Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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"
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Travel to Japan
I think they even let you pick your whale out of the tank.
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.
What would your laptop with 4GB memory have cost 20 years ago?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
People eat McDonald's. They eat that, they'll eat anything.
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.