Lab-grown Meat is not a Climate Change Solution
climatedrift.com
climatedrift.com
1. It will take a lot of investment, it's unclear if it will produce enough to matter.
2. It might not get close to real meat in taste and texture
3. Lots of people wouldn't switch even if it tastes like real meat.
This was disappointing because I was expecting an analysis of the greenhouse gas contribution of lab grown meat. I didn't see anything (long article with lots of charts, I could have missed it). This is the key issue to me, will lab grown meat significantly help. I am fine with some meat substitutes, I want healthy and tastes good, lots of veg food is like that without trying to be meat.
This is the key part. If lab grown meat was a climate change solution, most people would shrug and keep eating regular meat.
it saves me the same disappointment of not finding a commission in carbon footprint per protein content
I think the taste question can and will be solved, e.g. I've found some oat based "milk" doesn't taste like oat any more and I love it.
I agree the CO2/methane/whatever footprint is the core info, and the 1. 2. 3. you quite from the article are just distracting from that.
1. Everything takes investment, that's how capitalism works and if we're in a stage of capitalism where we can no longer invest in the future then the future is doomed.
2. It also might get close, be better, or people won't care.
3. People eat meat slurry chicken nuggets without complaint. If they can price themselves cheaper (which will be hard with all the subsidies the meat industry gets to be fair) and cover it in enough batter and spices, and not draw attention to it being lab made ("Naturally tasting meat!") it will sell. Not everything needs to be a steak and eating a steak is not the most popular form of meat consumption.
4. Any reduction is good. Not everything needs to be or even should be treated like it has to be some magic bullet that completely obliterates the competition. Having options is good.
> a facility that would use huge bioreactors to produce 10,000 metric tons of meat per year at an upfront capital cost of $450 million. 10,000 metric tons might sound like a lot until you learn that it would only amount to 0.002% of meat production in the US. Further, due to the high capital expenditure, investors would have to lock themself into 30-year repayment terms to keep the price per kilogram competitive > ... > So investors are faced with the “choice” of either throwing away absurd amounts of money to maybe make the tiniest dent in our meat production or to make a profit with a niche luxury product
Meat itself used to be a niche luxury item.
I'm not a heavy meat eater myself — about once every 9 days — and I've read that the amount of meat I consume is the norm for human beings for most of our existence, and it's in fact unhealthy to eat much more than that. So maybe the answer isn't synthetic meat, it's just not smashing animals into our faces for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
That's not in the article, I think.
> This was disappointing because I was expecting an analysis of the greenhouse gas contribution of lab grown meat. I didn't see anything (long article with lots of charts, I could have missed it). This is the key issue to me, will lab grown meat significantly help. I am fine with some meat substitutes, I want healthy and tastes good, lots of veg food is like that without trying to be meat.
I also would love to have this analysis, however, the data simply does not exist yet which adds to the uncertainty. I would also argue that the outlook on the techno-economic aspects is more pessimistic than what you put in 1. To quote the relevant section:
> It doesn’t scale. One of the chief proponents of lab-grown meat, the Good Food Institute (GFI), commissioned a techno-economic analysis (TEA) to project what the production of cell-cultivated meat in 2030 might look like. They imagine a facility that would use huge bioreactors to produce 10,000 metric tons of meat per year at an upfront capital cost of $450 million. 10,000 metric tons might sound like a lot until you learn that it would only amount to 0.002% of meat production in the US. Further, due to the high capital expenditure, investors would have to lock themself into 30-year repayment terms to keep the price per kilogram competitive - this is why supporters of the technology are calling for substantial public investments. So investors are faced with the “choice” of either throwing away absurd amounts of money to maybe make the tiniest dent in our meat production or to make a profit with a niche luxury product.
My only argument then is that this is a bet that we cannot afford to make, especially when reductionism already gets us there. Fully agree on the points about veggies being good on their own.
In other words, meet people where they are, not where you want them to be. There is a reason decades of vegan propaganda (I don't use this word in the negative way but in its original neutral definition) haven't made much of the population vegan but foods like Impossible/Beyond Meat have made significant in-roads to reducing animal suffering.
I predict we will all be vegan in 100 years, not because we decided to stop eating meat, but because we moved to lab-grown meat and other such alternatives.
You can call it ultra processed but so is livestock production.
My point is that some people actually prefer veggie or “fake” burgers and if tomorrow beef didn’t exist people would be more than happy with what currently exists today. It’s not like there is a huge gap there. Most people like the burger for the additions anyway.
Some people != all people
You are also assuming that most people like the burger for the addition (which may be true, but it's hard to know this for sure)
If tomorrow beef didn't exist the burgers would disappear as a regularly consummed food.
As far as taste, I'll admit that meat burgers are much more variable whereas impossible's are just one product. So it's more consistent compared to all the bad options you have for meat burgers.
But compared to a fresh unfrozen well-grilled burger there's absolutely no comparison. You are simply not making a serious argument to say impossible's taste better than that, to the point that I think you could be trolling.
At best you can say they aren't terrible, but again they're more expensive.
As far as beyond's go, they're even worse than the worst frozen burgers I can find.
Veganism is about not using animal products. It says nothing about the health of the diet. That some people incidentally eat healthier through becoming vegan says nothing about veganism as a whole.
> But compared to a fresh unfrozen well-grilled burger there's absolutely no comparison. You are simply not making a serious argument to say impossible's taste better than that, to the point that I think you could be trolling.
I agree, which is why I mention that lab grown meat (that tastes identical to naturally raised meat because, well, it's all the same cells in the end) is the answer over trying to get everyone to change their behavior.
When I google "why be vegan" all the top 5 results are "because of health". So objectively, you are wrong.
It sounds like you have an idealistic view of what it means to be vegan that flies in the face of reality.
I firmly believe that the level of meat consumption today is unnaturally high, simply because people of the old did not have refrigeration, to say nothing of how the animals are raised today. I eat meat here and there, and I enjoy it, but try to limit consumption to a few times per month.
Another point of reference: the Church forbade Crusaders to eat meat from warm-blooded animals more than two times a week. If a warrior under full armor is good with two portions of meat a week, most of us should be too.
https://www.quora.com/Where-specifically-did-the-Crusaders-c...
"Most seem to think they were warrior monks, or high ranking nobles or poor peasants. In some cases that’s correct, but on the whole often not the case.
Most who fought in the holy land and there were other places where they had crusades, were usually lower nobles, knightly class or franklin, usually richer farmers. They weren’t poor peasants, but they were no rich kings either. They were often people who could barely afford to travel accross the land and have some equipment. Not for nothing did the Byzantine empire get pillaged sometimes.
Picture them as mostly young men of upper middle class background, basically comparable to your modern day average college or university brat. They were relatively well off, but not exactly rich upper class either. Basically up and coming social climbers."
It depends on how you define "natural." In our hunter-gatherer days, it was very common to eat meat, and lots of it, since we did not have much caloric intake through plants alone. We see this today in certain tribal groups that still have that way of life.
That is to say, appealing to nature is not a good argument and is in fact considered a logical fallacy [0], because not all that is natural is good and not all that is unnatural is bad.
If you want progress in anything, you have to give people a way to atone for their sins, even if the atonement doesn't undo all of the damage already done. Without that, the vast majority are going to ignore you, because the shock to the system is too high to do what needs to be done. People do not willingly start to play games they are nearly certain they will lose, they only continue those games once they are already playing them.
The environmentalists eat their own so often and so badly that they can't be taken seriously. You need to give people something to latch on to that appeals to them, to start something. Scolding them for believing something is a true solution when it is about a 1% solution is helping nobody.
1000 people each doing a different 1% solution is better than 10 people each doing a theoretical 100% solution. Over time, the former will run in to some good practices. The latter are just turn-offs.
- on the long run being able to produce food regardless of exterior climate condition witch might be need both to ensure having food in a changed climate and geopolitical conditions and also for space exploration and to have room for more humans on Earth;
- in the medium run being able to cut out ANY small/medium food production making such productions an industrial-only game for big & powerful, a good move for them to ensure anyone dependent on them, since we can't live without food;
- in the short term a way to make money selling smoke.
While I'm VERY interesting in the idea of being able to produce food in an artificial environment both for living on Earth and space exploration I'm far LESS interesting in being TOTALLY dependent on large industrial power for food. I know we can't live in the modern word like in the past, and I do not want to live in middle-age like condition, but being able to source SOME food in nature and from small productions meaning still have a small freedom, something VERY valuable. And well, I'm definitively not in food startup business so not interested to see public money handed over private hand selling smoke for roast.
How do you divvy it up? Eating a kg of beef [2] per week means you emit 3.12 tCO2/year. Add whatever else food you consume, and that is your entire budget.
[1] ignoring people's ages and as yet unborn people. I use 1150 GtCO2/8.1 billion current people alive.
[2] The OP's OurWorldInData graph screenshot says beef emissions are 60, but the actual page says 99. Same chart. I don't understand. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha... I used 60 in the calculation above.
I would however also point out that simply divided total emissions reductions needed vs all humans is misleading. The average Nigerian emits FAR less CO2 than the average Indian. The average Indian emits less than the average Chinese person, who emits less than the average American.
North America and Europe on the other hand...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t... Scroll all the way down
The chart I used does not include losses in the supply chain. The difference between both charts is further explained here: https://ourworldindata.org/faqs-environmental-impacts-food
If you have a big open plain full of grass, does it change how much carbon is emitted if a cow eats it versus being left alone, dying, and rotting?
You have farm machinary involved I guess, but I would think actually more of it for plants than for beef especially when you consider fertiliser.
I understand that it’s possible to do worse than this though using feed lots because then you are effectively having to grow more crops (using more farm machinary and fertiliser) which basically increases the amount of carbon use versus just plants.
But then rather than saying “no meat” shouldn’t we just be saying “no feed lots”?
Shouldn’t there just be a push towards grass fed beef?
Also, farming doesn’t only happen on natural open plains. Trees get cut down to make farmland.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha...
And we could also agree that clearing forests is a different thing than farming meat, which we could separately campaign against and prevent.
After all, the great grasslands of America are not turning into forests, and cattle farmed there doesn’t result in further forests being cut down.
Natural forests and grasslands don't decay in a manner that emit a lot of methane. Cows on the other hand emit a lot of methane, due to how they digest their food.
> And we could also agree that clearing forests is a different thing than farming meat, which we could separately campaign against and prevent.
The data is about where current emissions come from. It is not directly suggesting any policy prescriptions, or directly stating what emissions will be under alternate food choices.
Yes, clearing forests is different from farming meat. But the best place to plant new trees in sustainable manner, in order to capture some of excess CO2 human activity causes, is where forests grew a few decades or centuries ago. Many of these places are currently occupied by cattle ranches or farms that grow food for cattle. One reasonable policy prescription would be to reduce beef demand/supply, and then incentivize tree plantation in those areas.
A push toward grass-fed beef is fine, but you can't feed the world by eating grass-fed, local food only, nor organic, nor non-GMO, nor even sustainably raised. There isn't enough of it.
We could have marketing campaigns for “green beef” and I’m suprised we don’t. It seems very strange.
My country doesn’t import beef, and all of the beef here is grass fed. Nor do we cut down any forests since they are all now protected.
Eating meat here is just fine then right?
And yet a significant number of people here are going vegetarian for climate change reasons.