What's so weird about sterile rooms and stainless steel tanks? Do you think breweries (for example) are so much different?
Very weird thing to hear from someone who claims to be a vegetarian.
Very weird thing to hear from someone who claims to be a vegetarian.
Frank-Lin takes industrial ethanol, city water, and flavoring, and makes a large number of alcohol-based products. They make over a thousand brands, but there are only a hundred or so different recipes, they admit. Each brand has its own label, and many have their own bottles. A few years back, they moved to Fairfield, CA, to be next to the bottle factory.
The Skyy Vodka article was updated accordingly. Skyy marketing was not happy.
I'm vegetarian for environmental reasons, not ethical. Nothing wrong with eating a chicken or a pig who had a good life on an open field for me
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-est...
No kidding. They could start by using a single (and known) definition for "factory farmed".
Unless you are in the business of refining that data, this study is useless.
Except that this phrase doesn't mean anything.
And that is only if you stay within the reasonable people. Almost everybody with an impulsion to talk about this subject uses unreasonable definitions. How is a single name that applies to all that still meaningful?
Because this is HN, where someone is sure to nitpick and/or take my next statement to logical extremes, I must be very careful about how I word this. I will regret it, but here I go:
I like eating chicken. I know lots of tasty recipes. I understand this involves killing the animal. Yes, I don't do it myself, but I could if I wanted -- I'm not squeamish. But factory chicken make me uneasy, it seems well past the inhumane line, almost like an extermination camp for chicken. I think free range chicken are happier, for whatever degree of "happiness" their tiny bird brains can understand. I like thinking that the chicken I eat lived a happy if short life trampling on actual grass and all that "breeze in their feathers" stuff. Yes, in the end it still involves killing them, but I think it's way better.
1) If I avoid all meat I cannot be held ethically accountable for it's provenance when, for example, a company's marketing department lies to you or the FDA does not sufficiently protect certain terms of art like "free range" which imply a lack of cruelty that wouldn't pass muster if I saw the treatment with my own eyes
2) If I am vegetarian, I will support vegetarian options, and I create support for companies and businesses that are unambiguously dedicated to reducing cruelty/suffering
essentially all animals raised for slaughter in the US are factory farmed
So if you are vegetarian for environmental reasons and had to eat a chicken, you should go with the battery-farmed one.
You would go with the (arguably mythical) happy chicken if you were vegetarian for moral reasons.
They're free to move about at least in their "bay" and have the company of other hens that can wander about too. Sure, they don't get the marketing feelgood "sun on their backs and wind in their feathers", but they also don't get raptors, foxes, or rats.
You can get rescue hens and they're just about savvy enough to figure out - after you've lost one or two - that predators are a thing, and you'll get an egg every couple of days per hen. They'll eat all the bugs in your garden (and most of the herbs, and the tops of your carrots) and shit everywhere.
> feed (less energy expended from movement)
Less muscles, more disease, worse health, lifespan of 4 weeks, &c.
Given the same amount of money, I'm assuming they mean buy less chicken (but from non-factory sources) and spend the remainder on other foods with less environmental impact.
Why vegetarian then? It's easy enough to buy meat that was raised on a local farm. Get a chest freezer, reach out to a local 4H club, and buy the whole animal. They'll butcher and vac-seal it for you. You could buy some kid's highschool project.
I live an hour from SF and I get much of my meat this way. It's surprisingly inexpensive. There are agricultural communities close enough to every urban environment to make it worth the drive.
I think we’re going backwards by trying to replace the natural bio reactor of the body with steal and piping. It’s all too labour intensive. To make this work we’ll need to genetically engineer an animal that has only the parts we’re interested in. Including skin to replace the steel bio reactors.
Cows due to generations of selective breeding are already remarkably close to this.
We also have to pasteurize it. Or we don't, and germs from cows are hundreds of times more likely to make us sick, despite generations of selective breeding.
I understand you’re saying the challenges lab grown meat faces arent insurmountable, but short of some outside influence (statutory interference?) I don’t see how it can compete with traditional cattle on the cost perspective
At 380 ppm anything that doesn't either directly alter reflectivity of the atmosphere or drastically lower CO2 in the atmosphere is just not going to work.
But you're not growing milk in those facilities, only storing and processing it. That's an important distinction, because it means with milk it's totally fine to deal with those "single germs" with long-understood sterilization techniques.
If you try to sterilize your "lab grown meat" cultures to deal with the germs, you're going to destroy your "meat" too.
Once you have it.
> The problem is keeping it sterile while it's growing/brewing.
This is what I was talking about.
> It can be done, as has been with breweries, but it is os not an easy task.
I think growing meat in a vat is only superficially similar to brewing beer.
To fix this it is processed in food factories that you can describe as squeaky clean massive installations of ceramic tiles and shining steel.
I’m not talking about cow milk
Raw milk is generally better tolerated than homogenized/pasteurized milk. However, in the early 1900s, as supply chains lengthened and the travel time for largely un-refrigerated milk from cow to table increased to days, we found that milk was a primary source of food-borne infections. The absolute risk was still low, but the relative risk was high. Thus, pasteurization became common and in most places, mandatory.
People have drunk raw milk for millennia and have not suffered from hormone-related effects..including people on dairy-centric diets. If you're talking specifically about rbGH, it's very easy to find milk free of it, which I would recommend anyway - I'd hazard a guess that's more common. It’s disputed that it has any ill effects, but I’m totally on board with not risking it.
Everything else aside, powerlifters aren’t recommending crazy diets like gallon-of-milk-a-day (GOMAD) and bodybuilders aren’t paying out the nose for human breast milk because milk has estrogenizing effects.
They ended up building a kind of exploded steel cow, all pipes and vats and such. It seems we are heading in this direction.
I have often wondered what it would be like to start with a cow, then engineer it to be anencephalic, then start paring away "features" or moving them around. Skip the legs, but do have networks of heart-like cells providing a contractile rhythm for the muscles, and so on.
Not a vegetarian FWIW.
A lot of vegetarianism is cloaked aesthetics.
What I notice though is that people get attached to their diets and act offended when you don't eat something that they consider to be some core part of their life style(barbeque, steak, meaty burritos, sushi, vegan fake meat). Some people can and do get butt-hurt when they find out I don't eat meat and then want to play "gotcha" reindeer games.
I can brew my own beer in my own home.
Can I make lab-grown meat in my own home?
We've also been educated to buy and prepare our own meals from the most natural/unprocessed ingredients as possible and avoid heavily industrialized/preprocess ingredients for health reasons.
Lab grown meat is the opposite of both of that.
I am just playing Devil's advocate here. I understand the appeal and potential environmental benefits as well.
This is partly the fault of Sci-fi, bio-engineering is rarely shown as a positive in TV and Film.
This will be mostly solved with time, eventually it may become economically unviable to buy "field meat" (not sure what the term will be), and it will become a lot more accepted when they see the people around them enjoying it without severe consequences.
"Icky" is ignorance.
That’s why there are laws to keep them from seeing it. Which might be why so many HNers think animals grow up in sunshine and rainbows and it’s the sterile lab that's icky.