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Slashdot Asks: Would You Eat Lab-Grown Meat? (dmarge.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via WIRED: Lab-grown meat appears to be coming to a supermarket near you whether you like it or not. Granted, you have some time before that becomes a reality. Scientists in Belgium and the United States are working on cultured meat substitutes that taste like real meat and cost less than real meat, but don't use as many environmental resources as meat from animals, nor does it involve the slaughtering of animals. They predict such meat substitutes will cost a lot less by the year 2020 when the efficiency of bulk production kicks in. According to a 2014 Pew poll, only 20 percent of Americans would be willing to try cultured meat, while a 2013 survey in Belgium revealed that just 13 percent of 180 subjects knew what cultured meat was. Also, vegetarians surveyed perceived man-made meat to be unhealthy and unfavorable. However, once respondents were told how the meat is grown, most said they might try it. When educated about the environmental benefits, the number of people who were willing to try it nearly doubled. A poll from The Vegan Scholar found that lab-grown meat was much more appealing to vegetarians than to vegans. Similar Reddit and SurveyMonkey polls have come to similar conclusions, but it's important to note that none of these polls were peer-reviewed. Researchers have suggested that the media greatly overestimates the importance of vegetarian and vegan opinions on lab-grown meat. Given the lack of large surveys determining the public's opinion on lab-grown meat, we thought we would pose the question to Slashdotters: Would you eat lab-grown meat?
with soylent
Raise pigs in a lab? What's the problem? I'd eat them.
I'd need a _big_ lab to raise some blue whale for steaks.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Cheaper, more energy efficient, and before long superior in taste and tone. Slam dunk.
I can just imagine cutting a slice off a 1'x2' meat beam; cover THE ENTIRE GRILL with a fillet. Yums, yums.
In fact, I am looking forward to it. I do not like how animals are treated, in general, and in order to provide meat for us, in particular. However, I love meat, and I can't wait for meat synthetically grown in a lab to become available. It will of course be outrageously expensive to begin with, but hopefully it will not take too long for prices to come down to something reasonable. At any rate, I'd be willing to pay a premium for it.
If was traveling in a space ship to Mars: Yes.
If was living on Mars: Yes.
Otherwise: no way.
I'm not "addicted" to meat. I eat what I find tasty an what I consider ethical ok.
And no: I don't eat tofu meat Ersatz either.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm assuming it tastes like chicken, in which case put me down for "yes".
If it tastes like beef, well, that's another yes.
Pork? mmmm... No, I think not.
Rubber? Definite no for that.
Any other options to be considered? Doubt they'd start with alligator (which would be a "yes") or salmon (another "yes") or elephant ("maybe?")....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
If it's cheap and healthy and tastes good.. Why not?
Trust. You can verify the cheap. You can verify the tastes good. The healthy? You gotta trust the same guys that pushed through the GMO whitewash labeling bills.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
215,000 british pounds for a hamburger.
I don't trust them, but I do trust the many scientists saying it's not a problem. GMO crops are a good thing. The problem is what Monsanto specifically does with them. Facilitating the use of toxic pesticide and introducing DRM to the fucking food supply is comic book evil. Get rid of those assholes, not GMO in general.
whereas farm grown meat can be grown in a pasture with relatively little assistance.
Not at scale though.
It scales just fine if you don't put a bunch of stupid roadblocks in the way of small-scale producers. Then you get more of them, which is what you want anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Eventually, lab-grown meat-like mystery goo will be better tasting, cheaper, healthier, disease/parasite-free, nicely textured, and more conveniently shaped compared to meat grown from real live animals tortured in cramped, feces-covered pens. Also when compared to grass-fed, free-range, hippie-approved animals. Everyone will be eating it except for a few crazy people.
Of course, in the beginning it will be over-priced, foul-tasting paste.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I tried my first veggie burger about 20 years ago, and I remember wondering when the FDA started considering sawdust a vegetable...
Now, I eat Gardein teriyaki chick'n and a few others quite regularly. I'm still waiting for the whole "cheaper than meat" part to kick in though.
If you haven't had them yet, give them a try, you'll be surprised, and once they get costs down, it'll change the world.
Ah, there is a problem here. You imply McDonald's makes food. They don't, they make profits and stuff that makes me sick.
...
They already have 'immortal' liver cells. They use them in artificial livers.
'immortal' liver cell = a certain type of liver cancer.
If a cell divides in a bucket, it's likely to have it's growth regulation unhooked. Maybe not technical a cancer cell...but I bet the guy that cooks it up knows _all_ about cancer cell division.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
People eat McDonald's. They eat that, they'll eat anything.
How long after this is feasible... will there be places you can buy "people steaks"?
Would it be unethical, if the person who provided the cell line was still alive?
Environment impact of eating meat with growing population is not sustainable. Distant future looks bleak, with no meat at all (at least at an affordable price).
Cultured meat seems the only option to retain meat in our diet in the future, hence I am all in favor of it.
What are these stupid roadblocks in the way of small-scale producers?
Limitations on how many slaughterhouses can exist, for one. I'm all in favor of environmental regulations, but it needs to be feasible for producers to get their cattle to where it can be slaughtered.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is there any reason they can't make it fatty and on the bone?
I assume if it's lab-grown, it sill needs nutrients. Still needs a circulatory system of a sorts, nervous system to twitch and build muscle, etc. Might as well grow a tube of muscle on a bone with marrow in it, and hook all that shit up. You can control the texture, the fat content, marbling, etc. That's where I see this being amazing.
If every cut was essentially the "perfect cut", how awesome would that be? I've had good meat, and I've had plenty of bad meat. All the marbling on one end, nothing on the other. Bits of gristle in it. If I could get a perfect cut every time for the same or less than I pay now, I'd happily take that. If they can pull that off, they change the world.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
See, during the Great Depression, the U.S. didn't produce enough food to feed everyone. People went hungry, or even starved. To prevent that from ever happening again, the government introduced agricultural subsidies to guarantee there's always an oversupply of food. That's why we pay farmers to not farm - so that they don't sell their farmland to a condo developer, so if a blight makes a field unusable in another part of the country, their farmland is ready to produce at a moment's notice.
Anyhow, this oversupply meant the price of food cratered (supply > demand does that), and farmers were losing their shirts. So the government instituted a program where it would buy up all the crop at a guaranteed price, then the buyers could buy it from the government. This worked at stabilizing prices so the farmers could stay in business, but it still left a huge oversupply - mostly corn. So the government had to figure out what to do with all that excess corn.
Some of it got shipped overseas as foreign aid. Some of it got turned into cheap meal for cattle, since Americans love beef. An enterprising scientists figured out how to convert it into high fructose syrup, which could substitute for sucrose since sugar cane only grows in Florida and Hawaii and we'd otherwise be importing most of it.
And during the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, someone said, "hey, what if we converted it to alcohol and used it as a substitute for gasoline?"
It made sense then. This was a sunk cost - the money and energy to grow the corn had already been spent. We weren't getting it back. So anything we could do with the corn to recoup some of those sunk costs made more sense than letting it rot in grain silos allowing the rodent population to increase.
So converting excess corn into ethanol makes sense. But then the corn lobby got its hands on the program and now we grow corn for the explicit purpose of converting it to ethanol. Which makes no sense since corn is a lousy crop for converting into ethanol.
"Would You Eat Lab-Grown Meat?"
Only if it gets billions of government subsidies, violates animals rights, ruins surface water, damages the environment and the air and is filled with hormones and antibiotics and fat giving you heart-attacks, just like the real thing.
Absolutely, yes, just as I would gladly participate in consuming approved GMO foods.
Unique.
I'm willing to eat the crappy mass-produced meat on the market right now. I don't see any real difference between that and lab-grown meat.
No being killed to obtain it. Hopefully less land, energy, carbon, etc.
Actually, a lot of the more popular effective ones a pretty benign to humans. Roundup has very low acute toxicity and "may" cause cancer with heavy, chronic exposure (kind of like coffee and sawdust). The Bt toxin that everybody freaks out about in GMO plants is extremely specific and has a "natural" origin--so much so that organic farmers use it on their crops. It only becomes Satan incarnate when non-organic farmers use it.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"