"but Eat Just said it would ultimately be cheaper"
That would be amazing. Looking at the prices for vegetarian and vegan meat substitutes, I can't see it happening.
: They are more expensive than meat. It appears that we need a lot more competition in these markets.
If the technology works and is safe, it would be a good point to gently start boiling the frog with taxes. Cattle farming is not good for the environment.
The point is to make the nu-meat more attractive, so that it gets a head start. The adoption rate will be dependant on its image i.e. how many people eat it.
Ideally it should scale a lot better than the real stuff.
You're ignoring that the externality of meat consumption is massive environmental harm, which disproportionately affects the poor (at least in the case of climate change).
Pricing in the negative externalities of meat is the best way to address this, which has a started goal of reducing the consumption of environmentally harmful meat.
It enables meat that is sustainable to be priced competitively and to shift consumption, but we should be very honest -- the goal of any pigouvian tax is to reduce the consumption of the harmful product.
Thus, meat should become more of a luxury, which means yes, it would be less accessible to the poor. But with billions becoming richer and demanding more meat consumption, the path we are on is entirely unsustainable.
The meat and dairy industries are heavily subsidized, so not even taxes. Take subsidies away and stop artificially underpricing it.
If we want to make sure meat products stay available in large quantities to everyone so you can have bacon for breakfast, a sandwich with deli slices for lunch, and a burger for dinner every day, you can take that subsidy money and put it toward lab grown meat instead.
Personally I'd like to see some of it redirected to vegetables though. Cheap meat and expensive vegetables isn't the ideal outcome even if it comes from the lab.
I’d be fine with this if we eliminate corn, wheat, and soy subsidies. As far as I’m concerned these products are poison and responsible for the American obesity epidemic.
How do we know if it’s safe? What if in 20 years we realize we’ve given everyone mad cow disease or some other slow acting wasting disease because of lab grown meat? I would be extremely concerned about ingesting these products.
I will be interested to see how this scales over time. Most of the world doesn't really care if their meat is cruelty-free (not enough to pay extra for it), but I think they'll move to lab grown meat if it has other benefits. Conventional livestock farming takes a lot of work to ensure that the food supply is safe (sanitation and testing), and I assume that lab grown meat has a natural advantage in this area. I would love if lab grown meat had a guarantee of less bacteria so I could cook my meat less. I would also love it if lab grown meat had customizable texture and fat content. That's stuff I'd pay extra money to have. Once the premium products see wide distribution I assume that a cheaper grade will become available.
Agree. This is a very West-coast American mentality. Frankly, the majority of the country doesn't see it that way, let alone the rest of the world.
And one often finds that the relationship to food is different outside of the US. It's somehow less of a commodity and more of a meaningful tradition. You'll be hard-pressed to convince Frenchmen to let go of Limousin beef, for example, and in a manner that's markedly different from Texans defending their meat.
Vegetarianism is growing in other parts of the world, like France, and for much of the same reason as in the American West Coast.
While you're right that there might be more attachment to 'traditional' and overall high quality meat, there's still a big movement for cruelty free meat as you can see by the impact of associations like L214 for example, or the fact that there was an increase of 25% for the vegetarian market in 2018
Most of the world doesn’t produce meat in massive centralized factories. Painting the entirety of anti-meat Americans as “meat is murder” zealots against all forms of husbandry oversimplifies the issue.
Certainly ethical vegetarianism is a very specific counter culture against European/American agriculture.
I just happened to come across a mean farmer in my language bragging about a “tadpole massacre” in their ricefield that happens when the field is drained in an appropriate season, a very conventional, not at all industrial, pesticide free, yet apparently a cruel method for unwanted animals, used to produce entirely vegetable products.
Conventional ethical vegetarianism don’t offer a consensus around such animal cruelty involved in vegetable produces, it’s completely out of sight and out of scope.
I believe this is a solved issue in trains of philosophy/religions from India, where some groups of people have practiced partial vegetarianism for millenniums, which I suspect to be the actual upstream of various vegetarianisms, and the layman’s versions of it say you should accept the sin, reasonably try to minimize harm to all life, and leave animal processing to (enslaved) butcher classes. The slavery part is kind of creepy, but the former two parts solves this classes of controversies beautifully.
As you can see, most, if not all, known branches of vegetarianisms are specifically crafted rebellion movement against certain parts of western agriculture, and I think thus they are moot in other contexts.
Most of the world doesn't even consider it cruelty. Certain barbaric religious customs notwithstanding, modern slaughtering is quick and painless by nearly instantaneously destroying the animal's brain.
But go visit a family owned ranch in Wyoming and tell me those cows don't have it just as good as the elk grazing alongside them.
Also, for the cows, chickens, pigs, etc themselves, the options are a life under husbandry or no life at all.
I would like to see meat substitutes become good enough to displace the low quality stuff (fast-food, etc), but a world without high-quality natural animal protein is a dull one...
Wouldn't the quality of lab grown meat be better? You can clone the cells of the tastiest cow, grow them in perfect conditions, and guarantee that the meat has zero pathogens (allowing it to be eaten raw).
The lab grown meat is just a single cell type at this point, correct? A perfectly lean mono-steak would be awful. Until the lab can figure out other basic things like how to grow fat and then get it marbled through the steak, we're a ways off from getting lab steaks that anyone wants to eat.
Sci-Fi reader part of myself wonder if there could be some information theory aspect to a perfect-mess of meat, that the food must grow within a context relevant to the consumer, i.e. a perfect piece of meat or a carrot from 100 years in the future or past is not perfect to us in present.
Seems like a lot of effort to recreate a mechanism that nature has already perfected. The tastiest protein comes from animals that have natural lives and diets. I'm not convinced a lab can truly compete with the efficiency of the natural process (at least in our lifetime).
We just need to consume less and go back to more natural production of what we do eat.
I agree with you that a world without high-quality natural animal products would be a dull one, but most meat sold is unfortunately from mass production AG.
I don't know for the US, but in France 82 % of poultry, 90% of pigs et 99 % of rabbits come from mass production.
So if you live in the city and cannot really know the origin of what you eat, you can bet it's been mass produced.
I think that's why there's such a hype around vegetarianism and veganism right now : not so much because eating animal is an absolute evil, but because most animal products available do not come from a family owned ranch in Wyoming but from places like this one : https://animaux.l214.com/poulets/elevage-poulets-duc-yonne-2...
Well, I think it is both. I find it quite cruel to kill animals. Even more cruel to breed animals just to be able to kill them later. It's quite a twisted moral towards a sentient being. No animal wants to be killed.
They don't know it's coming. They wouldn't live at all if we weren't raising them for food.
If they could be raised in humane, unlike mass production conditions, then one could argue convincingly that it's better than not doing it all from a purely compassionate viewpoint.
It's still tremendously wasteful of land and resources, but that's a separate concern to address.
It's the massive destruction of existing biomes and ecosystems to make way for monoculture soy, wheat and other grain farms that go into cattle feed that is the issue. Free range cattle in non-savana bushland like we have here in Australia is a pretty profitable business, and has caused large scale species extinction, landscape degradation and general misery to everything and everyone not chowing down on delicious burgers 3 times a week. If the meat in there comes from MeatChowCorp's basement, no problem.
A lot of people won't care about being able to use lower temperatures. Anybody who likes steak medium well or higher, of course.
Fears of trichinosis decades ago led to pork being overcooked for a long time. I did sous vide pork chops for my parents and they said it was the best pork chop they'd ever had, but still weren't crazy about it. They just don't like pork, after a lifetime of eating it overcooked.
I've done chicken breast at low temp and ended up with a mushy piece of meat i didn't care for. Chicken breast is good in a relatively narrow band of temperatures, where it's neither mushy nor dessicated, and often you still need to crisp the skin. Technology has made it easier to get in that band.
It would be cool to do steak tartare at home, though!
Wait what's stopping you? We eat steak tartare at home all the time, just buying good new york strips and cutting them up. All you need is very good olive oil and a little vinegar, perhaps some shallots or capers if you have them, and an egg yolk. It's faster prep and cleanup than bothering to fry the steak!
"The growth medium for the Singapore production line includes foetal bovine serum, which is extracted from foetal blood, but this is largely removed before consumption."
As a vegetarian, I have to wonder who the target market for this is.
Meat substitutes that don't use any animal cells whatsoever have existed for a long time, and many of them are pretty convincing, and even when they're not they often delicious in their own right.
It's cheese that I find to be the last great frontier as far as substitutes go. There just isn't even a remotely passible substitute for many cheeses.
Most existing meat substitutes don't match the nutritional profile of meat very well (and even if they do, there are differences between how well animal proteins/fats are made use of by the body compared to plant proteins/fats) and overall are just incredibly processed foods with long ingredient lists full of questionable substances, so that's the draw for me personally.
> It's cheese that I find to be the last great frontier as far as substitutes go. There just isn't even a remotely passible substitute for many cheeses.
99% vegetarian, 1% pescatarian here and I agree with your statement, but I'd add milk and eggs to that list. There is no substitute for eggs at the moment AFAIK and despite many probably pointing me to all the oat/nut/soy milk replacements none of them comes even close to real milk for me. I can tolerate a bit of oat milk with my coffee every now and then, but can't have a bowl of cereal with milk substitutes. Just doesn't taste right. Also I'm concerned about the much higher glucose intake from oat milks than real milk.
"There is no substitute for eggs at the moment AFAIK"
It depends on what form you're using the eggs in.
I don't think there's any substitute for hard-boiled eggs, or sunny-side-up fried eggs, for example.
However, tofu-scrambles make a good substitute for scrambled eggs, in my experience.
There are also a million substitutes for eggs in baking.
"despite many probably pointing me to all the oat/nut/soy milk replacements none of them comes even close to real milk for me"
Ok, they might not taste like milk per se, but I find some soy milk and other nut milks taste much better than ordinary milk.. though different. Many of them do tend to be sweeter, and I personally like that.. they taste more like a dessert to me, which I'm usually fine with.
Glucose is a problem, but there's no reason they couldn't use sugar substitutes, of which there are many (though unfortunately some of the best, like tagatose, are still pretty expensive).
> Glucose is a problem, but there's no reason they couldn't use sugar substitutes, of which there are many (though unfortunately some of the best, like tagatose, are still pretty expensive).
Have you tried allulose? I can't get it in my country, but it sounds better than others.
I have, actually. It's ok, but I find it a lot less sweet than sugar, so I have to use maybe 2x to 3x as much as I would regular sugar.. add to this that it's probably 10x as expensive as sugar and it is just way too expensive for me.
Not to mention that at least the brand I tried was a lot finer than ordinary table sugar, and was closer to powdered sugar in consistency. This is ok for some applications, but not others.
I found tagatose to be much, much better, as it's virtually indistinguishable from sugar for me. It's also way more expensive than sugar, but at least it's comparable to sugar in sweetness, so you only have to use about as much as you'd use of regular sugar.
Tagatose also doesn't have any weird aftertaste to it, unlike stevia, for instance. Overall, it's by far the best sugar substitute I've ever tried, and would highly recommend it.
Guess I'm a real weirdo because I very strongly prefer the taste of nut milks to cows milk. And I never tried any milk substitutes until I was an adult, so it's not because I grew up with them.
The critical issue with animal farming is not the issues that many vegans are focused on (cruelty, exploitation, etc), it’s climate change. The general population wants to eat meat, and finding a way to produce it with fewer greenhouse gas emissions is critical to address that.
I have mild moral qualms with killing and eating animals (treat others the way you want to be treated).
But unfortunately, meat protein has some of the highest biological value, outside of egg whites/whey/dairy proteins.
When you factor in how cheap low-grade meat is, it winds up being incredibly economical to just eat a bunch of $2/lb chicken and whatnot. Especially if you're trying to eat upwards of 200-250g of protein a day, it gets expensive fast.
So I have sort of accepted this hypocritical double-standard, where I recognize that what I am doing is not entirely ethical but at the same time it's too practical for me to give up. Plus, I love meat.
Lab-grown meat at somewhere near the price of regular meat has been a dream for me because then I get to have my cake and eat it too. Don't have to give up meat, or try to substitute non-meat proteins for it, and no actual sentient being has to suffer and die in order for me to continue doing so.
Huge win-win, can't come soon enough.
I would eat the plant-based stuff if someone could prove comparable biological value and the price was the same or only marginally higher, too.
I really don't care, as long as it tastes (doesn't even have to look) like meat, and the bodily effects are identical.
"meat protein has some of the highest biological value"
By what standard?
When I looked in to this for myself, it seemed like it's very unlikely for vegetarians to have protein deficiencies as long as they ate enough calories to sustain themselves and ate a decent variety of food (which they should be doing anyway, to stave off other health issues).
The tl;dr is that it boils down to amino-acid profile. There are 9 Essential Amino Acid's (EAA's) that human body can't synthesize from other amino acids.
A food's biological value is determined (primarily) by it's amino acid profile. It's also not just about the overall amount, but also the ratio, since the way that amino acid absorption works is on a first-come-first-serve basis and so the proportion matters almost as much as composition.
There's a list of common foods and their biological value on that page if you're curious.
> "When I looked in to this for myself, it seemed like it's very unlikely for vegetarians to have protein deficiencies as long as they ate enough calories to sustain themselves and ate a decent variety of food (which they should be doing anyway, to stave off other health issues)."
Ah, yeah. For the average person, it doesn't matter. You can pretty much eat anything and be alright. The grand majority of people have god-awful diets and seem to function just fine.
I recreationally bodybuild so my dietary requirements are kind of an edgecase scenario.
Articles like these[1][2] imply that vegetable proteins provide all the amino acids the body needs, and the body can "mix and match" whatever it requires.
As for bodybuilding, there are some vegetarian and even vegan bodybuilders out there. Have you looked in to how/what they eat?
This is probably going to sound gross, but for me it's the allure of not having to bite into bone fragments or tendons. I'm one of those types of people where if there's an eggshell, piece of bone, stem, or anything else that's an unintended guest in my food, I will find it.
I don't mean for this motive to sound selfish, but it would be nice to be able to enjoy something of the sort (e.g. ground beef) without it becoming meat-flavored chewing gum.
Joking aside, I think the potential for a high degree of consistency in terms of texture and flavor would be another bonus.
"it would be nice to be able to enjoy something of the sort (e.g. ground beef) without it becoming meat-flavored chewing gum"
I can't name a brand for you off-hand, but whenever I've bought vegetarian ground-beef substitutes at grocery stores, I've never once had this issue. They all tasted pretty much exactly like ground beef.
In my experience, that particular substitute is not a challenge.
There are also some pretty great vegetarian hamburger substitutes, like Boca Burger.
> In my experience, that particular substitute is not a challenge.
It's not. Some of the TVP products are pretty decent (and surprisingly so). And honestly, it's off-putting enough that it'd be worth using a substitute for. I eat hamburgers only rarely, so most of my ground beef consumption is in other dishes that are heavily seasoned enough that using a substitute is no problem (e.g. taco meat).
Otherwise, my problem is if I'm fixing chicken breasts for something and miss some connective tissue when I'm preparing it. I can guarantee with near certainty that if I do, I will be the one to find it. :)
FWIW, if you are regularly finding abnormal things in your ground beef, then switch providers. In my experience some shops (e.g. Winco, who I otherwise appreciate for their meat selection) have a really high contamination rate in their ground beef for things like bones. A halfway decent butcher won't have the same issue, and they're not that much more expensive.
> A halfway decent butcher won't have the same issue, and they're not that much more expensive.
This is true. Unfortunately, where I live, all of the grocery chains have reduced or eliminated their own butchers. The one that I can think of off hand that is still in town was good for a while, and contamination is unlikely, but the quality of their sources seems to have diminished over time.
I'm honestly half-tempted to go back to grinding my own, which probably sounds unnecessary. But hey...
As with some other comments I assume this is more aimed at the meat-eating market than vegetarians etc.
As somebody who hasn't eaten meat for years, I've long used "fake meat" substitutes because I originally missed normal meat, but the idea of eating actual meat (even lab-bred) triggers a disgust reflex now; I'll stick with the fake stuff.
They also go on to say that will not be used in the future, it is just what they were using at the time this approval process started. So it will likely be more acceptable in the future.
As a meat eater, this is very interesting to me. I try to be as environmentally responsible as I can when it comes to meat, but its still all bad really. I cannot go more than a few days tops without animal protein, or I start to get weird cravings. Could I eventually get past it? Probably, but not interested in doing so. But I certainly am interested in more environmentally friendly options, if they are safe and economical.
"I cannot go more than a few days tops without animal protein, or I start to get weird cravings"
Have you tried many vegetarian meat substitutes?
When I talk to meat eaters about this, many of them haven't tried many at all, and if they had tried anything it's maybe one product ten years ago.
The world of vegetarian meat substitutes has exploded in recent years, and there is just so much variety these days, many of them are really incredibly delicious and I'd stack them up against most meat any day.
Ok, they might not be 100% accurate, and tend to lack the blood, veins, gristle, skin, fat and bones of authentic meat products, but I think most people can live without those, if not even actively want to avoid some of that.
Yeah, I have. Although never as the only thing I eat for a longer period. So I suppose that would be an interesting experiment. I actually really like the impossible burger, not as much as a real one, but I have ordered it on multiple occasions. Beyond is ok. And I have had some great black bean burgers, but they don't quite hit the spot.
I also probably don't have the correctly balanced diet when I have done that in the past. And I have found a protein heavy diet is what my body prefers, and carbs are not super great for me. End up heavy and tired. And the vegetarian / vegan stuff we have done in the past have been far to carb heavy for me.
And I love cheese. Mac and cheese, alfredo, things like that. And I have yet to find a substitute that is acceptable to me in the cheese department. Although I have been able to cut back on the dairy the last few weeks, so its possible I could eventually cut it out. That just hasn't been on my priority list.
Natural meat gets tons of micronutrients through many different processes in the animal in it that this artifical meat never can unless they can 100% mimic an entire animal, which well, means that they would have to grow an entire animal...
You cannot just "add some zinc here and there" and pretend that it's ok.
This will lead to severe micronutrient deficiencies, just protein is far from enough.
Anyone who says this is a good food product is an idiot, there is no nice way to say this. In fact the term idiot as a way to mild term for this kind of a person.
To belive you can give & match all the required delicate balance of nutrients in lab grown meat compared to real meat is beyond stupid.
Would one or more of the downvoters be willing to actually answer these claims? I'm not a subject matter expert, but like everyone I have an interest in good nutrition. The micronutrient claim appears prima facie plausible. Even whole organism food like vegetables is poorer in micronutrients today than it was in generations past.
To some extent this is already a problem with real meat, because almost nobody in the USA eats organ meat and it's particularly rich in micronutrients.
They don't have any: it just goes to show you that people still think that all you need are carbs, protein and fats and you're good to go.
This belief is what caused the food to get so depleted in all micronutrients in the 1st place: because people aren't aware how important they are -> they don't care about them -> no one enforces rules for food quality in the micronutrients department -> food quality goes to shit over time.
What makes you think no one cares about micronutrients in food, or that no rules for food quality are enforced?
White rice in the US is required by law to be enriched [1]. The FDA heavily regulates food in the US, leading to some of the highest quality food in the world.
Perhaps you don't live in the US. If you do live in the US, I highly recommend taking some time to learn about the things you talk about in online forums. Spreading BS around isn't helpful for anyone.
The downvotes are probably more due to the dismissive/inflammatory tone, e.g.
"Anyone who says this is a good food product is an idiot, there is no nice way to say this. In fact the term idiot as a way to mild term for this kind of a person."
I doubt anyone here has tried this product yet or seen any extensive analysis, so to say it's good or not good is pure speculation at this point. Laying insults atop an argument seldom strengthens it.
Yeah - the micronutrient claim does make sense on the surface. However, the claim is wildly simplistic. We get tons of different micronutrients from tons of sources. If OP were correct, vegans wouldn't be able to survive. Vegetarians wouldn't be able to survive.
Basically everything we need in terms of nutrients (micro and macro) can be found in non-meat food products. Wherever a non-meat diet falls short of the needed micronutrients, multivitamins can be added to make up any deficiencies. Again, see vegans.
Finally, lab grown meat IS meat. Our bodies can break down and harvest any micronutrients grown into the meat. Furthermore, as developments are made, it's naive to assume the companies producing the lab grown meat won't attempt to add anything important which might be missing.
There's also precedent in the food industry for adding nutrients to food staples - white rice in America is legally required to be enriched. This point also confirms OPs concern is worth thinking about to begin with - the rice nutrient deficiency has caused epidemics in Asia. However, this problem has largely been solved.
Finally, OPs rant seems to start from an adversarial position. The arguments put forward seem to be in bad faith, as they are mostly distilled with minor research on lab-grown meat.
You are one of the people I was talking about: you belive you can just add a few vitamins and minerals here and there and call it a day: that is not how it works!
Example: vitamin C in supplements is only ascorbic acid. But the real vitamin C is a "complex" and contains multiple other vitamins INSIDE of it+ stuff surrounding the complex.
You cannot break down meat into minerals and vitamins if they don't have them in the first place.
You fundamentally misunderstand my point. I'm saying you can add those in to your diet, not meat. I'm not claiming we need to inject these missing nutrients into the meat, and I'm not claiming that our body manufactures them from sources where they are absent. But your implication here is that humans eat only one type of meat from an animal that provides all nutrients we need. That's not true, and it's stupid to think that. You really need to try to understand the science of this topic because you're out of your depth, clearly. Stop putting words in peoples' mouths.
The Great Courses has a nutrition course I watched and it it indicated a vegetarian diet if done right is 100% fine. I wouldn't expect adding artificial meat to a vegetarian diet to cause any deficiency if the vegetarian diet alone is fine.
I guess people who buy protein powders are idiots? The whole point of "a well balanced diet" is to eat a variety of things to get all your nutrients. This product is simply another means of getting protein in your diet.
Whey protein is not of questionable utility, it's used heavily by athletes worldwide, to great effect. Other proteins can be used, but it's the most common by far.
The comparison might still not be perfect, but OPs point about needing a well-balanced diet is still relevant and important to this discussion. We don't get all our nutrients from a single source, especially not meat. So not getting all our nutrients from lab-grown meat isn't a problem. We'll get them from somewhere else. Unless you know there is a specific nutrient in meat, which we don't get from any other source, which lab grown meat won't replicate. However, that's unlikely or vegans would all be dead.
One does not need to eat meat in order to be healthy. There are hundreds of millions of vegetarians world wide; that's a hell of a sample size and yet there is a remarkable lack of evidence to support the claim that they are all unhealthy.
So really, what's the problem with replacing meat?
Also this product will sooner or later be marketed as legit meat replacement.
But otherwise yes, even those who'd eat it just for protein would be idiots because eg whey comes from a natural food source beforehand which means nature has already done it's thing properly beforehand.
To think that growing stuff in a lab has no unintented consequences is beyond stupid, even if you use it "just for protein".
Instead of calling people stupid, perhaps you should spend some time reading up on the issues at hand. You can read about what the body needs and what is provided in lab-grown meat vs animal meat. You could learn about markets and where this is likely to end up in the market. You could learn about the actual process used and what the developers consider the risks and rewards.
But margarine was such a healthy alternative to butter, all the advertising agencies told us so for decades!
I have no problem with them trying it, although I worry about weird prion based diseases cropping up that would make a living breathing creature non viable and die, when it wouldn’t be noticeable in something lab grown until far too late (i.e. after humans have consumed it).
Basically the fact that a creature is not dead might mean that its constituent proteins are likely suitable for consumption? Obviously not bulletproof, as mad cow exists, but lab grown meat might have a much wider homeostatic range, since it doesn’t have a brain how would you know it has prions that could negatively affect brain function? How could you even test for such a thing?
What exactly do you mean by artificial food here? Anything substantial? Or is this a 'GMO BAD' type argument? Does enriched rice count as artificial? Modern bananas? Modern corn? Modern cows and pigs? Do vegan meat substitutes count as artificial food?
All these things listed above are very viable and healthy options for people to eat. The proof is in the pudding (XD) as people eat this stuff constantly, and at massive volumes, worldwide, without dying or whatever.
Also, who are you speaking on behalf of? Who thinks lab-grown meat is so safe? Who doesn't have concerns about the safety of this meat? It seems you're making ridiculous claims not based on any of the relevant literature.
> This fake meat produt has THE SAME ISSUE AS MARGARINE HAD: people think it's safe because a few "experts" say so. This is what happened to margarine.
Sometimes experts are wrong, that does not mean that they are not still our best hope of being right about things. Otherwise we may as all just listen to the village idiot's twitter account and inject bleach.
> In reality artifical food is always a bomb waiting to go off inside of you.
It really isn't any different than "real" food just because it is made in a lab. It may not have the same exact qualities as its natural equivalent, but "natural" by no means is the same as "safe" or "healthy" anyway. Do you want me to show you pictures of giant puss-filled cysts in a cow carcass? Or should we talk about Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease? There is nothing inherently good about "natural" and evil about "artificial", as your posts seem to imply.
This is a dangerous experiment but there is a way to make this safe. Animals can eat things that humans can't like grass cellulose. Biology is ridiculously complex and they have no idea what the full list of vitamins, enzymes, minerals, and proteins required to make up a human. Example: Nobody talks about choline or vitamin K. They don't know if humans even have the biological machinery to process some of those things. Example: Males convert ALA to EHA and DHA worse than females. Male vegans do worse than female vegans.
The only way to make this safe is by testing performance on mice or rats fed lab-grown meat vs. regular meat. Testing needs to be done at a high level(how long did take mice to travel the maze) and not at a low level(for a specific vitamin). Do not let them turn us into their experiment. You will suffer death by a thousand cuts if this food isn't good.
Regardless, this is pretty cool and very useful if successful but proper tests need to be put in place.
It doesn't work this way - first, you have to prove that these micronutrients actually matter. For some, we know they do. For most, it's more likely they simply don't matter much or at all. There are tons of examples thru history, and modern, of the benefits of simple enriched foods from iodized salt to Golden rice that do not have the whatever mythical natural balance of iodine and vitamin A. There are people living entirely on food substitutes, both due to poverty/medical conditions and because they are tech hipsters. As someone mentioned there are vegetarians/vegans who do just fine without these nutrients; hard to imagine they'd do worse if they also ate a fake burger.
Your comment is a simple example of natural-is-good fallacy. For all you know those natural micro-nutrients in meat could be net harmful (there are studies that some types of meat have negative health effects, and I say it as an avid steak eater - as far as I know, they don't have a good handle on specific causes, so it could be that the fake steak won't have them and only the "natural" one does :)).
I'm very hopeful that this becomes the norm. Even if it's hard to adopt for individuals, I imagine McDonalds would jump at the opportunity to use lab grown meat for their products, should it be actually cheaper. The benefits of this tech are potentially massive!
I sometimes get called a luddite, but I am honestly quite pessimistic about lab-grown meat. It seems like not that long ago we thought to "hack" unsaturated fats in order to give them a buttery texture. Fast-forward 20 years and it turns out biological systems are unimaginably complex, and trans-fats are quite probably inflammatory agents and carcinogens.
There's always some risk in innovation, but it seems like synthetic nutrition is an absolute minefield. It's not just the raw complexity of the field, either. It's also that much of nutrition is junk science, even in the peer-reviewed literature.
On a more conspirational note, I also can't help but to notice that the agro-dietary industry is a pretty low-margin business. It seems like driving up profit margins requires convincing people that existing foods are somehow unsuitable, and that "innovative" products are therefore needed. I think vegan and ecological sensibilities are being instrumentalized to this end.
In any case: this anonymous internet stranger plans on skipping the lab-meat fad.
However, a sibling comment makes a really good point - that's exactly how we treat pharmaceuticals. We don't allow consumption (except in dire cases) until the product is proven safe (with a very conservative definition of proven safe). One could argue we should have the same approach with foods - the health food supplement industry has had a lot of criticism for not having enough controls. 'artificial food' of this sort seems like it should be in a similar category.
> we're taking a major public health risk on the basis of low-quality science
Are we? (I really don't know the answer to this.) What's the science behind it and what are the gaps in it? This is the first time lab-grown meat is being sold and so far it's happening only in one country on the planet.
But I'd argue the difference is just that we're willing to give foods that seem "natural" more latitude. Bacon and sausages are believed to cause cancer at a rate of about 1 per thousand - not quite as dangerous as trans fats are for heart disease, but still a major public health issue.
How long will it take before we know the long term effects of any subtle changes in food chemistry, especially if this becomes the primary diet of some individuals? This seems wildly complex and unpredictable. It wouldn't surprise me if it took decades.
>Prions are misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein. They characterize several fatal and transmissible neurodegenerative diseases in humans and many other animals.[3] It is not known what causes the normal protein to misfold,
A lot of them take years to even be discovered once your infected and we're still not sure what causes them to misfold.
We're making proteins in a lab, have done only a few years of study on the safety and have approved them for human consumption. We may not see or understand the consequences for decades.
Maybe I misread the article but I missed the point about "synthetic novel proteins". They're dividing chicken cells, right? Not even genetic mutations involved...
They are just growing fetal cells in a vat are they not? There doesn't seem to be anything novel or synthetic about it. They are actual animal cells, just grown in a vat instead of a traditional animal.
Fun fact: Iomega Zip drives were prone to prion disease. Specifically, a damaged read/write head would damage the surface of the disk, and when the disk was subsequently inserted into a working drive the damage on the disks surface damage the head of the new drive. Rinse, repeat.
this is typically called a "hardware virus". I recall my workplace had a problem over a decade ago with Macbook Pros that had DVI; a bent DVI pin in the mac would mess up the connector to the projector (remember when we used those?) and then subsequent macs plugged into the connector would get their pins bent, propagating the problem to more computers.
L̶a̶b̶-̶g̶r̶o̶w̶n̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶t̶ Meat substitutes (corrected) are mostly made of vegetable matter, which humans have been eating for our entire existence.
> According to Beyond Meat's website, ingredients for its plant-based patties include water, pea protein isolate, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein and other natural flavors, including apple extract and beet juice extract (for color)
Safety concerns with respect to innovation are understandable. But they should be grounded. We know things like pea protein don't hurt us.
I don't think Beyond Meat is lab-grown meat, as far as I'm aware it is not made from actual animal cells but just a mix of plant-based ingredients like the ones listed.
Parent is still kinda right though. The original animal makes its meat by consuming and processing vegetable matter. All the lab-grown process does is replace the animal's process for doing this with a different one.
Beyond is not culturing cells in a vat though. They are not 'Lab-grown meat' they are a meat alternative made from stuff we do understand. Things like Impossible and this article are a whole different category of new stuff we may not fully understand yet.
You're confusing meat substitutes (plant ingredients made to resemble meat in look and taste) like Beyond Meat, and lab-grown meat (which is live muscle tissue that has been grown in a lab instead of on the body of an animal).
> I also can't help but to notice that the agro-dietary industry is a pretty low-margin business. It seems like driving up profit margins requires convincing people that existing foods are somehow unsuitable, and that "innovative" products are needed.
You're right, it is a (literal) cut-throat business. But the price of synthetic meat has been falling exponentially [1]. Hopefully it'll drop far below traditional meat. This is not a product you'd want to adopt if you're interested in high margins.
> I think vegan and ecological sensibilities are being instrumentalized to this end.
Organic is a better example. It's simply a marketing concept designed to capitalize on the appeal to nature fallacy. It's not healthier or cheaper or better for the environment [2]. Veganism is different: it's the practice of abstaining from the use of animal products.
Certified organic food is not healthier or cheaper, certainly.
Whether it's better for the environment is much less clear; the USDA organic requirements are pretty watered down, and modern pesticides responsibly applied are pretty safe, but synthetic fertilizer, as typically applied on commercial scale farms, is pretty darn bad for ecosystems.
> but synthetic fertilizer, as typically applied on commercial scale farms, is pretty darn bad for ecosystems.
True. It's a big problem. However, the biggest environmental problem _right now_ is habitat loss. As in, massive habitat loss has already happened. We won't feel the really bad effects of climate change for another 100 years. Clearing forests also contribute to climate change.
> Habitat loss is perhaps the greatest threat to organisms and biodiversity.[5] Temple (1986) found that 82% of endangered bird species were significantly threatened by habitat loss. Most amphibian species are also threatened by native habitat loss,[6] and some species are now only breeding in modified habitat
So how do we reduce habitat loss? Well, clearing habitats for agriculture is the principal cause of habitat destruction [1]. So we should try to be efficient with the land we have. Unfortunately organic farming does the opposite [2]:
> The Oxford meta-analysis of 71 studies found that organic farming requires 84% more land for an equivalent amount of harvest
This article on organic food looks like a rather biased piece to me, more like a grab bag of one-sided arguments looking only at bad examples. The author indeed backtracks in the notes at the end:
Based on the responses, I just want to make this clear: this is NOT a comprehensive comparison of organic and conventional agriculture, nor is it intended to be. That post would be miles long and far more complex. My overall belief is that there shouldn't be a dichotomy in the first place - there are a variety of methods and practices that a farmer can use, each with its pros and cons. The main point here is that something "organic" isn't intrinsically better than something that isn't, and that you have to approach all kinds of agriculture critically to achieve optimum sustainability.
I thought so... I would be surprised if the main point (that organic food is not healthier pesticide-wise) applies to all organic labels.
> Organic is a better example. It's simply a marketing concept designed to capitalize on the appeal to nature fallacy
It's not clear what exactly are you referring to with "organic", as one can refer to both agricaltural products and processed food.
At least in relation to processed food, I do read and compare labels, and very often, there are 1. less additives 2. natural additives as opposed to chemical ones 3. less refined ingredients.
This alone is a big deal, and just based on this, organic as a whole is definitely healthier.
I can't talk for processes themselves, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were higher standards in the food chain (e.g. less freezing time, no freezing at all etc.). As a matter of fact, you'll often read that organic is tastier; I personally don't find it so, but that could be very well the cause. Again, organic food is preferrable here (I'm not using "healthier" in a strict sense here).
I'm not based on USA though, which may have looser food standards.
>It's not clear what exactly are you referring to with "organic"
I'm referring to both, and more. All of it. Here is the definition from wikipedia [1]
> Organic food is food produced by methods complying with the standards of organic farming. Standards vary worldwide, but organic farming features practices that cycle resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity. Organizations regulating organic products may restrict the use of certain pesticides and fertilizers in the farming methods used to produce such products. Organic foods typically are not processed using irradiation, industrial solvents, or synthetic food additives
>This alone is a big deal, and just based on this, organic as a whole is definitely healthier.
This is the appeal to nature fallacy I referred to originally. Just so we're on the same page [2]:
> The appeal to nature is a logical fallacy that occurs when something is claimed to be good because it’s perceived as natural, or bad because it’s perceived as unnatural.
> For example, a person using an appeal to nature might suggest using herbal remedies when treating a serious medical condition, despite what research says on the topic, simply because they perceive the herbal remedies as more natural than modern treatments.
> It’s important to understand this kind of fallacious thinking, since it frequently plays a role in people’s internal reasoning process, as well as in debates on various topics. As such, in the following article you will learn more about the appeal to nature fallacy, and see what you can do in order to counter people who use it, while also making sure that you won’t use it yourself.
The linked page has many examples, you can find more here [3]. In response to your points in particular:
1. Additives aren't healthy or unhealthy. It simply describes a category of food. Anything can be an additive: sugar, salt, apples, uranium.
2. The meaning of "natural" and "chemical" isn't well-defined here. Everything in nature is composed of chemicals and chemicals are natural. The meaning you're giving to these words are basically natural is good and chemical is bad. If not, please provide a rigorous definition of the two words.
3. Refined probably refers to "processed"? It's similarly vague, allowing anyone to make it mean whatever they want. So if we go with the definition:
> "Processed food" includes food that has been cooked, canned, frozen, packaged or changed in nutritional composition with fortifying, preserving or preparing in different ways. Any time we cook, bake or prepare food, we're processing food
Then no, it's not bad to process food: [4], [5]. Some forms of processing may be bad yes, but please specify what you mean.
> but I wouldn't be surprised if there were higher standards in the food chain (e.g. less freezing time, no freezing at all etc.)
Again, which standards? My point being that standards enforced by organic farming _are not_ about improving taste, cost, or health. Of course they claim that, but there is insufficient evidence for this.
I'll simplify and generalize the concepts, in order to avoid semantic squibbles.
If one compares a significant range of non-organic food products with organic ones, the latter will correlate with lack of some ingredients, or replacement with comparable ones. This can be verified easily by anybody who lives in a country with a meaningful presence of the organic market/brands (I'm not sure what's the situation in USA; I wouldn't be suprised if the average presence is negligible).
Considering that nutrition is "not really" a science, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that if something has been approved by the food institutions (e.g. FDA), they don't have a negative impact on the body, therefore, organic and non-organic food products have essentially the same.
For the same reason though, the opposite is also reasonable.
If I can choose between, say, packaged bread with and without, say, hydrogenated fats and corn syrup, I prefer the latter, but as I wrote, I don't think that who chooses the former is wrong, ignorant, or so.
Regarding the standards, the same principle holds. Enforcing, there's not absolute truth about, say, crops rotation and forbidding antibiotics/hormones (this are some of the rules dictated by organic organizations) can be believed or not (I don't doubt there's straight snake oil in some practices). There was an Scientific American article on HN correlating modern agriculture practices to lower nutritional properties of crops, therefore practices mandated by the organic standards have a sense, but I doubt that there is a rigorous scientific investigation on this, so anybody can be reasonably reject the argument.
Most all modern agricultural produce are modified way beyond "natural". There is very little 'natural' about a plowed and fertilized field. And the produce being grown there has been selected and modified and optimised way beyond what you would find in nature in reaction to 'natural' selection bevery and pest pressure. So 'lab meat' is just progression on this. Dunno why you would arbitrarily skip fad 'lab-meat' but the rest, which is as 'natural' as that is ok...
Indeed. I'm also worried about nutrition -- meat and fish are absolutely packed with all sorts of compounds our body makes use of, different meats and fish having different sets of them, making variety important as well (e.g. beef vs. salmon vs. chicken). And it's not reducible to just a handful of vitamins and minerals.
Is lab-grown meat going to have anything like that variety?
We have a long history of thinking we've identified all the important ones, only to make new discoveries of important things, whether it's omega-3 fats, or compounds that fight free radicals. It remains to be seen whether lab-grown meat will be equally nutritious.
> We have a long history of thinking we've identified all the important ones, only to make new discoveries of important things, whether it's omega-3 fats, or compounds that fight free radicals. It remains to be seen whether lab-grown meat will be equally nutritious.
Don't most of these kinds of things wind up being marketing jargon which later gets largely debunked? Taking antioxidants as an example, we manufacture most of what we need already, you only need trace amounts of nutrients like vitamin C to satisfy the rest of your needs. Attempts to supplement those sources further with "superfoods," pills, etc have approximately zero affect on any metric of interest.
> pills, etc, have approximately zero affect on any metric of interest.
On the contrary. Artificially large doses of antioxidants disrupt signaling systems, preventing exercise recovery and wound healing. They are simply not a good idea.
However, the parent comment is mistaken in thinking that we don't understand nutrition reasonably well, and might 'miss' something in artificially cultured meat.
The science of nutrition is still in its infancy, with very basic questions still unanswered, and we're very, very far from having catalogued all the nutrients in meat and vegetables and understanding their effects on our body.
I mean, even with macro nutrients, just look at the flip-flopping and debates over the past few decades on saturated fats, trans fats, carbs vs fats, etc. Then when you get to micronutrients, we don't even know what we don't know.
You can see the other comment I made on how, for example, we know chicken soup helps fight colds, but don't have the slightest idea what compound is responsible. Will lab-grown chicken do the same?
> The science of nutrition is still in its infancy, with very basic questions still unanswered, and we're very, very far from having catalogued all the nutrients in meat and vegetables and understanding their effects on our body.
Even calling those compounds "nutrients" in the first place is a bit circular. If something hasn't had enough of an effect on any of our observations to warrant further investigation, or else if all the evidence points to it being largely inert, then it probably isn't much of a nutrient. We've almost certainly missed a thing or two here or there, but pointing to a list of compounds in meat that aren't in a nutrition book and assuming those must be nutrients of some kind doesn't seem like a productive activity.
> I mean, even with macro nutrients, just look at the flip-flopping and debates over the past few decades on saturated fats, trans fats, carbs vs fats, etc. Then when you get to micronutrients, we don't even know what we don't know.
The implication seems to be that macronutrients should be easier to reason about, so if we don't know much about them then we can't know much about micronutrients. In practice though, macronutrient composition doesn't matter much and doesn't have strong effects, whereas many micronutrients are easily testable. The flip-flopping hasn't been one of a vast scientific consensus, but rather small amounts of scientific research and a vast marketing machine.
> You can see the other comment I made on how, for example, we know chicken soup helps fight colds, but don't have the slightest idea what compound is responsible. Will lab-grown chicken do the same?
That seems like a moving goalpost (or a misunderstanding on my part as to what your position is). Is "a reasonable understanding of nutrition" a large enough body of knowledge to tailor a body composition to one's favourite activities and keep it healthy for its normal lifespan barring medical events (aging, cancer, colds, loss of limb), or is it a perfect understanding of every interaction things we can consume might have with our body or any other organisms we're hosting?
Mildly off-topic: We know that chicken soup probably eases cold symptoms, and so do hot water and hot tea. Even assuming a compound is medicinally responsible in the first place doesn't seem like a great starting point.
So you seem to be essentially saying, you think we know pretty much everything already, so it's not productive to continue checking?
Both sides of that are completely false. We have gigantic gaps in basic nutrition knowledge, and the idea that we have a strong idea of all existing important correlations is similarly completely and utterly incorrect.
The idea that flip-flopping is due to a "vast marketing machine" is also completely disingenuous. I'm not talking about pop science articles, I'm talking about disagreement between scientists.
I seriously don't know where people get this idea that human nutrition is this advanced science where we know most of the answers. I can only assume it's wishful thinking? It would be nice if we did... but we really don't. And there's a good reason for it, which is that it's incredibly difficult to ethically perform decades-long controlled experiments with nutrition in people to provide definitive scientific answers, for the obvious reasons.
> So you seem to be essentially saying, you think we know pretty much everything already
Not in the slightest. I've explicitly said we have "a reasonable understanding of nutrition" and not even vaguely implied that we know everything. Am I misunderstanding you that poorly too, and is that why we seem to be in such disagreement?
> On the contrary. Artificially large doses of antioxidants disrupt signaling systems, preventing exercise recovery and wound healing. They are simply not a good idea.
> meat and fish are absolutely packed with all sorts of compounds our body makes use of
I pulled up the nutrition of chicken and salmon. For chicken, I'd say "not really;" it's protein, fat, some B-6, and the rest of the micronutrients are <10% of the RDA per serving. The main notable nutrient difference between chicken and salon is more B-12.
Except for B-12 and omega 3 fatty acids, meat isn't where you're going to get micronutrients.
I'm not talking about the micronutrients we measure, I'm talking about the ones we don't.
Just a super-quick Google search reveals, for example:
> Dr. Stephen Rennard of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. He conducted laboratory tests to determine why chicken soup might help colds, beginning with his wife’s homemade recipe, handed down by her Lithuanian grandmother. Using blood samples from volunteers, he showed that the soup inhibited the movement of neutrophils, the most common type of white blood cell that defends against infection. Dr. Rennard theorizes that by inhibiting the migration of these infection-fighting cells in the body, chicken soup essentially helps reduce upper respiratory cold symptoms. The researchers couldn’t identify the exact ingredient or ingredients in the soup that made it effective against colds.
The idea that we understand and have catalogued all the compounds in meats (or vegetables) and fully understand how they improve our health is far, far from true.
I'm not talking about "magic" compounds or anything... but just that our body functions optimally on a wide variety of nutrients, of which we study only a relative handful.
Even for things we know of, like how important the iron in beef is -- would lab-grown beef contain it as well? Would it come "by default" or would it have to be specifically included?
I thought the whole point of cultured meat is that it is the exact same product? It literally just as much as meat as a meat cut from a whole animal, just without the rest of the animal. Therefore it would be just as safe as meat cut from an animal.
Nice. Chicken is healthy. I was going to raise rabbits due to their ability to produce more protein than a cow (per year). If there is a document that details how I can safely grow chicken or rabbit cells myself, then I won't need to raise animals. My goal being to not depend on businesses. a.k.a. homesteading. I am open to creating my own home lab.
Right now, we use unskilled labor (cows) to perform chemical reactions with biomass (grass) to produce milk. I find it surprising that we can't do the same but significantly cheaper and cleaner with vats.
I'm not talking about plant substitutes like oat or almond extracts, I mean actual milk that's produced using the same process that cows perform internally.
I think people confuse having state of the art knowledge of nutrition with knowing how all of nutrition works. There may be good arguements that this is safe, but history will decide that.
> The cells used to start the process came from a cell bank and did not require the slaughter of a chicken because cells can be taken from biopsies of live animals.
I wonder how many different chickens they sampled from the cell bank. Does their entire product trace back to a single "Eve" chicken sample from the cell bank? For comparison, I read (in "Diet for a New America", I believe) that one ground beef hamburger includes cells from about one thousand different cows.
If they just need cell samples, I wonder how different the process would be to grow human meat in a lab. There might be a niche novelty market for "human burgers"!
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadThat would be amazing. Looking at the prices for vegetarian and vegan meat substitutes, I can't see it happening. : They are more expensive than meat. It appears that we need a lot more competition in these markets.
You'd remove the incentives to choose one over the other but less people will be able to eat. That's dangerous.
More over, you'd remove the new tech's incentive to become cheaper. I think cheaper food is always better for everyone.
Ideally it should scale a lot better than the real stuff.
Pricing in the negative externalities of meat is the best way to address this, which has a started goal of reducing the consumption of environmentally harmful meat.
It enables meat that is sustainable to be priced competitively and to shift consumption, but we should be very honest -- the goal of any pigouvian tax is to reduce the consumption of the harmful product.
Thus, meat should become more of a luxury, which means yes, it would be less accessible to the poor. But with billions becoming richer and demanding more meat consumption, the path we are on is entirely unsustainable.
The aim is only to nudge the scale rather than tax the farmed meat out of existence.
If we want to make sure meat products stay available in large quantities to everyone so you can have bacon for breakfast, a sandwich with deli slices for lunch, and a burger for dinner every day, you can take that subsidy money and put it toward lab grown meat instead.
Personally I'd like to see some of it redirected to vegetables though. Cheap meat and expensive vegetables isn't the ideal outcome even if it comes from the lab.
For the soy at least.
The issue is really eating processed crap off the shelves than the ingredients as per se, e.g. does any get obese from fresh pasta?
I don't think most of the world views animal husbandry as having inherent cruelty in the first place.
And one often finds that the relationship to food is different outside of the US. It's somehow less of a commodity and more of a meaningful tradition. You'll be hard-pressed to convince Frenchmen to let go of Limousin beef, for example, and in a manner that's markedly different from Texans defending their meat.
While you're right that there might be more attachment to 'traditional' and overall high quality meat, there's still a big movement for cruelty free meat as you can see by the impact of associations like L214 for example, or the fact that there was an increase of 25% for the vegetarian market in 2018
I just happened to come across a mean farmer in my language bragging about a “tadpole massacre” in their ricefield that happens when the field is drained in an appropriate season, a very conventional, not at all industrial, pesticide free, yet apparently a cruel method for unwanted animals, used to produce entirely vegetable products.
Conventional ethical vegetarianism don’t offer a consensus around such animal cruelty involved in vegetable produces, it’s completely out of sight and out of scope.
I believe this is a solved issue in trains of philosophy/religions from India, where some groups of people have practiced partial vegetarianism for millenniums, which I suspect to be the actual upstream of various vegetarianisms, and the layman’s versions of it say you should accept the sin, reasonably try to minimize harm to all life, and leave animal processing to (enslaved) butcher classes. The slavery part is kind of creepy, but the former two parts solves this classes of controversies beautifully.
As you can see, most, if not all, known branches of vegetarianisms are specifically crafted rebellion movement against certain parts of western agriculture, and I think thus they are moot in other contexts.
But go visit a family owned ranch in Wyoming and tell me those cows don't have it just as good as the elk grazing alongside them.
Also, for the cows, chickens, pigs, etc themselves, the options are a life under husbandry or no life at all.
I would like to see meat substitutes become good enough to displace the low quality stuff (fast-food, etc), but a world without high-quality natural animal protein is a dull one...
Sci-Fi reader part of myself wonder if there could be some information theory aspect to a perfect-mess of meat, that the food must grow within a context relevant to the consumer, i.e. a perfect piece of meat or a carrot from 100 years in the future or past is not perfect to us in present.
We just need to consume less and go back to more natural production of what we do eat.
I don't know for the US, but in France 82 % of poultry, 90% of pigs et 99 % of rabbits come from mass production.
So if you live in the city and cannot really know the origin of what you eat, you can bet it's been mass produced.
I think that's why there's such a hype around vegetarianism and veganism right now : not so much because eating animal is an absolute evil, but because most animal products available do not come from a family owned ranch in Wyoming but from places like this one : https://animaux.l214.com/poulets/elevage-poulets-duc-yonne-2...
If they could be raised in humane, unlike mass production conditions, then one could argue convincingly that it's better than not doing it all from a purely compassionate viewpoint.
It's still tremendously wasteful of land and resources, but that's a separate concern to address.
Fears of trichinosis decades ago led to pork being overcooked for a long time. I did sous vide pork chops for my parents and they said it was the best pork chop they'd ever had, but still weren't crazy about it. They just don't like pork, after a lifetime of eating it overcooked.
I've done chicken breast at low temp and ended up with a mushy piece of meat i didn't care for. Chicken breast is good in a relatively narrow band of temperatures, where it's neither mushy nor dessicated, and often you still need to crisp the skin. Technology has made it easier to get in that band.
It would be cool to do steak tartare at home, though!
As a vegetarian, I have to wonder who the target market for this is.
Meat substitutes that don't use any animal cells whatsoever have existed for a long time, and many of them are pretty convincing, and even when they're not they often delicious in their own right.
It's cheese that I find to be the last great frontier as far as substitutes go. There just isn't even a remotely passible substitute for many cheeses.
Not everyone is convinced that being vegetarian is an option for them, and they don't have to be so convinced with this option.
99% vegetarian, 1% pescatarian here and I agree with your statement, but I'd add milk and eggs to that list. There is no substitute for eggs at the moment AFAIK and despite many probably pointing me to all the oat/nut/soy milk replacements none of them comes even close to real milk for me. I can tolerate a bit of oat milk with my coffee every now and then, but can't have a bowl of cereal with milk substitutes. Just doesn't taste right. Also I'm concerned about the much higher glucose intake from oat milks than real milk.
It depends on what form you're using the eggs in.
I don't think there's any substitute for hard-boiled eggs, or sunny-side-up fried eggs, for example.
However, tofu-scrambles make a good substitute for scrambled eggs, in my experience.
There are also a million substitutes for eggs in baking.
"despite many probably pointing me to all the oat/nut/soy milk replacements none of them comes even close to real milk for me"
Ok, they might not taste like milk per se, but I find some soy milk and other nut milks taste much better than ordinary milk.. though different. Many of them do tend to be sweeter, and I personally like that.. they taste more like a dessert to me, which I'm usually fine with.
Glucose is a problem, but there's no reason they couldn't use sugar substitutes, of which there are many (though unfortunately some of the best, like tagatose, are still pretty expensive).
Have you tried allulose? I can't get it in my country, but it sounds better than others.
I have, actually. It's ok, but I find it a lot less sweet than sugar, so I have to use maybe 2x to 3x as much as I would regular sugar.. add to this that it's probably 10x as expensive as sugar and it is just way too expensive for me.
Not to mention that at least the brand I tried was a lot finer than ordinary table sugar, and was closer to powdered sugar in consistency. This is ok for some applications, but not others.
I found tagatose to be much, much better, as it's virtually indistinguishable from sugar for me. It's also way more expensive than sugar, but at least it's comparable to sugar in sweetness, so you only have to use about as much as you'd use of regular sugar.
Tagatose also doesn't have any weird aftertaste to it, unlike stevia, for instance. Overall, it's by far the best sugar substitute I've ever tried, and would highly recommend it.
Does Tagatose caramelise? That's one of the things xylitol won't which is frustrating for some recipes.
But unfortunately, meat protein has some of the highest biological value, outside of egg whites/whey/dairy proteins.
When you factor in how cheap low-grade meat is, it winds up being incredibly economical to just eat a bunch of $2/lb chicken and whatnot. Especially if you're trying to eat upwards of 200-250g of protein a day, it gets expensive fast.
So I have sort of accepted this hypocritical double-standard, where I recognize that what I am doing is not entirely ethical but at the same time it's too practical for me to give up. Plus, I love meat.
Lab-grown meat at somewhere near the price of regular meat has been a dream for me because then I get to have my cake and eat it too. Don't have to give up meat, or try to substitute non-meat proteins for it, and no actual sentient being has to suffer and die in order for me to continue doing so.
Huge win-win, can't come soon enough.
I would eat the plant-based stuff if someone could prove comparable biological value and the price was the same or only marginally higher, too.
I really don't care, as long as it tastes (doesn't even have to look) like meat, and the bodily effects are identical.
By what standard?
When I looked in to this for myself, it seemed like it's very unlikely for vegetarians to have protein deficiencies as long as they ate enough calories to sustain themselves and ate a decent variety of food (which they should be doing anyway, to stave off other health issues).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_value
The tl;dr is that it boils down to amino-acid profile. There are 9 Essential Amino Acid's (EAA's) that human body can't synthesize from other amino acids.
A food's biological value is determined (primarily) by it's amino acid profile. It's also not just about the overall amount, but also the ratio, since the way that amino acid absorption works is on a first-come-first-serve basis and so the proportion matters almost as much as composition.
There's a list of common foods and their biological value on that page if you're curious.
> "When I looked in to this for myself, it seemed like it's very unlikely for vegetarians to have protein deficiencies as long as they ate enough calories to sustain themselves and ate a decent variety of food (which they should be doing anyway, to stave off other health issues)."
Ah, yeah. For the average person, it doesn't matter. You can pretty much eat anything and be alright. The grand majority of people have god-awful diets and seem to function just fine.
I recreationally bodybuild so my dietary requirements are kind of an edgecase scenario.
As for bodybuilding, there are some vegetarian and even vegan bodybuilders out there. Have you looked in to how/what they eat?
[1] - https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-protein-combining-myth/
[2] - https://www.treehugger.com/myth-complete-protein-4858275
This is probably going to sound gross, but for me it's the allure of not having to bite into bone fragments or tendons. I'm one of those types of people where if there's an eggshell, piece of bone, stem, or anything else that's an unintended guest in my food, I will find it.
I don't mean for this motive to sound selfish, but it would be nice to be able to enjoy something of the sort (e.g. ground beef) without it becoming meat-flavored chewing gum.
Joking aside, I think the potential for a high degree of consistency in terms of texture and flavor would be another bonus.
I can't name a brand for you off-hand, but whenever I've bought vegetarian ground-beef substitutes at grocery stores, I've never once had this issue. They all tasted pretty much exactly like ground beef.
In my experience, that particular substitute is not a challenge.
There are also some pretty great vegetarian hamburger substitutes, like Boca Burger.
It's not. Some of the TVP products are pretty decent (and surprisingly so). And honestly, it's off-putting enough that it'd be worth using a substitute for. I eat hamburgers only rarely, so most of my ground beef consumption is in other dishes that are heavily seasoned enough that using a substitute is no problem (e.g. taco meat).
Otherwise, my problem is if I'm fixing chicken breasts for something and miss some connective tissue when I'm preparing it. I can guarantee with near certainty that if I do, I will be the one to find it. :)
(Sorry to gross you out if you're vegan.)
This is true. Unfortunately, where I live, all of the grocery chains have reduced or eliminated their own butchers. The one that I can think of off hand that is still in town was good for a while, and contamination is unlikely, but the quality of their sources seems to have diminished over time.
I'm honestly half-tempted to go back to grinding my own, which probably sounds unnecessary. But hey...
As somebody who hasn't eaten meat for years, I've long used "fake meat" substitutes because I originally missed normal meat, but the idea of eating actual meat (even lab-bred) triggers a disgust reflex now; I'll stick with the fake stuff.
As a meat eater, this is very interesting to me. I try to be as environmentally responsible as I can when it comes to meat, but its still all bad really. I cannot go more than a few days tops without animal protein, or I start to get weird cravings. Could I eventually get past it? Probably, but not interested in doing so. But I certainly am interested in more environmentally friendly options, if they are safe and economical.
Have you tried many vegetarian meat substitutes?
When I talk to meat eaters about this, many of them haven't tried many at all, and if they had tried anything it's maybe one product ten years ago.
The world of vegetarian meat substitutes has exploded in recent years, and there is just so much variety these days, many of them are really incredibly delicious and I'd stack them up against most meat any day.
Ok, they might not be 100% accurate, and tend to lack the blood, veins, gristle, skin, fat and bones of authentic meat products, but I think most people can live without those, if not even actively want to avoid some of that.
I also probably don't have the correctly balanced diet when I have done that in the past. And I have found a protein heavy diet is what my body prefers, and carbs are not super great for me. End up heavy and tired. And the vegetarian / vegan stuff we have done in the past have been far to carb heavy for me.
And I love cheese. Mac and cheese, alfredo, things like that. And I have yet to find a substitute that is acceptable to me in the cheese department. Although I have been able to cut back on the dairy the last few weeks, so its possible I could eventually cut it out. That just hasn't been on my priority list.
It's effectively a prototype. As noted in the article, the next version won't use this.
Natural meat gets tons of micronutrients through many different processes in the animal in it that this artifical meat never can unless they can 100% mimic an entire animal, which well, means that they would have to grow an entire animal...
You cannot just "add some zinc here and there" and pretend that it's ok.
This will lead to severe micronutrient deficiencies, just protein is far from enough.
Anyone who says this is a good food product is an idiot, there is no nice way to say this. In fact the term idiot as a way to mild term for this kind of a person.
To belive you can give & match all the required delicate balance of nutrients in lab grown meat compared to real meat is beyond stupid.
To some extent this is already a problem with real meat, because almost nobody in the USA eats organ meat and it's particularly rich in micronutrients.
This belief is what caused the food to get so depleted in all micronutrients in the 1st place: because people aren't aware how important they are -> they don't care about them -> no one enforces rules for food quality in the micronutrients department -> food quality goes to shit over time.
White rice in the US is required by law to be enriched [1]. The FDA heavily regulates food in the US, leading to some of the highest quality food in the world.
Perhaps you don't live in the US. If you do live in the US, I highly recommend taking some time to learn about the things you talk about in online forums. Spreading BS around isn't helpful for anyone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rice
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I doubt anyone here has tried this product yet or seen any extensive analysis, so to say it's good or not good is pure speculation at this point. Laying insults atop an argument seldom strengthens it.
Basically everything we need in terms of nutrients (micro and macro) can be found in non-meat food products. Wherever a non-meat diet falls short of the needed micronutrients, multivitamins can be added to make up any deficiencies. Again, see vegans.
Finally, lab grown meat IS meat. Our bodies can break down and harvest any micronutrients grown into the meat. Furthermore, as developments are made, it's naive to assume the companies producing the lab grown meat won't attempt to add anything important which might be missing.
There's also precedent in the food industry for adding nutrients to food staples - white rice in America is legally required to be enriched. This point also confirms OPs concern is worth thinking about to begin with - the rice nutrient deficiency has caused epidemics in Asia. However, this problem has largely been solved.
Finally, OPs rant seems to start from an adversarial position. The arguments put forward seem to be in bad faith, as they are mostly distilled with minor research on lab-grown meat.
Example: vitamin C in supplements is only ascorbic acid. But the real vitamin C is a "complex" and contains multiple other vitamins INSIDE of it+ stuff surrounding the complex.
You cannot break down meat into minerals and vitamins if they don't have them in the first place.
The comparison might still not be perfect, but OPs point about needing a well-balanced diet is still relevant and important to this discussion. We don't get all our nutrients from a single source, especially not meat. So not getting all our nutrients from lab-grown meat isn't a problem. We'll get them from somewhere else. Unless you know there is a specific nutrient in meat, which we don't get from any other source, which lab grown meat won't replicate. However, that's unlikely or vegans would all be dead.
So really, what's the problem with replacing meat?
Also this product will sooner or later be marketed as legit meat replacement.
But otherwise yes, even those who'd eat it just for protein would be idiots because eg whey comes from a natural food source beforehand which means nature has already done it's thing properly beforehand.
To think that growing stuff in a lab has no unintented consequences is beyond stupid, even if you use it "just for protein".
I have no problem with them trying it, although I worry about weird prion based diseases cropping up that would make a living breathing creature non viable and die, when it wouldn’t be noticeable in something lab grown until far too late (i.e. after humans have consumed it).
Basically the fact that a creature is not dead might mean that its constituent proteins are likely suitable for consumption? Obviously not bulletproof, as mad cow exists, but lab grown meat might have a much wider homeostatic range, since it doesn’t have a brain how would you know it has prions that could negatively affect brain function? How could you even test for such a thing?
This fake meat produt has THE SAME ISSUE AS MARGARINE HAD: people think it's safe because a few "experts" say so. This is what happened to margarine.
In reality artifical food is always a bomb waiting to go off inside of you.
So this artifical meat is the modern equivalent of what "margarine is healthy for you" was ~60 years ago.
All these things listed above are very viable and healthy options for people to eat. The proof is in the pudding (XD) as people eat this stuff constantly, and at massive volumes, worldwide, without dying or whatever.
Also, who are you speaking on behalf of? Who thinks lab-grown meat is so safe? Who doesn't have concerns about the safety of this meat? It seems you're making ridiculous claims not based on any of the relevant literature.
Sometimes experts are wrong, that does not mean that they are not still our best hope of being right about things. Otherwise we may as all just listen to the village idiot's twitter account and inject bleach.
> In reality artifical food is always a bomb waiting to go off inside of you.
It really isn't any different than "real" food just because it is made in a lab. It may not have the same exact qualities as its natural equivalent, but "natural" by no means is the same as "safe" or "healthy" anyway. Do you want me to show you pictures of giant puss-filled cysts in a cow carcass? Or should we talk about Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease? There is nothing inherently good about "natural" and evil about "artificial", as your posts seem to imply.
Well put. I tried to find these words and failed.
The only way to make this safe is by testing performance on mice or rats fed lab-grown meat vs. regular meat. Testing needs to be done at a high level(how long did take mice to travel the maze) and not at a low level(for a specific vitamin). Do not let them turn us into their experiment. You will suffer death by a thousand cuts if this food isn't good.
Regardless, this is pretty cool and very useful if successful but proper tests need to be put in place.
Your comment is a simple example of natural-is-good fallacy. For all you know those natural micro-nutrients in meat could be net harmful (there are studies that some types of meat have negative health effects, and I say it as an avid steak eater - as far as I know, they don't have a good handle on specific causes, so it could be that the fake steak won't have them and only the "natural" one does :)).
There's always some risk in innovation, but it seems like synthetic nutrition is an absolute minefield. It's not just the raw complexity of the field, either. It's also that much of nutrition is junk science, even in the peer-reviewed literature.
On a more conspirational note, I also can't help but to notice that the agro-dietary industry is a pretty low-margin business. It seems like driving up profit margins requires convincing people that existing foods are somehow unsuitable, and that "innovative" products are therefore needed. I think vegan and ecological sensibilities are being instrumentalized to this end.
In any case: this anonymous internet stranger plans on skipping the lab-meat fad.
The argument is that we're taking a major public health risk on the basis of low-quality science, in an industry with a questionable track-record.
This isn't just a new food product. This is more directly comparable to a new pharmacological compound, and ought to be treated as such.
Are we? (I really don't know the answer to this.) What's the science behind it and what are the gaps in it? This is the first time lab-grown meat is being sold and so far it's happening only in one country on the planet.
An argument would be evidence for this claim about "low-quality science".
Comments upon comments of fear-mongering, and not a single one has managed to reference a scholarly work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
>Prions are misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein. They characterize several fatal and transmissible neurodegenerative diseases in humans and many other animals.[3] It is not known what causes the normal protein to misfold,
A lot of them take years to even be discovered once your infected and we're still not sure what causes them to misfold.
We're making proteins in a lab, have done only a few years of study on the safety and have approved them for human consumption. We may not see or understand the consequences for decades.
> According to Beyond Meat's website, ingredients for its plant-based patties include water, pea protein isolate, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein and other natural flavors, including apple extract and beet juice extract (for color)
Safety concerns with respect to innovation are understandable. But they should be grounded. We know things like pea protein don't hurt us.
It's the non-mostly other stuff that worries me.
You're right, it is a (literal) cut-throat business. But the price of synthetic meat has been falling exponentially [1]. Hopefully it'll drop far below traditional meat. This is not a product you'd want to adopt if you're interested in high margins.
> I think vegan and ecological sensibilities are being instrumentalized to this end.
Organic is a better example. It's simply a marketing concept designed to capitalize on the appeal to nature fallacy. It's not healthier or cheaper or better for the environment [2]. Veganism is different: it's the practice of abstaining from the use of animal products.
[1] http://www.rosiebosworth.com/blog/2017/8/2/price-will-trump-...
[2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/httpblogs...
Whether it's better for the environment is much less clear; the USDA organic requirements are pretty watered down, and modern pesticides responsibly applied are pretty safe, but synthetic fertilizer, as typically applied on commercial scale farms, is pretty darn bad for ecosystems.
True. It's a big problem. However, the biggest environmental problem _right now_ is habitat loss. As in, massive habitat loss has already happened. We won't feel the really bad effects of climate change for another 100 years. Clearing forests also contribute to climate change.
> Habitat loss is perhaps the greatest threat to organisms and biodiversity.[5] Temple (1986) found that 82% of endangered bird species were significantly threatened by habitat loss. Most amphibian species are also threatened by native habitat loss,[6] and some species are now only breeding in modified habitat
So how do we reduce habitat loss? Well, clearing habitats for agriculture is the principal cause of habitat destruction [1]. So we should try to be efficient with the land we have. Unfortunately organic farming does the opposite [2]:
> The Oxford meta-analysis of 71 studies found that organic farming requires 84% more land for an equivalent amount of harvest
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_destruction#Impacts_on...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_farming#Land_use
Based on the responses, I just want to make this clear: this is NOT a comprehensive comparison of organic and conventional agriculture, nor is it intended to be. That post would be miles long and far more complex. My overall belief is that there shouldn't be a dichotomy in the first place - there are a variety of methods and practices that a farmer can use, each with its pros and cons. The main point here is that something "organic" isn't intrinsically better than something that isn't, and that you have to approach all kinds of agriculture critically to achieve optimum sustainability.
I thought so... I would be surprised if the main point (that organic food is not healthier pesticide-wise) applies to all organic labels.
It's not clear what exactly are you referring to with "organic", as one can refer to both agricaltural products and processed food.
At least in relation to processed food, I do read and compare labels, and very often, there are 1. less additives 2. natural additives as opposed to chemical ones 3. less refined ingredients.
This alone is a big deal, and just based on this, organic as a whole is definitely healthier.
I can't talk for processes themselves, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were higher standards in the food chain (e.g. less freezing time, no freezing at all etc.). As a matter of fact, you'll often read that organic is tastier; I personally don't find it so, but that could be very well the cause. Again, organic food is preferrable here (I'm not using "healthier" in a strict sense here).
I'm not based on USA though, which may have looser food standards.
I'm referring to both, and more. All of it. Here is the definition from wikipedia [1]
> Organic food is food produced by methods complying with the standards of organic farming. Standards vary worldwide, but organic farming features practices that cycle resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity. Organizations regulating organic products may restrict the use of certain pesticides and fertilizers in the farming methods used to produce such products. Organic foods typically are not processed using irradiation, industrial solvents, or synthetic food additives
>This alone is a big deal, and just based on this, organic as a whole is definitely healthier.
This is the appeal to nature fallacy I referred to originally. Just so we're on the same page [2]:
> The appeal to nature is a logical fallacy that occurs when something is claimed to be good because it’s perceived as natural, or bad because it’s perceived as unnatural.
> For example, a person using an appeal to nature might suggest using herbal remedies when treating a serious medical condition, despite what research says on the topic, simply because they perceive the herbal remedies as more natural than modern treatments.
> It’s important to understand this kind of fallacious thinking, since it frequently plays a role in people’s internal reasoning process, as well as in debates on various topics. As such, in the following article you will learn more about the appeal to nature fallacy, and see what you can do in order to counter people who use it, while also making sure that you won’t use it yourself.
The linked page has many examples, you can find more here [3]. In response to your points in particular:
1. Additives aren't healthy or unhealthy. It simply describes a category of food. Anything can be an additive: sugar, salt, apples, uranium.
2. The meaning of "natural" and "chemical" isn't well-defined here. Everything in nature is composed of chemicals and chemicals are natural. The meaning you're giving to these words are basically natural is good and chemical is bad. If not, please provide a rigorous definition of the two words.
3. Refined probably refers to "processed"? It's similarly vague, allowing anyone to make it mean whatever they want. So if we go with the definition:
> "Processed food" includes food that has been cooked, canned, frozen, packaged or changed in nutritional composition with fortifying, preserving or preparing in different ways. Any time we cook, bake or prepare food, we're processing food
Then no, it's not bad to process food: [4], [5]. Some forms of processing may be bad yes, but please specify what you mean.
> but I wouldn't be surprised if there were higher standards in the food chain (e.g. less freezing time, no freezing at all etc.)
Again, which standards? My point being that standards enforced by organic farming _are not_ about improving taste, cost, or health. Of course they claim that, but there is insufficient evidence for this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food
[2] https://effectiviology.com/appeal-to-nature-fallacy/
[3] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature#Examples
[4] https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/not-all-proce...
[5] https:/&...
If one compares a significant range of non-organic food products with organic ones, the latter will correlate with lack of some ingredients, or replacement with comparable ones. This can be verified easily by anybody who lives in a country with a meaningful presence of the organic market/brands (I'm not sure what's the situation in USA; I wouldn't be suprised if the average presence is negligible).
Considering that nutrition is "not really" a science, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that if something has been approved by the food institutions (e.g. FDA), they don't have a negative impact on the body, therefore, organic and non-organic food products have essentially the same.
For the same reason though, the opposite is also reasonable.
If I can choose between, say, packaged bread with and without, say, hydrogenated fats and corn syrup, I prefer the latter, but as I wrote, I don't think that who chooses the former is wrong, ignorant, or so.
Regarding the standards, the same principle holds. Enforcing, there's not absolute truth about, say, crops rotation and forbidding antibiotics/hormones (this are some of the rules dictated by organic organizations) can be believed or not (I don't doubt there's straight snake oil in some practices). There was an Scientific American article on HN correlating modern agriculture practices to lower nutritional properties of crops, therefore practices mandated by the organic standards have a sense, but I doubt that there is a rigorous scientific investigation on this, so anybody can be reasonably reject the argument.
Dunno, seems stupid to me.
Is lab-grown meat going to have anything like that variety?
We have a long history of thinking we've identified all the important ones, only to make new discoveries of important things, whether it's omega-3 fats, or compounds that fight free radicals. It remains to be seen whether lab-grown meat will be equally nutritious.
Don't most of these kinds of things wind up being marketing jargon which later gets largely debunked? Taking antioxidants as an example, we manufacture most of what we need already, you only need trace amounts of nutrients like vitamin C to satisfy the rest of your needs. Attempts to supplement those sources further with "superfoods," pills, etc have approximately zero affect on any metric of interest.
On the contrary. Artificially large doses of antioxidants disrupt signaling systems, preventing exercise recovery and wound healing. They are simply not a good idea.
However, the parent comment is mistaken in thinking that we don't understand nutrition reasonably well, and might 'miss' something in artificially cultured meat.
The science of nutrition is still in its infancy, with very basic questions still unanswered, and we're very, very far from having catalogued all the nutrients in meat and vegetables and understanding their effects on our body.
I mean, even with macro nutrients, just look at the flip-flopping and debates over the past few decades on saturated fats, trans fats, carbs vs fats, etc. Then when you get to micronutrients, we don't even know what we don't know.
You can see the other comment I made on how, for example, we know chicken soup helps fight colds, but don't have the slightest idea what compound is responsible. Will lab-grown chicken do the same?
Even calling those compounds "nutrients" in the first place is a bit circular. If something hasn't had enough of an effect on any of our observations to warrant further investigation, or else if all the evidence points to it being largely inert, then it probably isn't much of a nutrient. We've almost certainly missed a thing or two here or there, but pointing to a list of compounds in meat that aren't in a nutrition book and assuming those must be nutrients of some kind doesn't seem like a productive activity.
> I mean, even with macro nutrients, just look at the flip-flopping and debates over the past few decades on saturated fats, trans fats, carbs vs fats, etc. Then when you get to micronutrients, we don't even know what we don't know.
The implication seems to be that macronutrients should be easier to reason about, so if we don't know much about them then we can't know much about micronutrients. In practice though, macronutrient composition doesn't matter much and doesn't have strong effects, whereas many micronutrients are easily testable. The flip-flopping hasn't been one of a vast scientific consensus, but rather small amounts of scientific research and a vast marketing machine.
> You can see the other comment I made on how, for example, we know chicken soup helps fight colds, but don't have the slightest idea what compound is responsible. Will lab-grown chicken do the same?
That seems like a moving goalpost (or a misunderstanding on my part as to what your position is). Is "a reasonable understanding of nutrition" a large enough body of knowledge to tailor a body composition to one's favourite activities and keep it healthy for its normal lifespan barring medical events (aging, cancer, colds, loss of limb), or is it a perfect understanding of every interaction things we can consume might have with our body or any other organisms we're hosting?
Mildly off-topic: We know that chicken soup probably eases cold symptoms, and so do hot water and hot tea. Even assuming a compound is medicinally responsible in the first place doesn't seem like a great starting point.
Both sides of that are completely false. We have gigantic gaps in basic nutrition knowledge, and the idea that we have a strong idea of all existing important correlations is similarly completely and utterly incorrect.
The idea that flip-flopping is due to a "vast marketing machine" is also completely disingenuous. I'm not talking about pop science articles, I'm talking about disagreement between scientists.
I seriously don't know where people get this idea that human nutrition is this advanced science where we know most of the answers. I can only assume it's wishful thinking? It would be nice if we did... but we really don't. And there's a good reason for it, which is that it's incredibly difficult to ethically perform decades-long controlled experiments with nutrition in people to provide definitive scientific answers, for the obvious reasons.
Not in the slightest. I've explicitly said we have "a reasonable understanding of nutrition" and not even vaguely implied that we know everything. Am I misunderstanding you that poorly too, and is that why we seem to be in such disagreement?
TIL. That's fantastic.
I pulled up the nutrition of chicken and salmon. For chicken, I'd say "not really;" it's protein, fat, some B-6, and the rest of the micronutrients are <10% of the RDA per serving. The main notable nutrient difference between chicken and salon is more B-12.
Except for B-12 and omega 3 fatty acids, meat isn't where you're going to get micronutrients.
Just a super-quick Google search reveals, for example:
> Dr. Stephen Rennard of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. He conducted laboratory tests to determine why chicken soup might help colds, beginning with his wife’s homemade recipe, handed down by her Lithuanian grandmother. Using blood samples from volunteers, he showed that the soup inhibited the movement of neutrophils, the most common type of white blood cell that defends against infection. Dr. Rennard theorizes that by inhibiting the migration of these infection-fighting cells in the body, chicken soup essentially helps reduce upper respiratory cold symptoms. The researchers couldn’t identify the exact ingredient or ingredients in the soup that made it effective against colds.
The idea that we understand and have catalogued all the compounds in meats (or vegetables) and fully understand how they improve our health is far, far from true.
I'm not talking about "magic" compounds or anything... but just that our body functions optimally on a wide variety of nutrients, of which we study only a relative handful.
Even for things we know of, like how important the iron in beef is -- would lab-grown beef contain it as well? Would it come "by default" or would it have to be specifically included?
[1] https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/the-science-of-chi...
Right now, we use unskilled labor (cows) to perform chemical reactions with biomass (grass) to produce milk. I find it surprising that we can't do the same but significantly cheaper and cleaner with vats.
I'm not talking about plant substitutes like oat or almond extracts, I mean actual milk that's produced using the same process that cows perform internally.
A machine that transforms grass to milk sounds extremely skilled to me.
I wonder how many different chickens they sampled from the cell bank. Does their entire product trace back to a single "Eve" chicken sample from the cell bank? For comparison, I read (in "Diet for a New America", I believe) that one ground beef hamburger includes cells from about one thousand different cows.
If they just need cell samples, I wonder how different the process would be to grow human meat in a lab. There might be a niche novelty market for "human burgers"!