As a thinking experiment, let us consider that on the 1st of January of 2025 it is announced that an advance making possible growing any kind of animal tissue in laboratory conditions as been achieved and that it is possible to scale it in order to achieve industrial grade production level.
There is no limit on which animal tissues can be grown, so, any species is achieveable, only being needed a small cell sample from an animal to start production, and the cultivated tissues are safe for consumption.
There won’t be any perceiveable price change to the end consummer, as the growing is a complex and labour intensive process, requiring specialized equipments and personnel.
Would you change to this new diet option?
No, i’d go vegan before i’d eat cultured meat. I’m not opposed to it and it’s probably better for the economy and environment, but I have a mental thing about it. Granted if I had to catch and clean my own meat, i’d also probably go vegan. Maybe I’m just squeamish about my food.
Yes, absolutely. No risk of virus or bacteria, or worse…
Grown to the size you want…
Of the shape and type you want…
No fat (maybe?)…
What’s not to like.
I’d say price is definitely a factor. I already pass over good cuts of meat for that reason. Also taste/texture/overall experience. If it checs those boxes, and it has been on the market long enough to be confident I won’t get instant cancer, then 100%! A little marbled fat makes it better though.
500 protein bars…
As if the facists will allow it…
You haven’t mentioned if there are any ethical concerns with this new meat; e.g. environmental cost of the production process, what kind of human labour is required to create it, who is providing that labour and under what conditions are they working.
Provided I had no ethical concerns with it, sure, but a lot of modern innovations tend to have these issues and I assume lab-grown meat would have these issues too.
Edit: Also, I’m opposed to animal captivity, so if there’s an ongoing need to collect samples from captive livestock then no, I wouldn’t. If it’s a “collect it once then it keeps reproducing from the lab samples forever” type of thing then sure.
I would definitely eat cultured meat as long as it’s not too expensive.
You know the difference between a white vegan/vegetarian vs a non white, they don’t try to find something that tastes exactly like a meat. There are a lots and lots of dishes that are 100% vegan/vegetarian and taste much much better and don’t pretend to be meat of any sort.
If you are so tempted by the taste of the meat then just eat it.Environment isn’t going to get any better just because you stopped eating meat, the animal cruelty isn’t going to stop because of you.
I’ve never heard this, bit have tried to explain it to people and failed. If you’re going to try to find a vegan substitute for a thing, most of the time it will fail to impress because it’s not the thing that it’s pretending to be. Take vegan cheese. It’s probably worse for you than regular cheese because it’s super processed.
I have several meals that I make that are vegan, but don’t need to be labeled as vegan because it’s not a substitute. For example, I make chili with those big mushrooms because I like the taste, but I don’t call it a vegan chili, I call it a mushroom chili.
White/non-white vegan? That is uncharted territory for me. Can you expand a little more on that?
oh you know I’m vegan but I just love bacon, and eggs. OK sometimes I like to have a little bit of lobster
Only if I could put my own DNA in it so I could eat my own ass
I… really don’t have a reply to that. Autophagy? Perhaps?
Labs be like
Fair
The only thing I’d wait for is for the process to be refined enough to be more eco friendly than just eating real meat. I’d do it, but until there’s proof of it being more sustainable and won’t tank my blood thin/thickness levels (blood thinners sometimes suck), I would be down to try it at the very least.
Though I would receive resistance in changing my diet until either my dad changes his eating habits or I move out on my own because my dad absolutely refuses things like plant based meats, so I know he’d most likely resist lab grown meat as well. It’s also hard for my mom and I to switch to a healthier dinner diet since both my dad and older brother wouldn’t dare change their diets to something like a Mediterranean or some other healthier because they can be picky eaters (especially my older brother).
Only if the culture medium for the meat cells is not made of living animals.
I would be wildly optimistic, but very cautious.
I’d want to see multi-year randomized control trials comparing the bioavailability of not only protein, but also vitamins and minerals from the synthetic meat and liver, to natural meat and liver.
Assuming the RCTs show no issues, then I would happily move over.
Modern meat products are on a spectrum as well, it’s not just having the meat, it’s what the meat ate before it became me that’s important. Grass-fed, versus grain fed for beef. Insect, and protein for chickens, grain fed for chickens etc. antibiotics, hormones being supplemented into the feed to improve yields.
One massive problem the industry globally suffers from is overpromising. Just like multivitamins, which are very poorly bioavailable, and mostly peed out, they promise a lot but don’t deliver much.
Factors I would look for:
- can somebody sustain life eating only the synthetic meat for multiple years?
- oxidative stress, and oxidation in the synthetic food?
- The temptation to engineer sugar, and carbohydrates, directly into the meat to increase sales yields.
Green sustainability:
- can the synthetic meat be produced globally?
- Will poor farmers in the middle of nowhere be improved or hurt by this? Will they have access to the synthetic meat?
- in the event global logistics fail, like an a war, will moving over to synthetic meat severely hurt critical infrastructure and ability to feed populations?
That was a very compreensive answer. You gave me a few thinking points.
I’ll move to it in a second. Protein with no need to slaughter animals would be so fantastic for the animals, the earth, and people.
We don’t eat red meat at all, so I would probably try it out fairly quickly. Actually we don’t eat chicken or the like either, only fish, which is something I miss a bit more now and then. We have a dried product called NoChicken that is actually pretty good, so that’d probably be sufficient for me to wait a bit to see how it goes long term (I.e is it truly safe to consume).
But every now and then, I miss game. Moose and wood grouse mainly. That’d probably hook me enough to try it quickly.
I eat tacos bell
its 3am and i laughed my ass off. why?
If it were indistinguishable from other meat sources, and priced similarly (preferably less!), then of course. I expect it will take a very long time to get to that point, though.
