are now the first company with cultivated meat approvals in two countries – the US and Singapore,” Eat Just VP and head of global communications Andrew Noyes told AFN. “And we’re the only company in the world that has ever sold to consumers.”

In the US, the FDA regulates cell collection, banking, growth and differentiation for cultivated meat and poultry. Regulatory oversight then switches to the USDA once the cells are harvested and through the processing and labeling stages.

Food regulation in the US sucks. In the EU we have both a "higher level of regulation" and it's more effective in most regards. Maybe some food production is cheaper in the US, partly from less regulation, but not by much and you wouldn't know it from consumer prices.

Overall, most of the EU enjoys a high quality of cheap food (yes, it increased quite a bit the last year...) and the food safety is actually higher.

I'm saddened that they are just growing chicken. It's a safe and boring choice when they could be presenting endangered species burgers, pate, lark tongue, or other intriguing possibilities.

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

WildType is growing Salmon.

Give it a couple of years to get the basics down. Though I suppose offering particularly weird stuff could help with the prestige/high price phase of things.

Also I should really reread Transmetropolitan, its a great series.

Chicken meat is versatile and the cultivation is probably a lot easier. There is a lot more biotechnology knowledge about chicken meat.

And yet they're still using fetal bovine serum to grow the cells, according to the article.

There are plenty of better culture media options, I wonder why they're not using them.

From the article:

> Asked about bovine serum, Noyes told AFN: “Today’s FDA clearance, which was years in the making, involved a chicken cell line that is produced with a very low level of animal-derived nutrients that are effectively removed through the harvesting and washing procedure. Like in Singapore, our team will be pursuing an amendment for serum-free media with the FDA.”

> He added: “GOOD Meat’s R&D operations have been free from animal-derived nutrients for over three years, and in January, we received the world’s first approval for serum-free media in Singapore, where we’ve been selling our cultivated chicken for more than two years. Moving to non-animal derived nutrients will not only lead to greater scalability and lower manufacturing costs, but also a more sustainable product.”

As a curious vegetarian (which at this point must be a lot of their prospective market), the bovine serum is a dealbreaker.

Do you consume dairy products?

I'm not a vegetarian, but even I feel it's not directly equivalent.

If you took a look at how cows are treated in factory farms, it might change your feeling. I have seen people get physically sick when they found out.

I think it's relevant.

All dairy cows are forcibly impregnated every year to keep producing milk, calves are removed from their mother immediately after being born, usually not far away, so they both are able to hear one another, but not able to be together (as not to "waste" the milk used for human consumption). Male calves or female calves not fit for milk production are either sent to the slaughterhouse after gaining veal slaughter weight (when max 2 years old), or are killed immediately.

Cow's life is shortened by the milk production, usually from 20-25 years (48 is the record) to the industry's max of 5-6 years.

All dairy cows are then killed in the slaughterhouse and if pregnant, the fetus is extracted (they cut dead mother's belly and let it fall on the floor) and harvested for bovine serum (usually with cardiac puncture, wherein a needle is inserted into its heart and it's bled out to death).

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

https://dairy-cattle.extension.org/adult-dairy-cow-mortality...

https://www.farmsanctuary.org/news-stories/the-real-life-of-...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/26/dairy-di...

Aah yes. Dairy consumption is at same humane level as procuring fetal bovine serum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum

No it’s not. Dairy consumption is far, far worse.

You can make an argument that FBS is not adding to the suffering of animals. At the moment it is just collected as a side product and most of it is thrown away.

There are always multiple products from raising an animal. Some of them, especially the filet pieces, drive the number of animals being raised and slaughtered. Others are sold at a discount, sometimes quite sharp, some edible products are actually thrown away. You don't drive animal cruelty with FBS, or even low-priced parts of the actual animal. Up to the point where demand is outstripping the "side chain supply".

Can't say all that for milk. Cows are raised for giving milk, and at the end of their lives slaughtered. They have to give birth to calves every year, half of which are male and slaughtered much earlier. That meat is actually cheaper than meat from cattle raised specifically for meat generation, because it's a side chain and the meat is of lesser quality but it is available. A similar dynamic applies to chicken.

Dairy farms rape all the cows to keep them producing milk.

There is a difference between being vegetarian and being vegan.

A lot of vegetarians do eat/drink dairy products like milk.

TIL: Eat Just (same company that makes Just Egg) owns GOOD Meat.

So they’re sticking with using confusing adjectives. It has to be intentional then. My mom eats vegan foods and sometimes gets just an egg on a sandwich if she asks if they have “just egg”. Imagine the confusion. “Let’s go to ${restaurant}.” “Do they have good meat?” “Yeah, it’s great!”

>The paste is “intended to be utilized as a human food ingredient to be mixed with other food ingredients” to make products such as chicken bites and boneless chicken breasts, said GOOD Meat, which combines cell-cultured and plant-based meat in its products sold in Singapore.

Curious to know why you chose to highlight this part, is it good or bad or just interesting in your view?

It's the main part of the story, good bad or interesting.

Reminds me of the food paste in Fallout 4[0]. Even the name GOOD Meat sounds like an acronym that would exist in the Fallout universe.

(I don't have strong feelings for or against cultivated meat)

[0] https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Food_paste_(Fallout_4)

Meat paste is totally how a lot of meat products are made, so that makes sense for cultured meat.

I once worked in a plant that largely made hotdogs. Pink slime everywhere.

As long as it is properly and fully labeled, so that people can know whether or not this product is used in what they are eating...

I wonder to what extent the patents expiring as mentioned in the article, have led to this push?

Cultured meat is a good idea in theory, the end result depends on the exact implementation of course. Cultured meat is coming, you can already get it in selected restaurants in Singapore and Israel. It makes sense to combine protein consisting of real animal cells with plant food, both to bring down costs and for environmental reasons. They could also market it as more healthy I guess, although opinions regarding that will be divided of course.

I always preferred the moniker "clean meat" over "lab grown" or "cultivated meat". It's the same material as meat, but without the ethical questions surrounding the factory production of meat.

What makes it "clean" vs animal grown meat?

I think he assumes the factory production aspects of how fetal bovine serum is collected taints the karma of lab grown meat.

But that is indeed an entirely sentimental or spiritual concept. FBS doesn't contribute to the suffering of animals because it is a side product that is actually discarded most of the time. At worst, buying FBS means making the main production chain slightly more profitable.

In any case, I don't believe "clean meat" means less animal suffering than "cultured meat". "Clean meat" is just as unscaleable as cultured meat (currently) because of demands on labor and land. You still need to kill an animal long before its natural death, and you raise that animal in the first place to kill it. So I don't follow that particular argument.

Eh, it can go both ways. I would consider the term "clean meat" to refer to meat grown simply, meaning naturally, so quite opposite to your intention with "clean".

I understand what you're getting at, but the message seems less about describing the product in question and more about assigning a virtue to it. That can be great for marketing towards specific crowds, but I think we should aim for a factual, neutral term to describe it.

Maybe clean as in it comes from a source that didn’t have piss, guts, feces, and pathogens inside it.

Sure, that's another viable interpretation for "clean". But the GP was pretty clear about what they meant, and it wasn't this. All the more reason to find a term that represents it factually and clearly, without being an attempt at swaying people's opinions.

I recently got grossed out enough to give up sushi after watching a video of workers using tweezers to deworm the meat and learning that it's common in all sushi restaurants to have to do that.

Between that and having several friends overseas who ate "natural" pork and now have intramuscular larvae for life, I'd agree that lab grown meat almost certainly sounds a lot cleaner.

The name aside. Diamond and cole are the same material too, the structure is the important thing. And I don't think that this artificial meat will ever form into a nice textured steak with the same taste and consistency. Thats the reason I only see two possible ways for this product. 1) Be a high priced meat replacement for people that years ago eaten the last piece of meat 2) Be a very low priced low quality meat replacement that is used instead of real meat for price reduction

I hope 2) will never happen.

I hope both will happen. What's your point? Poor people are getting less texture in the meat they can't otherwise afford? There are a lot of products where texture doesn't matter.

And it's an invalid assumption that cultured meat won't ever have the same or similar structure. They'll figure out how to grow connective tissue, even blood vessels.

I assume you do because you want to confuse people. There's nothing "clean" about artificially grown meat.

"Lab-grown" is a neutral term which lets non-vegans know they should avoid it.

I'm sick of the intentional confusion vegan products cause. Regulators need to come down on this hard.

There is no clean meat at the scale at which we consume it. Unless you buy it from a old school small farm at the end of your street it varies from very very bad to very bad

Red light from me. There is a psychological aspect to food unfortunately.

Can you explain yourself a bit more? It's unclear what point you are trying to raise.

There is a psychological aspect to food [being appetizing] unfortunately

Meat is more appetizing to me if it's not literally the corpse of an animal, and nothing suffered or died to create it.

I don't personally feel that way but 100% get where those are coming from that do.

As with any psychological aspects, one person's red light is another's green. Psychologically, I find using animals to be a red light. YMMV.

Finally we have Soylent green. /s

«GOOD Meat induces the ability for its adherent cell line to grow in suspension (“suspension adaptation”) through selective culture in the presence of bovine serum.» - https://www.fda.gov/media/166348/download

Of course they use freshly-squeezed aborted calves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum?useskin=vec...

They're not using that in their Singapore facility and presumably would move away from it as soon as they can for all facilities.

What the heck is the market for this stuff? I'm repulsed by it, and I've asked around. None of the people I know who eat meat are even vaguely interested in this either. I mean sure a cow gets slaughtered but the alternative being presented, with vats of barnyard-alien-maniamal (yes the lab grown franken-meat industry has gleefully stated culturing human meat is a goal) hybrids twitching and gibbering in their nutrient-piss fluid goo...

It's just dehumanizing. Maybe that's the point of this industry.

> I'm repulsed by it

Can I ask why? Why is a bunch of cells grown in a clean-room environment more disgusting than a similar bunch harvested from free-range chicken potentially exposed to vastly more diseases?

I don't mean to be facetious, really, I don't. I'm neither vegetarian nor vegan, and am not pursuing any kind of agenda with this line of questioning. I just don't understand where the feeling of disgust comes from.

I’m not sure if this is the previous poster’s reason, but (given the implication that the poster is a vegetarian) it my simply be that many vegetarians are put off by the taste and texture of meat, whether it be real, cultured or fake (via textured proteins, etc.).

But I think it’s pretty silly to think that vegetarians are the target market for fake or cultured meat. Surely not.

If you’ve been vegetarian for a long time (life-long or for decades), then the distinctive texture of many meat products can be very off-putting. It’s not like anything you find in vegetable dishes (which is why fake and cultured meat products exist!), and if you’re not used to it, it can trigger you to gag as your brain sends signals that “this isn’t food as I know it”.

This isn’t usually a problem. If you’re a vegetarian, you don’t have any requirement to eat meat. Except some restaurants are now excitedly adopting fake (vegetable protein-based) meats as a “vegetarian” option. It must be convenient as they don’t have to invent new vegetable-centric dishes, but many vegetarians just can’t manage to eat them even if they try. I’ve been to a couple of work dinners lately where the vegetarian option was a fake (TVP-based) meat, and had to just eat the side salad because the main dish triggered my gag reflex.

I’m a life-long vegetarian and kind of wish I could eat meat, it would make life simpler. But I just can’t bring myself to chew or swallow it without plenty of water to wash it down. That said, I’m all for cultured meats as an option for meat-eaters. Go for it.

> I’m a life-long vegetarian and kind of wish I could eat meat, it would make life simpler. But I just can’t bring myself to chew or swallow it without plenty of water to wash it down.

If you really want to, and I'm not sure if you do, you probably need to add meat slowly. It would work best if you often eat with someone who eats meat, but add a pea sized bit of meat to one meal a day for a week, then two pea sized bits, then four, etc. Kind of hard to do if it's only you / only vegetarians eating, because meat doesn't tend to come in appropriate sizes to do that with. Prefer tiny pieces mixed into dishes where you take larger bites of many things --- a burrito is a great place hide things.

Because it's never the same thing. People want the authentic real thing, not lab grown monstrosities created for the masses so they can be "ethical" while millionaires can do whatever they want.

You might as well ask why have sex when you can just buy a fleshlight/dildo. (Don't you know how many diseases you're exposed to?)

Millionaires also commit terrible crimes and depraved actions, I guess that should give us the green light to do that in kind

The cell lines are literally cancerous, for one. You can look that up. But it just feels wrong, without trying to be too offensive it’s the same reason I am repelled by transgendered and heavily tatted people. Part of my brain switches into fight or flight mode and screeches DANGER at me.

I'm sure cancerous cell lines exist, but could you show that those are used in cultured meats?

Also, did you mean cancerous or carcinogenic? Only the latter therm is about the consequences of eating the thing in question.

I invite you to show yourself how these cell lines, which must be immortal to be cultured, come to be. It should be educational. Perhaps I expect too much but in high school, freshman year, we learned about this even in my small town. I look forward to the next genuine interaction.

I'm taking up your offer: please show me. It's clear that you have enough knowledge about it to support your argument, and that I don't even know where to look.

The journey of personal growth begins within. Introductory high school level biology classes are where I learned that immortal cell lines are what causes cancer. And if you read their material on the GOOD Meat site you'll see they admit it without admitting it - the product is "sterilized" and "washed," you don't have to do this with actual meat.

But please, I invite you to research this for yourself. You'll be stunned.

Only immortal cell lines that are integrated with your body are cancer.

Given that you didn't cite any sources, I conclude that your fears stem from believing scary-sounding half-truths.

Three cents have been added to your bank account.

It's quite common to feel afraid of the new: it's an essential survival mechanism. However, just because we get that feeling initially, doesn't mean we should always trust it over a lived experience. People for all time have experienced this feeling when doing something new: riding a bike, driving in a car, and first week of kindergarten. What makes us the hyper adaptable omnivores we are is our ability to become desensitized via repeated exposure to things that aren't real threats.

And of course, sometimes we've gotten complacent and made an error, like lead in gasoline. But that's why we study everything to try to ensure we are improving.

That response might add unnecessary stress and complication in your life. I suggest reading or engaging with _why_ you feel this way, beyond the initial reaction. Imagine I felt unduly disgusted by you everytime I interacted with you. Not only is it not prosocial, that kind of overhead leads to bad places (having formerly held on to those beliefs myself).

It's actually worked out fine so far.

> ...hybrids twitching and gibbering in their nutrient-piss fluid goo.

Is this actually what's going on? And if there is any twitching, is there any brain involved, or is it external electrical stimulation used to develop the muscle tissue that will later be harvested?

> None of the people I know who eat meat are even vaguely interested in this either.

If you present it to them like you're presenting it here, and they don't bother to do any additional research, then it's no wonder why they're disinterested.

> I'm repulsed by it

Many people are repulsed by factory farming and go vegetarian or vegan, but would welcome meat flavors and textures that don't come at the cost of animal misery.

> and I've asked around

Considering the tone of the rest of your comment, I'm doubtful the question you asked of your friends was stated in a neutral way that wasn't just broadcasting your disgust at the idea.

"Hey Tom, instead of having a steak, would you rather eat twitching, gibbering barnyard-alien-maniamal hybrids grown in vats of nutrient-piss fluid goo?"

> lab grown franken-meat industry has gleefully stated culturing human meat is a goal

For sure there are people looking to grow skin and other organs for medical reasons, but I'd really like to see a reference to someone (much less the entire "franken-meat industry") claiming to grow human cells for consumption.

Most people don’t go vegan or vegetarian. It’s really a very tiny segment of the population, partially driven by ESG and our corporate overlords who want us to own nothing. And partly driven by Indian tech bros, they’re very keen on stopping me from getting my daily beef ration.

> Most people don’t go vegan or vegetarian. It’s really a very tiny segment of the population

And that implies there is no market how exactly? There's plenty of market for things that the majority isn't interested in. You seem to have an axe to grind.

Not "no" market, but it's a very very small market. A fraction of a percent of the public. And it's shrinking, as people switch away from veganism because of health problems. All three of my friends who were vegans 10 years back eat eggs and cheese again now.

Factory farming is infinitely more repulsive. Lots of us actually care about other living things

Are you being intellectually honest when you imply that the only options are prison sheds for the poor animals, and lab grown abominations? No, you’re arguing like a child. This wouldn’t even work on a child, I don’t know why you think it would work on me.

Everything about the meat industry from farm to table is dehumanizing.

It's even worse. Most lab grown stuff has to use this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum

As a vegetarian, I would say - continue to eat the animals than putting the animals through the dystopian hell that produces animal based nutrient solutions. I would also bet that most of the people looking forward for lab grown meat would be repulsed by what exactly they are eating if they understand the production process

Man, this is horrifying. I was looking forward to cultured meat but I never bothered to check what they actually do. Guess I'll die a vegetarian, or even vegan

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