States Are Lining Up to Outlaw Lab-Grown Meat
wired.com
wired.com
Why do these few states hate freedom?
Or is it just the wrong kind of freedom?
I looks to me more like ah, "red meat for the base".
Jokes aside, it's lobbying and corruption in its purest form. I cannot see any reason to ban it.
(not to say lab grown meat has the health problems of cigarettes, but I'm sure people calling for a ban would like it to be labeled as such)
2. This isn't limited to US states. Countries in the EU have either enacted or are planning to enact such bans.
>In the EU, the controversy over cultured meat is searing. The European Commission is considering whether a ban introduced by Italy’s conservative government breaches the rules of the internal market. Since the ban was imposed last November, 11 other countries have lined up to defend “real” meat. A note from the Italian, French and Austrian delegations to the agriculture and fisheries council on January 23rd claimed the lab-grown variety threatens the “very heart of the European farming model”. They managed to corral eight other delegations in support.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/02/15/europe-decides-i...
That's pretty parochial .. of course central north americans think that.
Point being made by the user ramraj07 above is that in a global forum such things often require clarification, many countries have states, and many countries refer to other countries as states.
If somebody posts a BBC article about chips, we don't need to have a whole discussion about word choice. Even for those who don't automatically contextualize those things, it takes about 3 seconds to sort it out.
then someone invariably steps in and translates the cooking tempreture to Fahrenheit, and someone else points out that cars in the UK drive on the left it it's relevant.
> we don't need to have a whole discussion about ...
differences between countries, and yet, consistently, we do.
In the Southern North Americas though, in the United Mexican States, many don't use English as first language.
Of course many do and would have newspapers discussing what the various States are up to.
There are other countries with states in the world though, like India iirc.
- Climate change
- Antibiotic resistance
- Novel pandemic pathogen evolution, including the "Spanish" flu and COVID-19
- Air pollution
- Water pollution
- Soil pollution
- Reduced total available calories
- Increased food prices
- Deforestation
... way, way down here is animal cruelty because the actions of 99% of people prove they don't give 2 fucks so long as they don't see it or the animals aren't cute.
I spent years being vegan and vegetarian and still eat many meals that way, but the idea of purging ranching and meat consumption from the world is technologist hubris and the start to someone's dystopian novel. I mean, maybe it'll happen responsibly some day, but if you're grounded in reality and history, it's a 500 year transition, not a 5 year one.
You may "reduce total available calories" yourself, that's fine, but other people should have a choice in a free country. That's why I would never touch lab "meat" with a telegraph pole, but against banning it per se.
Also understand that the FDA regulates lab-grown meat to the same health standards as farm-grown meat, and you can go buy genetically modified meat in the store today. 95% of meat sold in the US is thus "experimental."
https://www.fda.gov/food/human-food-made-cultured-animal-cel...
https://www.fda.gov/food/agricultural-biotechnology/gmo-crop...
What do you mean "exposed to" ?
If you mean "eat it", then ... don't eat it. Eat something else. That's not at all the same as preventing me from eating it. "personal freedom" is, as I said, a multi-edged implement, Why trample on my freedom in the process of freely not eating something?
If you mean that it's around, then so is lead, gasoline exhaust smoke and any number of other pollutants that are present in some quantity, are much harder to avoid, and are worse. We don't have complete freedom from them. There is no justification for a special legal exception for lab-grown meat.
If you mean that you don't want it present in the same supermarket, even wrapped in plastic, then ... isn't that a little fragile? Vegans are expected to shop in meat-carrying shops, and there is no justification for a special legal exception in that direction, or the the other direction.
Sure there is. It's untested and experimental. I don't want to go to a restaurant and accidentally eat lab-grown meat.
And I don't think you're engaging fully with the questions above in parent or grandparent post. I will refrain from repeating myself when you can always re-read.
As a vegetarian who pukes when I accidentally eat meat (happened twice in ten years), I would like to ban all meat. I trust that I'll have your enthusiastic support?
I was about to point out that the very TFA was about states lining up to outlaw it, but the sibling comment on here is the exact same hysterical response I was referring to. I would support labelling the item - I wouldn't eat either version myself, but banning one for the emotional comfort of flesh-eaters is the problem here.
A bioreactor is basically just an animal with a severely curtailed feature set - limited homeostasis, no sense organs, cognition, locomotion, etc.
Crucially, a bioreactor has no immune system. It's a soup of muscle cells with basically no defense against external pathogens. Sterile technique will only get you so far, especially at scale. Lab-grown meat pretty much constitutionally requires constant antibiotic input. It's the price you pay for stripping the concept of animal as meat machine down to its most basic essence.
You could imagine that the culture mechanisms will get more and more sophisticated, building up some of the systems seen in animals from scratch.
I have (partly jokingly) thought about the idea that rather than redesign animals from the ground up, why not just engineer out the qualities that we (think) we don't want in livestock animals.
It wouldn't be hard to selectively breed brain-dead carcasses that require life-support machines to grow. And then we can harvest the meat from brain-dead animals. Yum.
Sounds appealing, doesn't it?...
Why go through the effort to grow skin, eyes, and bones when all we want is a wad of meat
It would need a circulatory system, to get oxygen in to it, and waste products out.
As others have pointed out, it would also be very prone to infection, without a protective outer later (skin), and specialised cells that will destroy pathogens (immune system).
I could go on and on!
There is a reason why giant meatballs didn't evolve.
Lab meat may be in a sterile environment, but it’s vulnerable to a lot more too. (As OP was saying)
Like an operating theatre is cleaner than a slaughterhouse, but that’s because the bar for what would cause contamination is that much lower.
Too bad they pulled the plug on the product in the end, due to production costs making and market assessment it would still be too expensive to be sold as a viable alternate meat-option. But as far as I know, it's over three decades of growing meat in a lab, good and safe enough for human consumption.
1) Bioreactors have available many options other than antibiotics for controlling bacterial growth.
2) A bioreactor is not "basically just an animal with a severely curtailed feature set". A bioreactor is not even "basically an organ with a severely curtailed feature set".
3) What precisely do you mean by "sterile techniques will only get you so far, especially at scale"?
There are actual issues with lab-grown meat. In a nutshell: nutritional quality, and the high degree of post-processing likely needed in order to make them palatable in terms of texture and taste.
TL;DR when someone reasons by analogy, doubt everything they say.