Hacker News Reader

Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't lab grown meat literally tumors? Like we're eating tumors?

It's prudent to remember we're usually slow on the uptake when it comes to safety. Cigarettes were thought to be benign for decades, as was asbestos, high fructose corn syrup, trans fats and non ha bit forming pain killers. And now it looks like the ungodly concoction that is canola looks like it's not great for us as well.

So with that in mind, what are the odds that 50 years from now we look back and realize, yes eating artificial tumorous animal flesh was a good idea?

View on HN

As someone who's been around livestock in various modes I'd rather eat lab tumor than anything from a factory farm. If you're worried about meat quality you really need to grab a chest freezer and buy only from 4H auctions.

Some wizened monk might have massaged the cow you're currently eating, but the hard truth is that top quality meat is raised by little girls who'll be destroyed that you had the highest bid.

Could you help me understand your comment? What’s a 4H auction? What do little girls have to do with factory farming? It sounds interesting, but it’s easier to ask you than to research it at 3am after feeding my own little girl.

In rural areas of the US it is common for children to enroll in 4H which includes lessons in animal husbandry. Children can show various livestock at fairs and they conclude with auctions of said pets for consumption. Comparing it to factory farming is a stretch but to a little kid that gave a name to their chicken it might as well be.

Sure! 4H is a program in America with the goal of teaching animal husbandry to children. A big event in rural areas is the 4H auction of animals raised within the program. Since these animals are hand-raised they attract premium prices.

One of the "difficulties" with this program is that it's very easy for children to get attached to the animals they raise, and the tears flow when the animals are auctioned off. It's an important, formative time in the life of anyone who might raise livestock.

Most of the children involved are girls, for whatever reason. Could just be my own regional, temporal experience though!

Thank you very much! I had no idea that this existed. Those kids are lucky; I’ve always wanted to do something like that, but the closest I got was to be adjacent to a horse farm when I was growing up. I wish that there was some equivalent that I could get our daughter into. We live in Lake Saint Louis, which is about a 7 on a rural-to-city scale of 1 to 10. I wonder if there’s anything within driving distance…

She’s 7 months, so it’ll be a year or two before we’d be able to pursue it seriously, but one can dream. (I don’t know why I like goats so much.)

Anyway, thanks again. Have a good night.

We live in an area that is kind of rural. Rural in that we have fairly large farms 10-15 minutes from us but we are also fairly close to the city.

4H is around here as well but from random other activities we've taken our son to we found a nature society close to us owns a small farm and allows kids to come in and help with the chickens and couple cows they have (weekend, summer programs). Not exactly the same but maybe works for your family.

This anecdotal info from my part but I regularly visit some close friends from school who now live in a semi-rural area. My friends’ kids raise livestock like sheep for 4H and I joined them at their local 4H annual dinner where I met most of the families participating the town. I’d estimate that it was maybe 60% boys and 40% girls who were raising the livestock for the auctions. Felt very All-American.

> Felt very All-American.

Seems very West Australian Wheat-belt to me .. probaly quite Greek to someone from that part of the world.

I much more trust some experienced people to raise animals properly compared to untrained likely underage kids...

As opposed to eating a chunk of an animal's ass?

It's not a tumor. It doesn't grow out of control. It is carefully managed to grow as much like natural tissue as they can manage. The result isn't real muscle, but then, "real muscle" doesn't sound all that appetizing either.

Why would you claim they’re tumours? Is there evidence showing that it’s unsafe?

Plenty of ideas are abhorrent when they’re proposed but are obvious in hindsight. For example, Ignaz Semmelweis was ridiculed for proposing that surgeons wash their hands before surgery.

The article says the meat is grown from immortalized cells. Immortality is a feature common to many cancers and tumors (and some would call it a defining characteristic).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line

Something tells me we wouldn’t be having this conversation if the original poster had used the term “long-lived” instead.

Read your own link

Per the article:

> There are several methods for generating immortalised cell lines:

> 1. Isolation from a naturally occurring cancer. This is the original method for generating an immortalised cell line.

Conceptually, there isn't much difference between an immortalized cell line and a tumor cell line, except by definition cancer must have a host. They probably both share features like too many and weirdly shaped mitochondria.

The overall question is still an interesting one intellectually. Would it even be bad for you to eat an actual tumor from a patient? Is there buildup of toxins?

And for lab grown meat, do we really know what the long term impact is of eating pure protein? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning

There is no fat (which normally stores many vitamins), no innervation, no extracellular matrix I presume, no immune system. Who knows if lab grown meat is really a pound for pound nutritional replacement for real meat. There is a difference between "safe to eat" and nutritionally equivalent. And if it's not equivalent, then what other supplements are you supposed to take if you're eating it?

Also, what if there is a viral or fungal outbreak in the lab, what tests are they running? Is it grown in a medical grade facility? How expensive is that? Is it actually worth it long term, or should we just reform how animals are raised?

On the other hand, research should continue, maybe there is the opportunity to engineer lab grown meat to express whatever antigen you want (or remove foreign antigens like sialic acid) and maybe use it as a way to induce tolerance for people with autoimmunity, as a type of food based therapeutic.

Oral tolerance to food protein https://www.nature.com/articles/mi20124

A red meat-derived glycan promotes inflammation and cancer progression https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4299224/

> there are several types of mushrooms

> 1. Poisonous mushrooms

Like… shut up. That’s just a pathetically obvious cherry pick.

> Also, what if there is a viral or fungal outbreak in the lab, what tests are they running? Is it grown in a medical grade facility? How expensive is that? Is it actually worth it long term, or should we just reform how animals are raised?

You’re acting like you’re posing these questions as if nobody has thought about them before. Bioreactor contamination is a significant problem that needs to be heavily monitored. You can go read about this rather than saying “I don’t know, ergo we might not know”

If we knew about mushrooms because of poisonous mushrooms then your point might stand.

> “I don’t know, ergo we might not know”

Never said that. I'm saying until proven otherwise, I would prefer my meat to have had an immune system, to have experienced sunshine and contain vitamin D in the fat, and to have been stimulated by nerves during its lifetime. The onus is not on me to prove that lab grown meat is equivalent or better. How long has someone survived by exclusively eating lab grown meat?

You're not providing any evidence that all the important questions have been answered.

Considering that we are just now coming around to appreciate the nutritional value of fat (thanks, big sugar) I'm not going to trust quick studies that could be funded by vested interests. Vegans are not immune to capitalism. If there's a study you want to talk then like, send it over.

I don’t give a shit what you think I’m just irritated by you projecting your personal lack of knowledge as a failure of the field

> If you are experiencing rage or severe anger, Safe Horizon is one hotline to keep on hand. Safe Horizon can connect you with anger management counseling and other services with a stated mission of providing support, preventing violence, and promoting justice. Safe Horizon's 24-hour hotline is reachable by calling 1-800-621-HOPE (4673). Consider saving this number in your contacts if you need it.

https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/anger/the-anger-management...

All cancers are immortalized, but not all immortalized cells are cancer. There are countless things that have "features common" to other things, but that doesn't make them the same.

> Why would you claim they’re tumours? Is there evidence showing that it’s unsafe?

Intentional or otherwise they are just spreading disinformation put out by the meat industry to scare people away from a threat to their profits. All the talk about tumors and cancer comes from their PR scare-campaign.

https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2024/01/26/cell-based-mea...

Let’s see, the FDA approved it, and the people opposed are an industry lobbying group…

The people for tumor meat are also industry lobbying groups. What the FDA deems safe today will change tomorrow.

When I first read this comment my immediate reaction was that it was probably baseless fearmongering. After a bit of googling, I feel more ambivalent.

1. It’s illegal to sell cancerous animal meat.

2. Even if a cancer was capable of living in a human host, cooking and digesting it should neutralize it.

3. Cancer is generally not considered to be contagious, but there are specific cases where cancers actually can move from one host to another. Tasmanian devils spread facial tumors to one another by fighting and exchanging fluids. A lab worker got a tumor in her hand after accidentally injecting herself with colon cancer cells. Cancer can spread during organ transplants.

I wouldn’t be at all worried about catching cancer from eating lab-grown meat. But I do wonder about some edge cases, like what if you cut yourself while you were chopping the raw meat and it got in your bloodstream? That sounds kind of like the case with the Tasmanian devils, or the injected colon cancer. However, I’m not sure if there’s any known case of a tumor from one species spreading to another.

Anyway, this sounds more like a freak event than a pandemic. We’d probably figure it out if it happened to a decent number of people, it’s not like we’d realize after 50 years that millions have died that way. The downside risk doesn’t seem so great that we should avoid developing lab-grown meat. There’s probably a lot of things in your kitchen that could kill you if injected into your bloodstream.

Also, the parent comment was flagged. I don’t find it to be rule-violating, so I vouched for it.

Nothing is absolute in biology. Your edge case can happen, but the chance it happens is so low that it might as well be your body naturally created the tumor in the first place.

As someone who handle cells on a daily basis, I can confidently say these things are the most fragile things ever. You look at them wrong and they will be hurt, literally. What's that? Somebody forgot to feed me today? Welp, time to die. Oh wait, you actually fed me a day earlier? Well, dying time I guess. Hmm, you fed me on the right day but the feed was not warmed up? You guess it, straight to the grave.

For them to be frozen, put in a plastic bag, thawed out, left out for an hour, then exposed to your immune system who gonna be overzealous in killing them and asking them to survive and grow into a tumor is like asking is there a chance a cosmic ray gonna flip a bit in my hard drive and completely corrupt all my data.

>like asking is there a chance a cosmic ray gonna flip a bit in my hard drive and completely corrupt all my data.

The ECC RAM crowd is quite the vocal audience, to be fair.

well there was that one time a speedrunner established a record time by a cosmic ray inducing just the right bitflip. But yeah, people get super weird about cultivated meat for whatever reason.

https://hackaday.com/2021/02/17/cosmic-ray-flips-bit-assists...

> I wouldn’t be at all worried about catching cancer from eating lab-grown meat.

And you shouldn't. Cooked or not, the cells are not cancerous https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-lab-meat-cancer-animal...

No because meat is muscle tissue and cancer doesn't grow in muscle cells

The poster above you is incorrect in many respects, but your statement that "cancer doesn't grow in muscle cells" is also misguided.

There are numerous muscle and muscle adjacent tumors that arise at various levels of differentiation, ranging from those that literally mean "muscle cancer" such as myosarcomas or leiomyosarcoma (smooth muscle), to those affecting adnexa such as fibrosarcomas or chondrosarcomas, or less differentiated mesenchymal neoplasms, depending on how far you want to zoom out on a whole realm of oncology. Even fat cells can become cancerous (liposarcoma).

In essence any cell type you can stick in a burger has a cancerous correlate, but again the idea of cultured cells being equivalent to eating tumors is incorrect as much as it is amusing.

Even if it is a tumors, once that's properly cooked it is still a lump of protein/fat, no?

I don't share the OPs reservations, but cooked lumps of protein can still be dangerous i.e. prions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com