The only advantage of this is optimizing the food supply chain
The marketing around this type of product is very bad, they should not call it meat and they should stop trying to shame their potential customers for eating meat (from animals)
Real advantage is much less animal cruelty and much much less pollution, in case of cows literally fighting global warming big time.
If it tastes like meat from previously live animals, it definitely can be called meat, albeit its good to clearly distinguish it from the other. I know from folks around me they wouldnt mind it as long the taste is OK, has some good safety checks for various nasty chemicals and price is reasonable.
What reason is there to think that the animals the cells are harvested from will be treated with less cruelty? I would have assumed that they would be bound to exist in the same conditions.
This alone removes almost all of the downside suffering.
Additionally, for those of a more more absolutist moral bent, when the animals are small in number, there isn't the same financial pressure to ruthlessly optimize cost at the expense of welfare; you can afford to raise the animal in non-torture conditions without it materially impacting competitive position.
Do you think this will compel people towards meat-only diets to avoid the billions of insects and other critters harmed in the production of plant-based food?
Realistically, meat is N+M, where M is the cruelty towards animals in the production of food for animals. But M still remains if people keep eating plants.
The nutrients for the cell lines are still going to come from plants, so I don't see any reduction in the cruelty involved from the plant side, unless the new way allows using less of that.
Does that suggest that it could actually lead to more total animal cruelty? I expect, for example, cattle grazing grasslands is less cruel to the aforementioned critters than a mechanical harvest. The latter is downright brutal to animals. Indeed, if you save a cattle beast, but harm 100 additional crickets, you would be much, much worse off with respect to animal cruelty.
If the majority of farm animals get their feed from grazing, then replacing them as sources of nutrients with mechanically harvested plants might come out even.
As I understand it though, the vast majority of cattle are currently being fed mechanically harvested plants, so they can be cut out of the nutrient pathway without any need to increase suffering by the way of mechanical harvest.
> If the majority of farm animals get their feed from grazing, then replacing them as sources of nutrients with mechanically harvested plants might come out even.
Why even? Rule of thumb is that it takes an acre of grass to feed a cattle beast. If that acre is, instead, 'clear cut' multiple times each year, over several years to match what would be fed to a live animal, to ship the product off to a factory, only one animal living in that grass will experience the cruelty? That seems surprising. An acre of grass provides a significant habitat.
And that is if grass remains the source of nutrients. Harvested grass is hard to move efficiently. If, say, a row crop is used instead then there is an attack on the habitat even before harvest begins. Row crops regularly come under fire because of how unfriendly they are to everything else.
> As I understand it though, the vast majority of cattle are currently being fed mechanically harvested plants
While that is true – the vast majority of cattle are raised on grass and finished with corn, the latter of which being almost certainly mechanically harvested – it is also not binary.
According to Oklahoma State University, most cattle in the United States will spend most of their lives on pastures and grasslands and then finished in feedlots, the latter of which accounting for 15-35% of their lives according to their figures. This does mean that mechanically harvested food does account for some of the nutrient requirements for most cattle, but there is more to the story.
I think now you're in the territory of gathering real data. To my best knowledge, the amount of mechanical harvest needed to feed an animal one unit of protein is no more than 4 units of protein in the most optimistic case[0]. Even with some fudge factor, it is enough to give me an 80% certainty that cutting the animals out reduces net cruelty.
I don't know the conversion factor for lab meat, but I expect it to be somewhere between eating mechanically harvested plants and regular meat.
There's also the aspect of how you weigh suffering of different beings, which is a complicated enough topic that I won't get into right now[1]. I'll get back to it once feeding cattle with harvested grain becomes rare.
> To my best knowledge, the amount of mechanical harvest needed to feed an animal one unit of protein is no more than 4 units of protein in the most optimistic case[0]
So even if we assume that the harvest needs to affect four animals, that still seems like pretty small potatoes, no? Any hay field I've ever walked through was teaming with hundreds of visible insects alone, and who knows what else was hidden in there, in areas smaller than an acre.
> There's also the aspect of how you weigh suffering of different beings
I am not sure that is necessary. An earlier comment told that all we have to do is count animals. The larger the count, the more the cruelty. The entire discussion has hinged on that assertion.
Certainly there is going to be a whole lot of subjectivity. Some will argue that the number of animals doesn't matter with respect to cruelty – that suffering is wholly an individual experience. And many more will tell you that the animal that experiences the most cruelty of all is man himself and that ending that cruelty will solve all of the world's problems.
But I don't think we need to find a new metric. We already chose one that was good enough.
The discussion hinged of treating animals of the same kind equally: those that were slaughtered vs those who have had a biopsy. Once you introduce a different kind: those who suffer from plant harvesting, you can't apply the same rule.
Or maybe you can, but you'll find that others don't agree with your estimations.
For example, anyone believing in panpsychism will find this hard to work with. Do you include the harvested plants in your calculation and compare them on a 1:1 basis with slaughtered animals? This kind of nonintuitive conclusions result from insisting that all beings suffer the same. Not a good enough metric IMO.
> Certainly there is going to be a whole lot of subjectivity.
I'm afraid that it's not just "a whole lot", but the final answer depends entirely on subjective definitions of suffering, unless we can find a true, objective one. Sadly, some philosophers don't think that's possible at all [0].
Regardless of where the discussion began, it shifted to an animal multiplication factor represented by N, where the value of N determines the level of cruelty. While I ultimately agree that comment did not consider a lot of open questions, possibly due to being posted in haste, it was good enough to establish a focal point and it became the place where the discussion continued from.
An animal is an animal is an animal. While it is true that there is fluidity in language, and that one could define animal as only a creature kept by humans for the purpose of extracting meat, there was no push back on the use of the more common, broader definition that would be reflected in the dictionary.
Plants have not been considered animals. There has been a clear division between the plants harvested and the animals affected by it throughout the discussion. Whether or not their suffering should be included is and interesting side topic, but immaterial to this one. There is no value in flailing around trying to find new metrics. We picked one. It was certainly not perfect – far from it – but it was good enough. Perfect need not be the enemy of good.
While the philosophers have a point, we are only seeking something to form a belief. Beliefs need not be true. But they do need to be formed, and it seems we don't have enough information to form any kind of beliefs here?
I think you're mixing up the categories now. The animal originally in question for the factor was the slaughter animal, and the N factor applied only to those.
Otherwise, the discussion falls apart because a human is an animal is an animal. But no one is slaughtering humans with such an enthusiasm as cows or chickens. Equating all animals is a fringe belief not supported by the population at large, and one I don't feel like spending time to discuss, especially as it's not required for this discussion to have been valid.
I agree with this product 100%, although I fail to see how it could work unless normal meat is banned or taxed to be much more expensive.
Why?
It's very expensive to make, like synthetic fuel. But unlike fossil fuels, I have seen zero government initiative to ban or limit meat consumption so it's very unlikely for the economies of scale to work out, in my opinion.
I would be dishonest if I said I would pay a premium for meat as to not harm animals.
If you can kill two birds with one stone(ok maybe not the best saying in this context)and under cut the price of meat currently and at the same time be less cruel to animals then I will make it a diet staple ASAP.
I am sure it is anything but trivial though to undercut the price of chicken and turkey in the US.
Interesting. And not opposed to this at all, though I can't imagine it would be cost effective. Since most of what we eat (50-65%) is purely for energy.
That said. We get a lot more from animal meat than just protein and fat, and even then it's a wide variety of amino and fatty acids along with fat soluble nutrients. I think that actual animal protein (even if just eggs and fish) will still be necessary for a lot of micro-nutrients and versions of nutrients that are more digestible than what is available from other sources.
In a similar vein, I feel that natural fertilizer offers more to the soil than what chemical fertilizers bring to the table. Soil health has been a real and increasing problem over the past several decades.
Lab grown "meat" does not go through the life of an actual animal, and won't contain what a well raised animal will contain. Actual animals will consume food... for example, ruminant animals eat grass... this grass along with digestion process will bring nutrition that just feeding cells won't contain...
Fat soluble vitamins as an example example. In the case of just fat soluble vitamins, a lot of the supplements are either a baseline nutrient the body can convert to the actual nutrient or another form of the nutrient likewise. However these supplements are often not as bioavailable or have malabsorption and don't actually cover nutritional needs. A lot of the systemic hormonal issues in society can be traced to a reduction in the consumption of animal fats and fats in general, which are essential to body function.
That also doesn't cover the variety of fatty and amino acids in naturally grown muscle and fatty tissue in animals. You actually need a wide variety of these. And even then, the dietary guidelines are absolute minimums and not optimal values. They also don't contain guidance or understanding for all nutrients. It wasn't until just the past couple decades that a few essential nutrients were added for hospitalized feeding which accounted for serious brain/mental issues.
We (humans) have a very poor understanding of actual nutrient requirements, even for those in very small amounts that can have huge impacts on overall health.
edit: it can still be considered meat, or even animal meat... but if you look at the nutrition profile of farm raised vs wild caught salmon. Or grass fed grass finished beef vs grain fed. Or naturally fed chickens and their eggs vs commercial feed lots. There are vast differences in quality that can add up.
> this grass along with digestion process will bring nutrition that just feeding cells won't contain...
What makes you think that? If the cells are not fed the nutrients they need to survive, they will die. You can only reduce the inputs so much until the entire system breaks down.
That doesn't bar anyone from providing rich feeding mixes to produce cells with extra nutritional value.
They could also combine GMO cells with ultra-precise nutrient formulations to minimize costs, and be able to provide better nutrition than naturally-raised meat.
That assumes they know what needs to be there are aren't using substitute nutrients.
There's a lot of things in animal meat that won't be in lab meat. And given what they charge for oat milk and impossible burgers,.I doubt it will be more cost effective for the public.
could but the versions of those nutrients in supplements are usually not the same versions, but precursors that don't have the same bioavailability. There's also the fact that there are other micronutrients that we don't know if they are or aren't actually necessary for optimal health. Again, see choline[1], "in 2007 most commercial formulas were “humanized” in terms of choline content" ... That's 2007, which is really recent. That is just a single example. What else will be missing from lab meat?
Again, not opposed to lab grown meat... I still feel that it may be appropriate to still consume some animal based nutrition. Even if that is limited to mostly dairy, eggs and/or fish. As I stated earlier, half to two thirds of what people consume is mostly energy alone. Hormonal responses will vary based on the content, but strictly speaking, not so bad one way or another, provided an appropriate balance of amino and fatty acids, which even there, I doubt will be optimal.
I was under the impression that you pointed out a technical impossibility of putting the right nutrients in the cultured meat. Instead it seems like cultured meat will [at first] not have the ingredients [due to lack of knowledge], [similarly to other existing products]. Thanks for explaining.
Do we need those nutrients to be more digestible? Why do we assume that more available nutrients will lead to better health? I would guess there are some nutrients that are beneficial and probably many we already get more than optimal amounts of, and it seems like science is only just now starting to have any clue what these things do.
I'm a bit biased, I don't eat meat nor do I have any interest in lab grown meat for at least a decade or two after it becomes common.
Awesome. There is no better way to slow climate change, we need to stop the endless waste of energy that is modern industrialized livestock agriculture. I genuinely believe that this can be a cheaper and easier alternative to real meat, when the time comes.
> Though many of the details are proprietary, the basic formula to produce cultivated meat is clear. They began by extracting cells from animals using a needle biopsy. Food scientists no longer need to go back to the animal to extract cells every time, since there are lots of cells stored in a cell bank. The companies can select the cells they want to grow. Then, inside the stainless steel tanks, the cells are fed a mix of the same nutrients an animal would eat, a combination of fats, sugar, amino acids and vitamins, which allows the cells to proliferate and grow into meat.
I do wonder how vegans will feel about this needle biopsy. And while they say there are lots of cells stored in the "cell bank," it does seem like it will need to be replenished with future needle biopsies or there will be genetic drift if they recycle cells from the vat (which might be fine or even desired). Does this mean we can eat whale and, I dunno, bald eagle?
Edit: or, excellent point raised in a dead comment... human? Sounds ick to me too, but bear with me: is the height of ethical meat consumption to have personal meat-vats grown from your own donor cells?
Some vegans will be okay with it because the marginal animal suffering needed to produce each additional pound of meat is roughly zero. Some vegans will still not be okay with it because (pick any):
- It's still more energy intensive than plant-based foods.
- Meat, in general, doesn't meet their personal healthiness threshold.
- It's an unnatural way to produce meat with unknown health risks.
As a vegan I applaud every step towards the elimination of animal exploitation, this product might be a nice niche for transitioning but once you get accustomed to plant based whole foods you feel strange eating even “meat replacers” as for the environmental impact I don’t think it can get any worst than animal agriculture.
I'm a vegetarian here but still believe in a world of reduced animal suffering. This is definitely a step in the right direction so I'm all for it. Not that I'll be consuming it because it's still meat.
Depends how invasive / unpleasant the needle biopsy is. If it can be taken from an animal with minimal pain (using anesthetics) and the animal otherwise lives a life comparable to animals in farm sanctuaries, it seems pretty much ethical to me. Though even if it's very painful and has to be done without anesthetic, I'm guessing the overall suffering from lab-grown meat would still be way lower than conventional meat (so I'd prefer it theoretically, but avoid it practically).
I like plants just fine and don't care enough to pay the [currently] higher financial / environmental costs of cultured meat. But if it were offered to me I wouldn't take moral issue with it, and if I were ever in charge of caring for a carnivore (ex. a cat) I'd pay a lot to get cultured meat instead of conventional meat.
If for some reason I ever had to eat animal meat again, I'd 100% choose cultured meat.
[More pressing ethical question for me: if I think cultured meat is a technology that could be super important to reducing factory farming, is there an ethical obligation to financially support it? If not buying directly, then maybe donating to something like the GFI]
> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
> “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
(I've posted this before but I think it bears repeating that this whole industry looks like a complete fantasy at best and a scam at worst)
46 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 77.0 ms ] threadThe marketing around this type of product is very bad, they should not call it meat and they should stop trying to shame their potential customers for eating meat (from animals)
If it tastes like meat from previously live animals, it definitely can be called meat, albeit its good to clearly distinguish it from the other. I know from folks around me they wouldnt mind it as long the taste is OK, has some good safety checks for various nasty chemicals and price is reasonable.
What reason is there to think that the animals the cells are harvested from will be treated with less cruelty? I would have assumed that they would be bound to exist in the same conditions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line
This alone removes almost all of the downside suffering.
Additionally, for those of a more more absolutist moral bent, when the animals are small in number, there isn't the same financial pressure to ruthlessly optimize cost at the expense of welfare; you can afford to raise the animal in non-torture conditions without it materially impacting competitive position.
Even if the treatment doesn't change, the production of meat becomes N times less cruel after the switch.
Realistically, meat is N+M, where M is the cruelty towards animals in the production of food for animals. But M still remains if people keep eating plants.
As I understand it though, the vast majority of cattle are currently being fed mechanically harvested plants, so they can be cut out of the nutrient pathway without any need to increase suffering by the way of mechanical harvest.
Why even? Rule of thumb is that it takes an acre of grass to feed a cattle beast. If that acre is, instead, 'clear cut' multiple times each year, over several years to match what would be fed to a live animal, to ship the product off to a factory, only one animal living in that grass will experience the cruelty? That seems surprising. An acre of grass provides a significant habitat.
And that is if grass remains the source of nutrients. Harvested grass is hard to move efficiently. If, say, a row crop is used instead then there is an attack on the habitat even before harvest begins. Row crops regularly come under fire because of how unfriendly they are to everything else.
> As I understand it though, the vast majority of cattle are currently being fed mechanically harvested plants
While that is true – the vast majority of cattle are raised on grass and finished with corn, the latter of which being almost certainly mechanically harvested – it is also not binary.
According to Oklahoma State University, most cattle in the United States will spend most of their lives on pastures and grasslands and then finished in feedlots, the latter of which accounting for 15-35% of their lives according to their figures. This does mean that mechanically harvested food does account for some of the nutrient requirements for most cattle, but there is more to the story.
I don't know the conversion factor for lab meat, but I expect it to be somewhere between eating mechanically harvested plants and regular meat.
There's also the aspect of how you weigh suffering of different beings, which is a complicated enough topic that I won't get into right now[1]. I'll get back to it once feeding cattle with harvested grain becomes rare.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/protein-efficiency-of-mea...
[1] https://reducing-suffering.org/crop-cultivation-and-wild-ani...
So even if we assume that the harvest needs to affect four animals, that still seems like pretty small potatoes, no? Any hay field I've ever walked through was teaming with hundreds of visible insects alone, and who knows what else was hidden in there, in areas smaller than an acre.
> There's also the aspect of how you weigh suffering of different beings
I am not sure that is necessary. An earlier comment told that all we have to do is count animals. The larger the count, the more the cruelty. The entire discussion has hinged on that assertion.
Certainly there is going to be a whole lot of subjectivity. Some will argue that the number of animals doesn't matter with respect to cruelty – that suffering is wholly an individual experience. And many more will tell you that the animal that experiences the most cruelty of all is man himself and that ending that cruelty will solve all of the world's problems.
But I don't think we need to find a new metric. We already chose one that was good enough.
Or maybe you can, but you'll find that others don't agree with your estimations.
For example, anyone believing in panpsychism will find this hard to work with. Do you include the harvested plants in your calculation and compare them on a 1:1 basis with slaughtered animals? This kind of nonintuitive conclusions result from insisting that all beings suffer the same. Not a good enough metric IMO.
> Certainly there is going to be a whole lot of subjectivity.
I'm afraid that it's not just "a whole lot", but the final answer depends entirely on subjective definitions of suffering, unless we can find a true, objective one. Sadly, some philosophers don't think that's possible at all [0].
[0] http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nagel-what-is-it-l...
An animal is an animal is an animal. While it is true that there is fluidity in language, and that one could define animal as only a creature kept by humans for the purpose of extracting meat, there was no push back on the use of the more common, broader definition that would be reflected in the dictionary.
Plants have not been considered animals. There has been a clear division between the plants harvested and the animals affected by it throughout the discussion. Whether or not their suffering should be included is and interesting side topic, but immaterial to this one. There is no value in flailing around trying to find new metrics. We picked one. It was certainly not perfect – far from it – but it was good enough. Perfect need not be the enemy of good.
While the philosophers have a point, we are only seeking something to form a belief. Beliefs need not be true. But they do need to be formed, and it seems we don't have enough information to form any kind of beliefs here?
Otherwise, the discussion falls apart because a human is an animal is an animal. But no one is slaughtering humans with such an enthusiasm as cows or chickens. Equating all animals is a fringe belief not supported by the population at large, and one I don't feel like spending time to discuss, especially as it's not required for this discussion to have been valid.
I would be dishonest if I said I would pay a premium for meat as to not harm animals.
If you can kill two birds with one stone(ok maybe not the best saying in this context)and under cut the price of meat currently and at the same time be less cruel to animals then I will make it a diet staple ASAP.
I am sure it is anything but trivial though to undercut the price of chicken and turkey in the US.
That said. We get a lot more from animal meat than just protein and fat, and even then it's a wide variety of amino and fatty acids along with fat soluble nutrients. I think that actual animal protein (even if just eggs and fish) will still be necessary for a lot of micro-nutrients and versions of nutrients that are more digestible than what is available from other sources.
In a similar vein, I feel that natural fertilizer offers more to the soil than what chemical fertilizers bring to the table. Soil health has been a real and increasing problem over the past several decades.
Fat soluble vitamins as an example example. In the case of just fat soluble vitamins, a lot of the supplements are either a baseline nutrient the body can convert to the actual nutrient or another form of the nutrient likewise. However these supplements are often not as bioavailable or have malabsorption and don't actually cover nutritional needs. A lot of the systemic hormonal issues in society can be traced to a reduction in the consumption of animal fats and fats in general, which are essential to body function.
That also doesn't cover the variety of fatty and amino acids in naturally grown muscle and fatty tissue in animals. You actually need a wide variety of these. And even then, the dietary guidelines are absolute minimums and not optimal values. They also don't contain guidance or understanding for all nutrients. It wasn't until just the past couple decades that a few essential nutrients were added for hospitalized feeding which accounted for serious brain/mental issues.
We (humans) have a very poor understanding of actual nutrient requirements, even for those in very small amounts that can have huge impacts on overall health.
edit: it can still be considered meat, or even animal meat... but if you look at the nutrition profile of farm raised vs wild caught salmon. Or grass fed grass finished beef vs grain fed. Or naturally fed chickens and their eggs vs commercial feed lots. There are vast differences in quality that can add up.
What makes you think that? If the cells are not fed the nutrients they need to survive, they will die. You can only reduce the inputs so much until the entire system breaks down.
That doesn't bar anyone from providing rich feeding mixes to produce cells with extra nutritional value.
There's a lot of things in animal meat that won't be in lab meat. And given what they charge for oat milk and impossible burgers,.I doubt it will be more cost effective for the public.
Can you give one example? I'm starting to doubt the honesty of your argument.
I found one source talking about nutrient problems, which talks about B12 and iron, and suggests adding them to the nutrient mix. https://www.burdockgroup.com/the-nutritional-challenges-of-c...
Again, not opposed to lab grown meat... I still feel that it may be appropriate to still consume some animal based nutrition. Even if that is limited to mostly dairy, eggs and/or fish. As I stated earlier, half to two thirds of what people consume is mostly energy alone. Hormonal responses will vary based on the content, but strictly speaking, not so bad one way or another, provided an appropriate balance of amino and fatty acids, which even there, I doubt will be optimal.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4422379/
I'm a bit biased, I don't eat meat nor do I have any interest in lab grown meat for at least a decade or two after it becomes common.
I do wonder how vegans will feel about this needle biopsy. And while they say there are lots of cells stored in the "cell bank," it does seem like it will need to be replenished with future needle biopsies or there will be genetic drift if they recycle cells from the vat (which might be fine or even desired). Does this mean we can eat whale and, I dunno, bald eagle?
Edit: or, excellent point raised in a dead comment... human? Sounds ick to me too, but bear with me: is the height of ethical meat consumption to have personal meat-vats grown from your own donor cells?
- It's still more energy intensive than plant-based foods.
- Meat, in general, doesn't meet their personal healthiness threshold.
- It's an unnatural way to produce meat with unknown health risks.
- ???
I like plants just fine and don't care enough to pay the [currently] higher financial / environmental costs of cultured meat. But if it were offered to me I wouldn't take moral issue with it, and if I were ever in charge of caring for a carnivore (ex. a cat) I'd pay a lot to get cultured meat instead of conventional meat.
If for some reason I ever had to eat animal meat again, I'd 100% choose cultured meat.
[More pressing ethical question for me: if I think cultured meat is a technology that could be super important to reducing factory farming, is there an ethical obligation to financially support it? If not buying directly, then maybe donating to something like the GFI]
> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
> “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
(I've posted this before but I think it bears repeating that this whole industry looks like a complete fantasy at best and a scam at worst)