'No kill' meat, grown from animal cells, is now approved for sale in the U.S.
npr.org
npr.org
I do wonder how vegans will feel about this needle biopsy. And while they say there are lots of cells stored in the "cell bank," it does seem like it will need to be replenished with future needle biopsies or there will be genetic drift if they recycle cells from the vat (which might be fine or even desired). Does this mean we can eat whale and, I dunno, bald eagle?
Edit: or, excellent point raised in a dead comment... human? Sounds ick to me too, but bear with me: is the height of ethical meat consumption to have personal meat-vats grown from your own donor cells?
- It's still more energy intensive than plant-based foods.
- Meat, in general, doesn't meet their personal healthiness threshold.
- It's an unnatural way to produce meat with unknown health risks.
- ???
I like plants just fine and don't care enough to pay the [currently] higher financial / environmental costs of cultured meat. But if it were offered to me I wouldn't take moral issue with it, and if I were ever in charge of caring for a carnivore (ex. a cat) I'd pay a lot to get cultured meat instead of conventional meat.
If for some reason I ever had to eat animal meat again, I'd 100% choose cultured meat.
[More pressing ethical question for me: if I think cultured meat is a technology that could be super important to reducing factory farming, is there an ethical obligation to financially support it? If not buying directly, then maybe donating to something like the GFI]
That said. We get a lot more from animal meat than just protein and fat, and even then it's a wide variety of amino and fatty acids along with fat soluble nutrients. I think that actual animal protein (even if just eggs and fish) will still be necessary for a lot of micro-nutrients and versions of nutrients that are more digestible than what is available from other sources.
In a similar vein, I feel that natural fertilizer offers more to the soil than what chemical fertilizers bring to the table. Soil health has been a real and increasing problem over the past several decades.
Fat soluble vitamins as an example example. In the case of just fat soluble vitamins, a lot of the supplements are either a baseline nutrient the body can convert to the actual nutrient or another form of the nutrient likewise. However these supplements are often not as bioavailable or have malabsorption and don't actually cover nutritional needs. A lot of the systemic hormonal issues in society can be traced to a reduction in the consumption of animal fats and fats in general, which are essential to body function.
That also doesn't cover the variety of fatty and amino acids in naturally grown muscle and fatty tissue in animals. You actually need a wide variety of these. And even then, the dietary guidelines are absolute minimums and not optimal values. They also don't contain guidance or understanding for all nutrients. It wasn't until just the past couple decades that a few essential nutrients were added for hospitalized feeding which accounted for serious brain/mental issues.
We (humans) have a very poor understanding of actual nutrient requirements, even for those in very small amounts that can have huge impacts on overall health.
edit: it can still be considered meat, or even animal meat... but if you look at the nutrition profile of farm raised vs wild caught salmon. Or grass fed grass finished beef vs grain fed. Or naturally fed chickens and their eggs vs commercial feed lots. There are vast differences in quality that can add up.
What makes you think that? If the cells are not fed the nutrients they need to survive, they will die. You can only reduce the inputs so much until the entire system breaks down.
That doesn't bar anyone from providing rich feeding mixes to produce cells with extra nutritional value.
There's a lot of things in animal meat that won't be in lab meat. And given what they charge for oat milk and impossible burgers,.I doubt it will be more cost effective for the public.
Can you give one example? I'm starting to doubt the honesty of your argument.
I found one source talking about nutrient problems, which talks about B12 and iron, and suggests adding them to the nutrient mix. https://www.burdockgroup.com/the-nutritional-challenges-of-c...
Again, not opposed to lab grown meat... I still feel that it may be appropriate to still consume some animal based nutrition. Even if that is limited to mostly dairy, eggs and/or fish. As I stated earlier, half to two thirds of what people consume is mostly energy alone. Hormonal responses will vary based on the content, but strictly speaking, not so bad one way or another, provided an appropriate balance of amino and fatty acids, which even there, I doubt will be optimal.
I'm a bit biased, I don't eat meat nor do I have any interest in lab grown meat for at least a decade or two after it becomes common.
> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
> “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
(I've posted this before but I think it bears repeating that this whole industry looks like a complete fantasy at best and a scam at worst)
The marketing around this type of product is very bad, they should not call it meat and they should stop trying to shame their potential customers for eating meat (from animals)
If it tastes like meat from previously live animals, it definitely can be called meat, albeit its good to clearly distinguish it from the other. I know from folks around me they wouldnt mind it as long the taste is OK, has some good safety checks for various nasty chemicals and price is reasonable.
What reason is there to think that the animals the cells are harvested from will be treated with less cruelty? I would have assumed that they would be bound to exist in the same conditions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line
This alone removes almost all of the downside suffering.
Additionally, for those of a more more absolutist moral bent, when the animals are small in number, there isn't the same financial pressure to ruthlessly optimize cost at the expense of welfare; you can afford to raise the animal in non-torture conditions without it materially impacting competitive position.
Even if the treatment doesn't change, the production of meat becomes N times less cruel after the switch.
Realistically, meat is N+M, where M is the cruelty towards animals in the production of food for animals. But M still remains if people keep eating plants.
As I understand it though, the vast majority of cattle are currently being fed mechanically harvested plants, so they can be cut out of the nutrient pathway without any need to increase suffering by the way of mechanical harvest.
Why even? Rule of thumb is that it takes an acre of grass to feed a cattle beast. If that acre is, instead, 'clear cut' multiple times each year, over several years to match what would be fed to a live animal, to ship the product off to a factory, only one animal living in that grass will experience the cruelty? That seems surprising. An acre of grass provides a significant habitat.
And that is if grass remains the source of nutrients. Harvested grass is hard to move efficiently. If, say, a row crop is used instead then there is an attack on the habitat even before harvest begins. Row crops regularly come under fire because of how unfriendly they are to everything else.
> As I understand it though, the vast majority of cattle are currently being fed mechanically harvested plants
While that is true – the vast majority of cattle are raised on grass and finished with corn, the latter of which being almost certainly mechanically harvested – it is also not binary.
According to Oklahoma State University, most cattle in the United States will spend most of their lives on pastures and grasslands and then finished in feedlots, the latter of which accounting for 15-35% of their lives according to their figures. This does mean that mechanically harvested food does account for some of the nutrient requirements for most cattle, but there is more to the story.
I don't know the conversion factor for lab meat, but I expect it to be somewhere between eating mechanically harvested plants and regular meat.
There's also the aspect of how you weigh suffering of different beings, which is a complicated enough topic that I won't get into right now[1]. I'll get back to it once feeding cattle with harvested grain becomes rare.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/protein-efficiency-of-mea...
[1] https://reducing-suffering.org/crop-cultivation-and-wild-ani...
So even if we assume that the harvest needs to affect four animals, that still seems like pretty small potatoes, no? Any hay field I've ever walked through was teaming with hundreds of visible insects alone, and who knows what else was hidden in there, in areas smaller than an acre.
> There's also the aspect of how you weigh suffering of different beings
I am not sure that is necessary. An earlier comment told that all we have to do is count animals. The larger the count, the more the cruelty. The entire discussion has hinged on that assertion.
Certainly there is going to be a whole lot of subjectivity. Some will argue that the number of animals doesn't matter with respect to cruelty – that suffering is wholly an individual experience. And many more will tell you that the animal that experiences the most cruelty of all is man himself and that ending that cruelty will solve all of the world's problems.
But I don't think we need to find a new metric. We already chose one that was good enough.
Or maybe you can, but you'll find that others don't agree with your estimations.
For example, anyone believing in panpsychism will find this hard to work with. Do you include the harvested plants in your calculation and compare them on a 1:1 basis with slaughtered animals? This kind of nonintuitive conclusions result from insisting that all beings suffer the same. Not a good enough metric IMO.
> Certainly there is going to be a whole lot of subjectivity.
I'm afraid that it's not just "a whole lot", but the final answer depends entirely on subjective definitions of suffering, unless we can find a true, objective one. Sadly, some philosophers don't think that's possible at all [0].
[0] http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nagel-what-is-it-l...
An animal is an animal is an animal. While it is true that there is fluidity in language, and that one could define animal as only a creature kept by humans for the purpose of extracting meat, there was no push back on the use of the more common, broader definition that would be reflected in the dictionary.
Plants have not been considered animals. There has been a clear division between the plants harvested and the animals affected by it throughout the discussion. Whether or not their suffering should be included is and interesting side topic, but immaterial to this one. There is no value in flailing around trying to find new metrics. We picked one. It was certainly not perfect – far from it – but it was good enough. Perfect need not be the enemy of good.
While the philosophers have a point, we are only seeking something to form a belief. Beliefs need not be true. But they do need to be formed, and it seems we don't have enough information to form any kind of beliefs here?
Otherwise, the discussion falls apart because a human is an animal is an animal. But no one is slaughtering humans with such an enthusiasm as cows or chickens. Equating all animals is a fringe belief not supported by the population at large, and one I don't feel like spending time to discuss, especially as it's not required for this discussion to have been valid.
I would be dishonest if I said I would pay a premium for meat as to not harm animals.
If you can kill two birds with one stone(ok maybe not the best saying in this context)and under cut the price of meat currently and at the same time be less cruel to animals then I will make it a diet staple ASAP.
I am sure it is anything but trivial though to undercut the price of chicken and turkey in the US.