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Comment by nightski | Hacker News Reader

I'm following lab grown meat with optimism but I really hope they are required to label it as such.

At the current time, the label is positive marketing.

I'd love to have cruelty free meat.

Certainly not cruelty free. Arguably less cruel. The extraction of the resources needed to grow the meat shifts a lot of the cruelty to wild animals, not to mention that you still need barnyard animals involved in the process, but the technology is quite neat so it is definitely positive marketing on that end. Being still less efficient to produce, that marketing will also be necessary to compel the buyer to pay more.

When you say extraction, what specifically?

Energy? Any specific non-energy resources?

The meat needs to feed on vitamins and minerals. It is real meat at the end of the day.

for all mammalian eukaryotic cells ie cow , chicken ,human etc require growth media that contains FBS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum this extracted from the foetus of cattle, otherwise the cells cannot survive outside of the a live mammal. it is not vegan or vegetarian in the slightest

Thank you

FBS is used because it's versatile, whereas chemically-defined media have to be painstakingly reformulated for different cell lines. It's not a hard requirement.

would taking a tissue sample be considered cruelty if they claim it doesn't harm the animal? the article doesn't mention wild animals as well. or do you mean by "extraction of resources" the energy costs of processing?

vegan meat!

The meat still comes from animals. It does not satisfy the constraints of veganism.

Throw me into whatever category we want to call this.

If 1 animal dies and all of humanity can stop eating meat, I'm happy to do that.

Heck I'd sacrifice myself for such a value.

But it sounds like this is a ~1 time prick of an animal, who could be sedated, and after that, you don't need the animal again.

I want to be vegan because of cruelty, but not eating meat because it came from a pricked animal 1 time in history sounds like a religion.

EDIT: Someone said this, which makes me think its not vegan at all, even with my definition. (Although this would probably put pro-choice vegans in a dilemma)

>for all mammalian eukaryotic cells ie cow , chicken ,human etc require growth media that contains FBS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum this extracted from the foetus of cattle, otherwise the cells cannot survive outside of the a live mammal. it is not vegan or vegetarian in the slightest

> If 1 animal dies and all of humanity can stop eating meat, I'm happy to do that.

You still need resources to grow the meat, and many animals will be harmed and killed in the process of extracting those resources. Probably many more animals than would be harmed using traditional meat raising practices as when humans extract resources we like to strip things bare. Other animals tend to be a lot gentler on habitats.

Of course, if you are only concerned about cute, domesticated animals then you may find success here.

I guess you don't use electricity either because of logging and coal mining. What about the internet and all those resources needed for the data centra?

Those who abstain from activities that are cruel to animals avoid those things, indeed. Of course we won't hear from them here, for obvious reasons.

Right, so obviously you're not one of them. No need to virtue signal.

Nobody here is. There is no possibility to virtue signal in this case as the audience will never see it.

Sorry that I let out your little secret that animals are harmed in the process of resource extraction. I don't think it was ever much of a secret, though.

> You still need resources to grow the meat, and many animals will be harmed and killed in the process of extracting those resources.

This is an absurd stretch of the definition of veganism. If this were accepted, you couldn't call anyone living in any basic form of civilization vegan. It stretches the idea to a point of being useless.

No homes allowed, since their material extraction and the construction process harms animals. No bicycles, those factories harmed animals in being constructed.

Even Jaina live in buildings.

Veganism very well may be absurd, but well beyond the discussion taking place. Is there some reason for this tangent?

Does it come from animals or merely from cells similar to those found in animals?

I wonder what the popular opinion among vegans will be. I certainly don't think it's as clear cut. Or maybe the term veganism will fall out of favor in exchange for something like cruelty free.

per the article: "making cultured or lab-grown meat starts with extracting cells from an animal’s tissue, be it a pig, cow, chicken, fish, or any other animal that humans deem to be delicious. The cell extraction doesn’t kill or harm the animal."

>At the current time, the label is positive marketing.

In California, maybe?

Has a transition to fake meat worked anywhere, commercially?

This would be real meat.

Just to be clear 'beyond meat' is a bean that is fermented.

This is animal cells grown in a lab.

>This would be real meat.

Ah, you're right, I was confused. Although, "real" might be questionable.

> This would be real meat.

I'm not sure if I agree with that.

It's definitely not real chicken.

It is real animal chicken muscle.

Are clones real animals?

I think a cloned whole chicken is a real chicken, but I don't think a part of a chicken is a real chicken.

Is a grown chicken leg, a real chicken leg?

No because it doesn't exist anywhere on a large enough scale yet.

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