I’m sorry that people could one day lose jobs over this, but if lab-grown meat is proven to be a safe and cost/energy/carbon efficient alternative to raising and killing animals, then it would be insane to not pursue that.
Also, that's not even the worse of the things introduced by our government yesterday, administrations do not need to publish a public contract for works up to 150k euros.
Now every single administration can spend and gift corrupted money left and right without any need for any accountability and rules.
Disgusting.
sorry but how is this different from just democracy ?
we have democracy here in USA that allows NIMBY homeowners opposing any new development. Is that also just 'populist vote-grabbbing'
Democracy is still the best form of government I know of though. So if you don't live in one it is worth moving to one. Hopefully you can learn from the mistakes of those of us who have gone before and design protection for some more downside.
There's no better example of this than the discussion on health insurance here on HN a few days ago, where people with health insurance were opposing universal healthcare because they'd have to "compete with the general public for treatment access".
How do you fight it though? There's no incentive for anyone to willingly choose to have a worse personal situation for a greater good.
As an example, just in the last six months or so, I took considerable time and effort out of my day to help absolute strangers in two different occasions to change their flat tires. Both times I was soaked through in sweat by the time I was done, but I was happy to help. Does it follow from my willingness to do this that I would be in support of, say, a government program for roadside assistance (call it AAA-for-All)? Hell no.
America once excelled at civil society, but over time government has subsumed more and more of those functions; to everyone's detriment, if you asked me.
I'm not calling you prejudiced, to be clear, but your example of "we should all rely on each other to help out" is exactly what racists use to justify cutting welfare and saying communities and churches should handle it, for example, with the dogwhistle that only those "deserving" will get assistance. But "welfare queens" who dare to be Black? No support for them!
I'm not sure what part of the country you live in or what your background is, but it is my sincere belief that there are not nearly as many racists in America in this day and age as you imply. I live in a majority black city in a Deep South red state (and I myself am visibly nonwhite), and I observe nothing but pleasant interactions between people of all skin tones. It's honestly a strange difference from back when I lived in a stereotypically "coastal liberal elite" city in a blue state, where every other lawn had a BLM sign but approximately zero black people lived there. Here? Approximately zero BLM signs but people of different races being neighbors and getting along just fine.
Perhaps I'll be proven wrong, but it is my experience that outside of small pockets, there is no racism of the sort you describe, where someone may not extend private kindness to another because they're black or any other race.
In case you need a refresher of an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ahmaud_Arbery
I'm familiar with the Arbery tragedy. You're extrapolating from this and maybe other high-profile cases to make the argument that there are racists all over the country who are willing to kill. The actual data paints a different picture, with there having been anywhere from five to ten thousand reported hate crimes annually over the past decade or so, with only a few tens of those being murders. Statistically you're about as likely to be killed by a lightning strike as someone murdering you due to your race.
Your claim that people are "discriminated against regularly", of course, is too vague for me to counter.
Elect whichever "populist" politician offends the progressive reformers the most.
Populism is how people react to democracy failures. It happens when people are disenfranchised.
But where did you get that this happened in italy . I didn't see that in the bbc article.
> sorry but how is this different from just democracy
to:
> But where did you get that this happened
Which seems like example of moving the goal-post.
I guess i don't really understand 'riling up' means.
That is why many rational people do not support this idea of unlimited democracy. The founders of he US knew very well the perils of unlimited democracy and that is why they not only attempted to check government power, but check the power of the majority
I dont want to be ruled by either a government in washington, nor a majority of my neighbors
Populist movements only grow because the insulated ruling class don't listen to the people(and often don't give a shit).
The Swiss do have a popular vote on things, but they aren't, for example, voting themselves free lunch and ponies for all. I don't know whether that's because the government is prohibited from providing free lunch and ponies or because the majority of people culturally value hard work and saving over immediate gratification and are educated enough to know that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Either way, it would not work out as well in places where one or both of those things are not true.
Let's pick out some recent results from Switzerland:
In 2022, voters rejected "Ban on animal and human experiments" and "Popular initiative against factory farming", and approved "Limiting tobacco advertising".
In 2021, they rejected "Federal Act on greenhouse gas emissions" and "For clean drinking water and healthy food", and approved "Ban on full facial coverings".
In 2020, they rejected "Affordable housing" and "Ban on financing weapon production" and approved "Paternity leave".
In 2019, they rejected "Stop the Sprawl", and approved "Gun control directive".
From this, I can gather that the Swiss as a whole are sensible people who understand that voting for things that sound good on the surface like "ban factory farming" or "more affordable housing" might lead to worse problems down the road than what it is they are trying to fix; and that they have a strong sense of cultural identity, as shown by the ban on full facial coverings.
I would imagine the same questions would yield vastly different results in other places. The proposition system in California resulted in Prop 13, arguably one of the worst policy disasters ever in that state, looking back almost 45 years later. Now the San Francisco city government is talking about paying every black resident a lump sum of $5mm and a guaranteed high income for the next 250 years; what do you think a binding popular referendum would do in that city?
Isolated nation of small population that is largely a monoculture with very low rate of poverty...
That model does not scale to a large culturally diverse population with widely disparate income levels.
I'm no expert on Switzerland, but can it really be described as a monoculture? There are four language groups, after all. I cannot speak to the existence of an overriding Swiss ethos that people identify with.
Likewise, there's plenty to be said about standards for food safety and quality, but legislating against lab-grown meat serves no practical purpose right now (it may in the future), other than pure political grandstanding.
Because of who is behind the unpopular thing, and who has power to make (thing) happen.
Nuclear weapons are also deeply unpopular.
> Won't the market quickly show that "bugs and lab-grown abominations" can't stand?
The market won't have a say when bureaucrats pass a law mandating every burger or sausage should contain a % of lab-grown meat, with the % increasing every year. If there's anything the recent years have showed is that slippery slope isn't a fallacy.
Sure, but they're currently demonstrating this in the exact opposite way: the market won't have a say when bureaucrats mandate everything has a maximum percentage of lab-grown meat, and that proposed percentage is "zero".
Who? The government that's currently banning it?
> Nuclear weapons are also deeply unpopular.
Consumers can't just not buy nuclear weapons and cause them to stop existing. This has nothing to do at all with a food product.
> The market won't have a say when bureaucrats pass a law mandating every burger or sausage should contain a % of lab-grown meat, with the % increasing every year.
Why would they do this? And wouldn't the people who had to do this be the same Italian government that's clearly anti-lab grown meat? If they switch to that stance won't this ban be easily rescinded anyways? If there's a lab meat boogie man with the power to make new laws what does this ban really do?
Reversing a law, especially one that would be exceptionally popular is unlikely to succeed. By contrast, so long as e.g. lab meat remains legal - there are lots of ways to work behind the scenes to achieve your ends. One of the easiest is labeling. By allowing lab meat to simply be labeled as meat, consumer choice can be largely eliminated. Pair this with artificial subsidies to the lab meat industry, and you completely undermine the market in a rather quiet fashion. It all has the same effect, without the same degree of outrage, as trying to overturn a popular law would.
> By allowing lab meat to simply be labeled as meat, consumer choice can be largely eliminated.
By making lab meat illegal, consume choice HAS been eliminated. This is literally the exact same problem that's being suggested as a slippery slope in plain view.
So if you're an American farmer, you should expect Kroger (among other WEF affiliated businesses) to treat lab meat in an unfairly preferential way. Even if you would feel comfortable competing against lab meat on a "level" playing field, this changes the game, and creates a much bigger motivation for things exactly like what's happening in Italy right now.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/will-we-eat-lab-grown...
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/06/you-will-be-eating-re...
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/how-a-new-approach-to...
I also think you have the push/pull the wrong way - Kroger wants a say in WEF's decisions, it's not controlled by the WEF. It's always going to do what's best for Kroger.
What are you referring to?
That seems ideologically inconsistent but terribly convenient.
GM bacteria rennet.
Of course, part of why I'm vegetarian is that the idea of scraping off the stomach lining of a baby cow in order to turn milk into a convenient solid is, to me, also an abomination…
The fact that you perceive something natural as an abomination is a symptom of a society that's too successful and needs to invent problems where there are none.
If the cow could speak, I believe their opinion would be otherwise.
Humans don't generally appreciate it when lions, tigers, and bears beat them to the top of the food chain.
Perfectly natural, that hypocrisy; as natural as your face being eaten by leopards.
> The fact that you perceive something natural as an abomination is a symptom of a society that's too successful and needs to invent problems where there are none.
Lots of natural stuff has been "an abomination" to one group or another since writing existed, regardless of how successful the societies have been.
Examples in Leviticus, amongst other ancient texts.
Shellfish are natural.
Because I wasn't even attempting to; rather the point is to demonstrate that natural things can be abominations.
And my first comment on this thread was giving appreciation to an (artificial) "abomination" that meant I didn't need a (specific) natural one.
Except cows... Don't speak? That's kind of the whole point. We can't apply human value judgements to other species that work in a fundamentally different way.
> Humans don't generally appreciate it when lions, tigers, and bears beat them to the top of the food chain.
It's safe to say no carnivore/omnivore denies that animals suffer. And I'd bet most of us are not happy that they do. It's just not a deal breaker, seeing as it's outweighed by many benefits.
Obviously so.
You'll note I said "vegetarian" above rather than "vegan", despite the reasons (I could quote PETA but I won't bother) that milk itself can be well described as an abomination.
Thing is though, as we become better artisans, the comparative benefits of "natural" over artificial are ever reduced.
The ban proposed in the link reminds me of the early years of motorcars, when they were limited to a few miles per hour lest they scare the horses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws
These laws didn't last long, fortunately, and ostensibly they were to protect cattle, horses and carriage riders but clearly the idea was to slow the car down to the speed of a pedestrian effectively hobbling it to the point that driving a car didn't make sense.
Today in the US, cars are the number one cause of death for children and lag only firearms for accidental death overall. Excusing the daily human slaughter by saying, "Well, they're not _designed_ to kill people like guns are" is not a cunning retort.
It's insane that the top leader in accidental death of children and adolescents involves automobiles [1].
Your counter to the above should be building more transit. However in the English speaking world we are incompetent in that these decades, and we refuse to learn from anyone else.
There's plenty of towns and small cities in Europe (specially the "center") that could be considered walk-only and people are pretty happy there, for example Toledo (Spain) or Venice (Italy).
That should actually have been done or better, Stirling Engines.
We need to fully understand its safety, nutritional content, and long-term health effects.
Our understanding of the full biochemical spectrum of our diets is still limited. Therefore, it's important to ensure that lab-grown meat adequately replicates the complex array of nutrients and other beneficial compounds found in conventionally produced meat.
Long-term effects: Since lab-grown meat is a relatively new technology, the long-term health effects of consuming it are not yet known. Rigorous safety testing and research are needed to establish its safety over time.
---------------
Modern nutrition is largely unexplored territory
"The unmapped chemical complexity of our diet" December 2019 Nature Food
DOI:10.1038/s43016-019-0005-1
"Our understanding of how diet affects health is limited to 150 key nutritional components that are tracked and catalogued by the United States Department of Agriculture and other national databases. Although this knowledge has been transformative for health sciences, helping unveil the role of calories, sugar, fat, vitamins and other nutritional factors in the emergence of common diseases, these nutritional components represent only a small fraction of the more than 26,000 distinct, definable biochemicals present in our food—many of which have documented effects on health but remain unquantified in any systematic fashion across different individual foods. Using new advances such as machine learning, a high-resolution library of these biochemicals could enable the systematic study of the full biochemical spectrum of our diets, opening new avenues for understanding the composition of what we eat, and how it affects health and disease."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337846288_The_unmap...
This is the same "reasoning" that ultimately led to ban on most GMO foods like actual long-term tasty tomatos.
For some reason we demand significantly stricter controls over anything "lab-grown" than on anything "natural".
Note: I'm not calling for lax controls. I'm callling for controls that are not more stringent than those on "natural" products.
Because honestly there's literally nothing natural about any food we consumr.
Long-term tasty tomatos are a good thing but what about impossibility to breed my own tomato seeds if GMO will win 100% of the market?
That is a great question and a very valid concern.
Because there are two things at odds with each other:
- We don't really want GMO plants (or even animals and fish) to interbreed with non-GMP plants/animals because wide-spread effects on the ecosystem could be disastrous. We've lived through a few of those with natural plants and animals as invasive species, and boy do we not want a pest-and-herbicide-resistant strain of tomatoes to take over the planet [1]
- And yet we do want to let people (both hobbyists and farmers) to raise their own plants and animals. At the very least to preserve local varieties.
I don't have a good solution for that. I think what may work if implemented correctly is for governments to maintain a stock of non-GMO seeds or even mandate that X% of the market must be given over to non-GMO products.
[1] We already have the giant hogweed to deal with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleum_mantegazzianum. Imagine that but even more resistant to everything * shudder *
1. Any invasive specie known today is about transporting an organism, evolutionally willing to live from one place to another. GMO organism aren't evolutionally willing to live, they just genetically willing to give us better tomatoes.
2. Absence of non-GMO is not a problem at all if I still have an access to bleeding-edge reproductionable seeds as it happens today. The problem is in patent system, what if the cost of bleeding-edge seeds will be costing so much that small farmers with expensive and not yummy non-GMO will be out of market? Have you seen any vegetable before selection? Nobody needs the corn with few grains while we use to have a corn with few hundrends of grains. Even the most green-headed crackpot on the planet will not grow that in 21th century.
3. I do not believe that all plants harvested from GMO are _really_ sterile. Since they use to have a reproductive system so all kinds of mutations are possible if something with CRISPR/Cas9 goes wrong. And there are some experiments with attempt to spread some modified genes to something like all the malary mosquitoes [1] . There are some GMO even among humans, and that humans are not sterile [2]
Evolution doesn't have a concept of will. It does have the concept of survival. Survival of the fittest (yes, I know it's a simplification).
Nearly every species is invasive given lack of external controls. For example, Sweden needs to kill 100 000 (yes, one hundred thousand) of moose every year because their natural predator, the wolf, has been exterminated, and moose have become invasive.
If your pest-resistant, herbicide-resistant tomato that is also more adaptable to varying soil conditions is able to reproduce and hybridize, it will "willingly" take over any local plants not because it has the "will", but because it has the capacity.
It will just as "willingly" take over, say, wheat, if the field is contaminated with its seeds.
We use herbicides in our fields not because our plants have "no will to live", but because other plants will just take over given half the chance.
> I do not believe that all plants harvested from GMO are _really_ sterile. Since they use to have a reproductive system so all kinds of mutations are possible if something with CRISPR/Cas9 goes wrong
All GMO products (both plants and animals) are required to be sterile because impact on ecosystem is very hard to estimate if they aren't. And yes, it's not 100% fool-proof, and quite a concern
You are writing correct things but the experience which is in my hands tells me that you are not right about properties of invasive specie vs properties of typical crop.
I think any market segment without at least 10 comparably sized companies AND the option to just not transact with ANY of them is not competitive and will not benefit from any "free market" supposed benefits.
We could argue whether it's too long, but it's a complex topic I don't know nearly enough.
It's the same reason we worry about (artificial) nuclear weapons - despite "natural" reactors also existing.
Because we overall know the natural products, how they are to handle and how they interact with each other. And yet we still have many problems from poor handling and still unknown interactions and also new "optimizations" coming from the business-side. And GMO&lab-grown is this, just worst, it's unknown territory, coming from a mindset which quite often has not the benefit of consumers and mankind on its focus. Basically, we have learned to not trust big business, and these are cases where they can shine with all their evil ignorance, so many trust them even less than normally.
The reason is simple. We haven't co-evolved with lab-grown food for several billion years, or had transmitted cultural experience with it for tens of thousands of years. The recent discovery that artificial sweeteners have unforeseen health effects (hyper-clotting / glucose intolerance) should point out the necessity of caution.
The human organism has been in a very complex dance with its environment for millennia. We have no idea what subtle chemical traces it is grown to depend upon. We pay for our arrogance and never seem to learn.
Trust me, you haven't co-evolved with a single plant you pick up at the supermarket today.
None of the hybrids you eat evolved naturally.
Most of the hybrids you're consuming are nowhere to be found in nature. But since they are "natural" somehow they are absolved of most sins. And then boom and E. coli outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_o... or listeriosis outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_States_listeriosis...
> The real concern with GMOs is not about something like a genetic collapse but the fact that the technology is only really capable of enabling the use of more exotic pesticides and herbicides in food stocks.
That is not nearly the main concern. If anything, GMOs would allow us to forego most exotic pesticides and herbicides.
> I really don’t see the need to engage in a widespread experiment on pesticide use when targeted smaller scale studies would suffice.
What I "love" about discussions like this is that they immediately veer off territory that is only tenuously adjacent, at best.
As for GMO’s letting us forgo pesticides? When is that going to happen? Currently that is their main application in ag (synth bio for chemical precursors is more interesting but totally different). The more fanciful dreams of geneticists have not yielded a panacea of new options.
And this is a purely political issue over agricultural policy. Farm subsidies are directly related to this discussion. If it were just a science project it would not concern me in the slightest. The fact that there are a large number of unwitting subjects has clear ethical implications and pretending that this is not a political issue is just obtuse.
Of course it doesn't. There's a reason I picked corn specifically. Because it's such a mutant, scientists still struggle to unravel all the mixed stff that eneded up there.
And, of course, none of the stuff you eat would ever evolve naturally in nature.
> As for GMO’s letting us forgo pesticides? When is that going to happen?
I didn't said forego entirely.
Some studies suggest that even with the very few crops that are allowed to be modified, farmers already use less pesticides: https://allianceforscience.org/blog/2020/07/new-study-gmo-cr...
Basically all foods are cells so they contain all the normal cellular machinery like DNA. As long as lab grown meat is just normal animal cells nothing new is going on.
Where you need to care about each individual molecule is if we where creating food one molecule at a time via a replicator or something so we could have wildly unusual ratios of these individual components. In that context sugar is actually less “natural” than lab grown meat because it’s so concentrated.
Modern nutritional ingredients no longer contain only natural substances, and most additives are untested.
"The European Commission is banning titanium dioxide (E171) as a food additive in the EU, starting with a six-month phasing out period as of February 7, 2022, until August 7, 2022, after which a full ban applies. Following the publication of Commission Regulation (EU) 2022/63 in the EU’s Official Journal (OJ) on January 18, 2022, Annex II and III to Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008 on food additives will be amended accordingly. The Regulation also includes a commitment to review the necessity to maintain or delete titanium dioxide (E171) from the EU list of food additives for exclusive use as a color in medicinal products. On November 30, 2021, the Commission had already published Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/2090 in the OJ, denying the authorization of titanium dioxide (E171) as a feed additive for all animal species."
https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/european-union-titanium-dioxid...
in 2000, E171 was considered safe, but now it is not. Generally, it can be concluded that the half-life of food additives' safety is quite short.
Just because a little dirt ends up on an apple doesn’t make that dirt food, it’s a contaminant. Similarly people have been adding preservatives, poison, dyes, pesticides, etc to food for ages that doesn’t make that stuff food.
I would be very concerned about the artificial meats growth medium ending up in the end product.
"Although the evidence for general toxic effects was not conclusive, on the basis of the new data and strengthened methods we could not rule out a concern for genotoxicity and consequently we could not establish a safe level for daily intake of the food additive."
So EU took the "better safe than sorry" approach which actually is sensible.
That's a very simplified and misleading stance. We already have problem with normal grown foods for various reasons, including unexpected and harmful outcomes of breeding. Food is complex, and handling of food is even more complex. And research is limited in what it can find, and if there are financial interests, it will limit itself even more in what it communicates.
75% of people in the US are overweight or obese, do you really believe that we are doing a good job with what we are putting in our bodies?
Now, I am not saying nutrition is ignorable you need to do more than say it was alive and now it’s in my tummy so everything is fine. On the other hand eating normal foods doesn’t require min maxing 26,000 different chemicals.
Moreover, you can pick a safe organism, stick it in a growth medium, let it sit for a while, and then eat it. That’s how we get cheese, beer, bread, soy sauce etc. Calling it lab grown meat evokes an image that’s different from what’s being proposed. They aren’t synthesizing every individual molecule they are simply feeding cells. If those cells can be healthy then most of what your cells need is probably included.
I wouldn’t try to live on an all lab grown meat diet, but that’s also true of an all beef/beer/cheese/etc diet
We managed to fuck this up without going that far for vegetables and there's no considering additives or lab grown differences there. It's definitely all cells and dna.
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conserv...
Yeast requires a huge range of chemicals to grow, but we mostly ignore all the details when we mix flower, water, and starter because flower is already a really complicated thing.
In the ongoing debate surrounding breast milk and baby formula, the majority continues to favor breast milk as the optimal choice for infant nutrition.
Ultra processed foods are clearly garbage. There is no nuance to this. There is no need for a deep study needed on unclear aspects of nutrition. They are plainly bad nutrition wise.
Breast milk is not an active debate. It’s not determined by “the majority” either. It is pretty clear that breast milk is better for a baby developmentally.
None of this actually supports your earlier assertion that lab grown food would have fundamentally different nutrition rules than other foods.
Due to antagonistic pleiotropy and short term reproductive selection you could even argue that novel foods have an advantage over the foods we've "adapted to" since our bodies never learned to make short term trade-offs with those foods.
Those skeptics should also be skeptical of the naturalistic fallacy.
The difference is we are feeding them grass seeds vs grass leaves.
> it's important to ensure that lab-grown meat adequately replicates the complex array of nutrients and other beneficial compounds found in conventionally produced meat
Why?
feels more like PR/corporate-speak than human speak.
"""
I am scared of living in a society that doesn't find it obvious that things perfected by nature over millions of years are scientifically speaking, safer than things made by some "scientists" in a lab.
Statistically, the "large n" of nature makes it > scientific.
"""
This is the "natural corn" you consume vs. the actual natural corn: https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/670657
Same goes for all "natural things" you eat.
"Our analysis makes clear that the PP is essential for a limited set of contexts and can be used to justify only a limited set of actions. We discuss the implications for nuclear energy and GMOs. GMOs represent a public risk of global harm, while harm from nuclear energy is comparatively limited and better characterized. PP should be used to prescribe severe limits on GMOs."
Also, I can't get past random graphs with random numbers with zero explanation of the axes.
There are valid concerns expressed, but they are buried underneath an avalanche of demagoguery.
Proposing ridiculous laws that won’t go anywhere is an age-old tactic for local politicians to grab headlines and fire up their voter base. There are numerous proposed laws like that every week that will never go anywhere and were never intended to.
Ridiculous, yes, but don’t let it fool you into thinking that there was a chance of it happening in the US.
As for Italy: I have no idea. Their politics are weirder than I can wrap my head around and I’m not familiar enough to know if this is a political bluff or a serious effort.
It is a bit of an open question as to whether or not chemical engineers can beat a chicken in a chicken making contest, but should the results come back unequivocally in favor of the chemists, then Italy can simply repeal the law.
The big wins are in expensive cuts of meat from large, popular animals... i.e. beef and tuna.
I am not for any top down laws banning things, but the idea that lab grown is anywhere an equal swap for real meat is silly. Italy has a genuine concern, they value food, and that comes down to the quality of ingredients.
wrt supply chains:
> Specifically, the livestock sector and its related industries are among the most impacted sectors. This is mainly ascribed to the limitations of animal movement and the decrease of production inputs' availability.
> The availability of animals', feed ingredients, either through foraging or concentrate ingredients, was an additional challenge confronting the sustainability of the livestock supply chain. Data presented in our overview illustrated that one of the livestock supply chain's major disruptors was the inability of farmers to access animal feed.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7593325/
And unless I'm rich enough to eat choice cuts regularly, the marbling et al is not going to be amazing regardless, so...
But that is what is this topic about. So if something is not "equal swap" then we can consider ban?
> "Food or feed consisting of, isolated or produced from cell cultures or from tissues deriving from vertebrate animals is therefore completely prohibited for the use in the preparation of food, drink and feed."
Hence, you can make lab-grown meat from various insects (or crab or lobster) if you like with no concerns. Not sure if the public has an appetite for it, but these are apparently delicious when deep-fried:
https://www.mysabah.com/wordpress/sago-worm-butod/
I think lobster is the way to go. I guess octopus cells would also be an acceptable starting material (octopi are intelligent and shouldn't be hunted IMO).
Con:
Producing and consuming lab-grown human meat raises ethical questions about human dignity and the potential normalization of cannibalism, even if it does not involve harming an actual person.
Many religious and cultural beliefs would likely oppose the production and consumption of lab-grown human meat.
The long-term health effects of consuming lab-grown human meat are unknown, and the production process would need to be carefully regulated to ensure safety.
The idea of consuming human meat, even if lab-grown, is likely to be met with strong social disapproval and stigma, which could hinder its acceptance.
The production and consumption of lab-grown human meat could face legal challenges in many jurisdictions, as it might be considered a form of cannibalism or be subject to other regulations.
Pro:
Some individuals may be interested in trying lab-grown human meat due to curiosity or as a novel experience, without causing harm to another person.
Cultivating human tissue in a lab could have applications in medical research, such as testing drug efficacy, studying human tissue regeneration, or using it for transplantation purposes.
imho: lab-grown meat not only a scientific issue.
Is it not equally ridiculous to ban combustion engine sales?
It appears many want the government to “protect them from carbon”. Why is it bad for people to want to protect the robustness of their food supply?
If you view government as a way to protect the population (as it seems most here do), then it shouldn’t be surprising people use it to protect themselves.
Personally, I think a fair market where regulation is as minimal as possible is best. That said, I wouldn’t want a few corporations controlling my countries food supply. So, please keep the farms active and plentiful.
Similarly, I wouldn’t want car manufacturers of EV to receive any government benefit. Let’s see it produced and become dominate. As oil prices rise because it becomes a scarce resource, EVs would become popular. Of course, we haven’t actually seen a decline in oil production where that occurs, so we do it artificially.
Taste is also serves as a good metric, because it supports human happiness and enjoyment. A big factor.
Sadly, it's not. It requires growing tumors based on animal cells, which need to be pumped full of antibiotics to prevent infection, because a clump of cells has no immune system.
The EU is extremely skeptic of any genetically-modified food, for a whole load of various reasons, and banning lab-grown meat is entirely in line with that. If you can't tolerate one extra disease-resistance gene in your food, you're not going to be happy with lab-grown meat either.
Furthermore, the EU has a very long list of foods that are only allowed to be grown in specific areas or in certain ways. While this is nominally because a lot of those foods are named after specific towns, in practice many of them do not have "generic" names, so these are ultimately de-facto trade bans on other people making those foods. Labs being able to grow "perfect" versions of those foods (as opposed to the generic competition being demonstrably worse) would upend this system.
It gets more muddy with cheese, lots of cheese named 'Gouda' isn't Gouda, traditionally Gouda (and Alkmaar) were the big cheese trading markets and the stamp 'Gouda' originally meant traded in Gouda, not produced in Gouda (which doesn't really make Cheese). But Edammer cheese really is made in Edam (or Volendam!). And 'Old Amsterdam' is just a tradename for factory produced Gouda like cheese which has nothing whatsoever to do with Amsterdam and isn't really all that old (artificial high speed ripening). Tourists love it though and pay ridiculous amounts of money for it and now you can get it in regular stores as well.
So food named after towns isn't always historically - or even at all - connected to the town. But in cases where that is so it makes good sense to respect that history.
I come from a small wine-producing country of Moldova. It produces or produced anything from wine to classical champagne to port to cognacs to...
Now it's only wine that can be called wine (thankfully it's been around for longer than most civilizations). And for the rest they had to come up with their own rather awkward names. And now it doesn't matter if a Moldovan "divin" is superior to a French Cognac. Because branding.
I a definitely interested in trying Moldovan beverages now though!
See Generic Term/Trademark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
I've yet to see a single person who thinks of the region when refering to a fizzy alcoholic name as "champagne".
> If the Moldovan spirits industry has a superior product, why can’t they call it a relevant name that protects the integrity of their creation?
You constructed your argument in a way that makes it sound that the moment something is called by a place name it becomes the superior product.
Like, there's nothing magical about the towns of Champagne or Cognac that makes the wine they produce different. It's all in the process and expertise used to produce the wine. If you brought the brewers and growers to another part of the world with the same soil and climate, and told them to make the same thing they make in Champagne and Cognac, they would produce identical[0] wine.
And the current regime of "terroir makes the trademark" leads to suitably absurd results. Like, if a Champagne producer wants to expand their operations, they can't, because there's only 75,000 acres of land you can legally make Champagne on. France has been trying to add new villages to Champagne's terroir since 2008 and the process still isn't done, even though the villages being added are literally just in between other Champagne villages. People still clutched their pearls about France diluting the brand purely by just allowing more of it to be made.
Ok, so maybe it's silly, but it shouldn't matter, because Champagne is a luxury product and I'm a [1]smelly American neoliberal that thinks you shouldn't be able to trademark a whole town. Fine. What about a staple food like rice? You see, India saw the EU PDO system and realized they could use it as a weapon to beat Pakistan with. So they're going to the EU and crying bloody murder about how poor Indian rice farmers are being crushed by evil Pakistani rice counterfeits[2]. Defining any sort of terroir here is a political statement not backed up by reality: both countries are either perfectly capable of making basmati rice, or we need to look at micro-climates and other things that would probably exclude a large portion of both countries' rice farms.
>If the Moldovan spirits industry has a superior product, why can’t they call it a relevant name that protects the integrity of their creation?
So, the thing is, often times there isn't really a generic equivalent name. We have "sparkling wine" for Champagne, but that seems to be rare. For example, I've no idea what you'd call non-terroir - but still otherwise well-made - Parmesan or Mozzarella cheese.
[0] As determined by a double-blind taste test with a suitably experienced sommelier.
[1] Two of the following words are true while the other one is trash. Can you spot the fake?
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/7/india-pakistan-take-...
Then it can be judged on its merits and if it is as good as you say it is then selling it shouldn't be a problem.
I'm calling Bs on the whole cow industry being bad for the planet because of their bodily functions. Any cows, any animals, any living creatures are never going to be bad for the planet.
There is more resource consumption and harm in transferring the livestock as meat and farming livestock than there is in the methane gas. And lab grown meat is not going to change that.
Also, it's not about the planet, it's about us. The planet obviously will be fine, but a lot of humans won't be.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha...
I don't buy the future decarbonization transport argument. It is a mirage. But put that aside.
Cows are incredibly powerful creatures. Their uses were in not just taking up a lot of land but also moving lots of farm equipment and cultivating land. With machinery, they are displaced and no parallel uses are found.
The huge consumption of meat has incentivized capitalist industries to destruct land for profit. Blaming this on cows is like blaming a worker instead of the boss. Blame the overly large consumers who cannot forgo meat, and blame the capitalists for feeding that frenzy. How despicable have we become if our arguments are now based on “lab grown meat" being a solution. Like we refuse to see our own feces as a stinker.
I do agree that there are many problems with our food system beyond climate change, and replacing Big Ag with Big Lab-grown Ag would leave almost all of those problems in place. It's not my preferred solution.
So were the bodily functions of the wild bison, and a boatload of other species that have disappeared or shrunk togheter with their methane output in rough equivalence to the growth in livestock and it's methane output (at least in the US tho I assume such calculations would be similar elsewhere.) Additionally anything they put out is a temporary problem part of a carbon cycle. The shit they fart out was once gras and will go back to it a few decades down the line. Wish to reduce that ouput to buy ourselves some time (to excuse pumping up more oil and the like for a little longer) and you basically end up with chicken and similar animals as the acceptable solution.
So yeah cow farts are not the factor to look at when looking at the relentless increase in CO2 ppm. Similarly most sequestration investments and drives are often little more than a scam, copium, equivalent to the push malicious push for single use plastics recycling by plastic manufacturers or at worst a push down the price of co2 for EHR. There is one source we keep making excuses for ad nauseum that is a new introduction into this all and it's the hydrocarbons sequestered for untold years that we pump up(and methane from tundra now defrosting oh and the reduction in boglands.)
No replacing those fields with forest won't be your cure. Sadly they barely sequester anything at all compared to what we're putting out even if we'd severely reduce it. They largely take it up, die, rot and release it again in the process. We can rely on it if we accept our solution to take thousands of years.
>it's the enormous amount of land we clearcut and leave basically empty so they can graze.
I agree it's an issue. However remove it and you'll have a different one. The fertilizer their manure makes up a significant portion of will probably be drawn even more from hydrocarbons (and rather finite resources like cheap phosphorus from morocco). The same hydrocarbons that produce an actual very long term issue. I have little trust in incentives leading us elsewhere. Perhaps you wish to avoid this by forcing techniques that will generally ... require more land for the same output or for land to be left "basically empty".
I'd see some good things coming from such harsh increase in food prices and availability at least. Some negative pressure on our relentless population growth, perhaps we'll learn to more often ditch some silly concepts such as unused lawns.
1. Cows emit a lot of methane
2. Methane warms the planet
3. Warming the planet is bad for humans
4. We can easily replace cows with other animals and plants that warm the planet a lot less
It doesn't matter that wild bison used to do the same thing, this is the situation we're in. Unlike with wild bison, we are in full control now and we can simply stop making more cattle without any negative environmental effects. It is a factor to look at. We are not in a position to be ignoring big factors because they taste good.
> most sequestration investments and drives are often little more than a scam, copium, equivalent to the push malicious push for single use plastics recycling by plastic manufacturers
I agree but it's totally irrelevant to this conversation.
> There is one source we keep making excuses for
Counterpoint: no we don't. Who is we? I challenge you to find a single person who both advocates for less cow consumption because of the climate impact and promotes more fossil fuel consumption. I don't think such a person exists.
> Wish to reduce that ouput to buy ourselves some time [strawman removed] and you basically end up with chicken and similar animals as the acceptable solution.
Yes, exactly, I'm glad we're on the same page. Quickly phasing out cattle would buy us a LOT of time, like decades.
> I agree it's an issue. However remove it and you'll have a different one.
I mean, ok, if you want to give up I guess I can't stop you, but can you at least keep it to yourself and not try to bring everyone else down with you? "We should just stop burning oil, nothing else matters" is a) not true, and b) equivalent to giving up, unless you have some secret plan to accomplish that extremely quickly. "Go back in time and keep all the hydrocarbons in the ground" is not an option, they've already been burned and they're already warming the planet and we're in a crisis now.
So does CO2 (to a much lesser extent per quantity yes) Yet the issue we have today is not due to countless forest fires for hundreds of thousands of years. Because that CO2 too is part of a carbon cycle. And if those trees rotted instead they'd still largely release that co2. It is still accurate to say the CO2 of those fires warms the planet. It is inaccurate to say it is part of the cause of global warming. It is thus inaccurate to claim that stopping those fires would have been a viable part of a solution to stopping global warming even if we could.
After all the co2 ppm has shot up insanely since the start of the industrial revolution. Those first engines on coal and oil contributed to our issue today and anything similar has done the same since. The large amount of cows and their farts back then did not.
So....If we stopped introducing new hydrocarbons, didn't set off feedback loops and kept the livestock and their farts and manure would temperatures go up due to the lifestock? We could reasonably assume no.
>Counterpoint: no we don't. Who is we? I challenge you to find a single person who both advocates for less cow consumption because of the climate impact and promotes more fossil fuel consumption. I don't think such a person exists.
I don't think they're advocating for more fossil fuel use. That's not what I said. The person you should challenge me to find is easily found in the majority of people. I've saw plenty of people at my previous workplace (recent job change) saying they tried to eat less meat. Few even stopped it. We were/are well off so no qualms about the price in that calculation i'd say. If you'd ask em a plain question like should we strive to stop using hydrocarbons altogether few might even answer yes without delving too deep into the implications They still drove to work every day and would continue to do so indefinitely. They still worked for a massively polluting corporation. Still traveled by plane and had a carbon footprint that's ridiculous in contrast to the situation or that of many people in less developed countries and they all patted themselves on the back for contributing their part in stopping climate change whilst contributing massively to it barreling onwards. The bit they did do not actually affecting long term results.
Now take the situation where we stop pumping up oil, gas and such and you get an even better sample because it's a lot more tactile of a matter when almost every damn industry heavily depends on fossil fuels in various ways leading to massive layoffs and degrowth, foodprices skyrocket, etc I dare say finding support for an actual solution among them given that case becomes difficult.
Is that me arguing for continued use of fossil fuels? No. Is that me giving up? No. But it does remind me of scenes in 'Don't look up' where they suggest trying alternative solutions first until it's too late ...and it's extremely frustrating.
>I mean, ok, if you want to give up I guess I can't stop you, but can you at least keep it to yourself and not try to bring everyone else down with you?
I don't want to give up in finding a solution but when a big part of the stuff put forward is not a solution at all it becomes discouraging.
In my country for example our greens championing climate change want to phase out nuclear powerplants which provide the majority of power and phase em out all together. Their proposed solution has been to build gas plants to provide variable output to encourage renewable investment however the plan requires it to be main output for a very very long time and even then cause a shortage. The massive subsidy contract to get companies to build these gas plants span decades with no scaledown.
Pointing out the likely fossil fuel use and/or land use implications that'll stem from what you champion is not me giving up. It's more like you don't want to address it.
>Yes, exactly, I'm glad we're on the same page. Quickly phasing out cattle would buy us a LOT of time, like decades.
The atmospheric halflife of methane is 9 years for one.
>Go back in time and keep all the hydrocarbons in the ground" is not an option, they've already been burned and they're already warming the planet and we're in a crisis now.
We are still doing it. We are still doing it on a massive. insane. scale. We are not stopping. Hell there's no clear indication we're slowing down nearly enough When we will it will probably be because we reached peak oil. In the meantime we do a lot of bs revolving around it.[1]
And this is why i brought up things like the sequestration projects and plastics recycling scam that you considered totally irrelevant. Because it feels to me like another non solution being popular because it is les opposed (because we don't want to touch actual ones too much and harm our standard of living drastically in the process, etc) making us all feel like we're doing something about the problem whilst long term it does little to nothing.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/sep/16/iraq.iraqtimel...
This is typical vegan misinformation to appeal to people who are concerned about global warming (as we should).
Land that's used for grazing is typically land which can't be used for other purposes. People don't grow grass on flat fields of black soil because it doesn't make economic sense.
Additionally, animals are also fed the leftovers that people don't eat. That is, when you grow corn, we eat the grain, and the rest of the plant (leaves and all) is given to animals. Without livestock that food would just be wasted.
These are just some of the many ways vegans mislead.
Most deforestation of the Amazon is done to create more land for cattle, to give you one example. It is by far the largest driver of tropical deforestation, and almost all global deforestation is tropical. Grazing land that can't support anything else is by definition not included in statistics on deforestation or loss of biomass and biodiversity.
https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-drivers-deforestation
It's true that a lot of cow feed is stuff humans won't eat, but it's not true that it would all be wasted if we stop raising cows. We can grow less of it, we can throw the scraps in anaerobic digesters to generate power, we can simply feed it to other animals, as a last resort we can use it for compost.
I'm pretty sure vegans are less than 1% of the world, and I don't think they have some special influence over the IPCC and most climate scientists on the planet.
Trivial counterexample: humanity
I think you have a definition of good/bad w/r/t the planet different from the mainstream.
All in all, if everyone would transition to an EV you would see a noticeable drop in oil consumption thanks to the mentioned benefits.
EDIT: From a quick Google search I saw that:
- The lower end efficiency for oil and coal power plants is 37%. Gas power plants achieve 56% on the lower end according to [1].
- Car engines vary between 20% (gasoline) and 40% (diesel) efficiency according to [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_station#:~:t....
[2] https://rentar.com/efficient-engines-thermodynamics-combusti...
We should definitely take what improvements we can get!
(Also, sorry for injecting stupidity into the discourse in general. I didn't mean to anger people or say something wrong.)
I think if you and others ask these questions it means that there's room for improvement in how we should discuss EVs and renewables!
The big problem is mining the battery metals, involving worst kind of worker exploitation and danger, which is why we need ethically sourced nickel-sodium (also known as sodium-ion) tech to catch up with lithium-cobalt.
That's not going to happen under capitalism though.
However if you live in other states you may find that roadblocks have been put in place and so your power has to come from non-renewables. Make no mistake, the limit is more legal than practical these days, renewables can easily be most of your power mix, and are already the cheapest source of power.
Am I wrong because even if you charge the batteries with power that comes from nonrenewable energy, its still more efficient, and in that becomes different from nonrenewable power?
Am I wrong because, in the U.S., its about 50/50 renewable/nonrenewable so the claim that your likely to charge your battery with nonrenewable energy is laughable?
Am I wrong because it depends where you are in the country?
I'm really just trying to understand, I didn't think I was making such a huge claim. I just thought it wasn't controversial to say most of our energy comes from nonrenewables still, bracketing whatever economic or political or logistical forces have made it that way.
Regardless, I will definitely think twice before talking about any of this on here. Lesson learned.
this is an it depends.
The best combined cycle power plants are more efficient - even accounting for transmissions losses than an ICE. However there are a few power plants that are less efficient.
Coal is about equal efficiency to a ICE in the ideal cases for both. Running an ICE at ideal efficiency is unlikely though, while they manage coal to put close to ideal, though after transmission losses the difference isn't so great if you are doing highway driving (but city driving is vastly worse).
The worst case power plants are worse then city driving in an ICE. These power plants are typically mothballed, but they when there is an emergency. They are generally only used every 5 years, but they are a part of every power utilities emergency plans. As power demand goes up power gets less efficient in general, so Christmas season is going to be less efficient.
> Am I wrong because, in the U.S., its about 50/50 renewable/nonrenewable so the claim that your likely to charge your battery with nonrenewable energy is laughable?
This is wrong. US generation is about 20% renewable (as of last year) overall. Some areas have far more renewable than others (my utility claims >80% wind for me in marketing, but I cannot find and source that can be scientifically claimed). Some areas have far less. You may also count nuclear power as green even though it isn't renewable.
Most energy comes from non-renewables for sure. However that is overall and so your specific situation may be different.
You the city people are so cocky in teaching me the village guy about how to live the life.
What if I do not want my meat addiction to be controlled by some big corps? For example, they may decide to put in their meat products something I do not want to be put. At least I can grow my food as I like it to be grown and I can kill it in the way I find reasonable (for example, I might like some products from blood and I might use a lot of animal fat). And last but not least, different parts of animal body has totally different taste which might be hard to simulate - that's why I'm sure that nothing will force me to stop holding cattle before end of my life.
I said it would be insane to prohibit what is potentially a better alternative, just because some people raise cattle.