Slashdot Mirror
Lab-Grown Meat Is In Your Future, and It May Be Healthier Than the Real Stuff (smh.com.au)
An anonymous reader shares an article on The Sydney Morning Herald:Scientists and businesses working full steam to produce lab-created meat claim it will be healthier than conventional meat and more environmentally friendly. But how much can they improve on old-school pork or beef? In August 2013, a team of Dutch scientists showed off their lab-grown burger (cost: $435,000) and even provided a taste test. Two months ago, the American company Memphis Meats fried the first-ever lab meatball (cost: $23,700 per pound). Those who have tasted these items say they barely differ from the real deal. The Dutch and the Americans claim that within a few years lab-produced meats will start appearing in supermarkets and restaurants. And these are not the only teams working on cultured meat (as they prefer to call it). Another company, Modern Meadow, promises that lab-grown "steak chips" -- something between a potato chip and beef jerky -- will hit the stores in the near future, too.
Right now, my wife and I are both not complete vegetarians but very rarely eat any form of meat. This is for...financial reasons.
Really? With a membership to a warehouse store like Sam's Club, I am currently getting 90/10 ground beef for under $3 per pound (80/20 is even cheaper) and can get frozen chicken breasts for around $2 per pound. At the local grocery store we can get fresh chicken breasts for a little over $2 per pound. Me and my wife go through a bag of chicken every 2 weeks and a 5 pound case of ground beef in 3-4 weeks. Unless you live in a place where meat is very scarce, you only eat filet or ribeye every night, or insist on grass fed free range low stress hand massaged beef the financial impact of meat vs no meat is very minimal.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
While I agree with your basic point keep in mind it's more like:
a [untitled, unreferenced] 2011 study [probably funded by the industry] calculated [based on a bunch of wildly optimistic, untestable assumptions made in almost total ignorance and inexperience] that growing meat in labs would cut down on the land required to produce steaks, sausages and bacon by 99 per cent and reduce the associated need for water by 90 per cent. What's more, it found that a pound of lab-created meat would produce much less polluting greenhouse-gas emissions than is produced by cows and pigs, even poultry.
A more recent article 2014
http://modernfarmer.com/2014/0...
"One tissue-engineering researcher I spoke with scoffed at claims that cell culture techniques could deliver an edible hamburger for a reasonable cost, with a lower environmental footprint, than a cow.
âoeIf you ask anyone who has actually worked in a lab,â he says, âoewho has seen how cells are grown in a lab and how artificial tissue is made, the amount of energy and resources that go into it â" theyâ(TM)ll tell you, itâ(TM)s never going to happen.â
Post, the scientist whose cultured cells went into the celebrity burger, disagreed, but he acknowledged that there are still unanswered questions about the production process. The largest one is this: What will we feed animal tissue cells, cultured in a lab? ...
Of the researchers I spoke with, Post was the most optimistic, and even he admitted that it hasnâ(TM)t been done yet, and that âoewe canâ(TM)t be 100 percent sure that cells, in culture, can be more efficient than a cow. That is something that needs to be proven.â
For now, Post and others in the industry feed their burgers fetal bovine serum, which currently is produced from blood collected in slaughterhouses and processed in a lab. Footprint analysis hasnâ(TM)t been done on that method, but even the scientists involved say they donâ(TM)t think the numbers would look good â" and itâ(TM)s not a sustainable, animal-free solution in the long run."
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Unless you live in a place where meat is very scarce, you only eat filet or ribeye every night, or insist on grass fed free range low stress hand massaged beef the financial impact of meat vs no meat is very minimal.
I'm not a vegetarian, but I'm not sure you're familiar with what it takes to live on an extremely low budget. If you're looking for cheap protein sources, the amount of protein per dollar you get with dried beans or lentils is generally anywhere from 50% more to double the amount of protein per dollar you'd get from the cheapest chicken. For other meats, that disparity is generally quite a bit more.
And of course that's only protein. If you take into account calories per dollar, meat is incredibly expensive compared to legumes, not to mention bulk grains, flour, etc.
There's a very good reason the poor in the past generally lived on bread and other starches (often supplemented with legumes for protein) as their staples for calories -- they're incredibly cheap... much cheaper even that the cheapest factory farm meat you can buy in the U.S. today.
And if you're at all concerned about source of meat, welfare, sustainability, quality, etc., then the premium for "better" meat goes WAY up compared to the added cost for "better" legumes/grains.
(If you want to start a response by noting the high cost of vegetables, note that you should be eating vegetables for a balanced diet regardless of whether you're eating meat or not. The replacement for meat in a diet is other protein, not more vegetables. And vegetable protein sources are simply a LOT cheaper than animal protein sources overall.)