Lab-grown Meat

[palo]

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/21/business/cultivated-meat-us-approval/index.html

 

How will this affect vegans?

 

p

[palo]

What's it taste like?

 

https://apnews.com/article/labgrown-chicken-cultivated-meat-863e7d68c8c4a5293683a7c5d6a58d15

 

p

[IndyRob]

I was curious as to whether they'd try to emulate white meat or dark meat.  White meat for the presumed healthiness, or dark meat for flavor.  It looks like they went with white meat.

 

I'm only assuming they had a choice.

[weinoo]

Hard pass by me.

[gfweb]

I wonder what the "carbon footprint" (crazy term) of this stuff is, compared to a hen in the yard

[chromedome]

35 minutes ago, gfweb said:

I wonder what the "carbon footprint" (crazy term) of this stuff is, compared to a hen in the yard

Well, "hen in the yard" is as low as it can get, though it comes up a bit if you're feeding it store-bought feed and/or scraps from your kitchen. But that's not the point, or the target, because the cumulative number of hens in yards across the continent is less than a rounding error relative to the total number of chickens. If the lab-grown version can get its costs and carbon footprint below those of battery-raised, factory-farmed meat chickens, it'll be a net positive. (ETA: ...and of course chickens have a far lower carbon footprint than pork, lamb, beef, etc)

That didn't work out with vertical farming (as Tamar Haspel put it, "Lettuce is cheap and power is expensive, why did anyone think this would work?") but potentially the questions of scale could be resolved for lab-grown meat. And yes, "potentially" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

 

On 6/22/2023 at 2:10 AM, palo said:

How will this affect vegans?

 

I actually posed that question somewhere here on the board a number of years ago, because I was genuinely interested to hear some differing viewpoints on the subject, but it seems vegans are in short supply on eG. I suppose it would weaken the ethical argument somewhat ("No animals were harmed in the preparation of this dish!") though not the health-related arguments. To be clear, I'm personally an omnivore so I have no skin in the game, I was just curious.

 

Major players like Perdue are throwing significant funding into this research, on the basis that if it becomes "the next thing" they want to profit from it (just as, in an unrelated field, a Shell Oil subsidiary is the world's leading vendor of grid-scale battery storage for renewables). I'm just turning 60 this year, and have lots of nonagenarians on both sides of my family, so barring accidents I expect these products to come to market during my lifetime. As/if/when they do, I don't anticipate treating them any differently than I do "real" meats. I tend to shop opportunistically - looking for bargains and planning my meals accordingly, rather than planning a meal and then shopping for it - so, as always, I'll follow the deals.

 

For anyone who's interested in a nuts-and-bolts look at the technology from the industry's perspective, here's a link I'd posted elsewhere a few days ago.

 

https://www.crbgroup.com/insights/food-beverage/cultured-meat#:~:text=Cultured meat—also known as,a variety of meat products.

 

 

Edited June 23 by chromedome (log)

[BeeZee]

I was pondering the same question as @chromedome regarding vegans. If a vegan abstains from animal products, these "should" be off the table for most of them, since they are created using animal cells. Hell, vegans won't even eat honey, which is a product created by bees and doesn't kill bees (aside from a few unintentional casualties) in the harvesting process. I'm flexitarian, I'd just eat less actual meat (which I don't eat much as it is) before I'd eat a laboratory created product.

[rotuts]

Tech // Processing 

 

has simply missed the point .

[Tropicalsenior]

I too wonder about the footprint of producing 'lab chicken'. What chemicals are they using and how are they being disposed of? How much pollution do the 'chicken factories' produce?

I know that I was much less inclined to buy recycled products when I found out that the recycling process, much of the time, produced more environmental contamination then making the product from new material.

[rotuts]

lab chicken is a live culture.

 

I doubt anything would be used that might ' poison '

 

the culture.

 

however , growth hormones , and the like 

 

are possibly a different matter 

 

as are antibiotics and the like to keep the culture from an infection

 

all speculative on my my part.

 

its economics again :  its going to be expensive

 

as is fake beef.  still.

 

and ' scale '  will only get you  so far.

 

tissue culture run amok 

 

one sneeze , and you are tossing out the vat.

 

should you ' buy ' in early

 

make sure you have plans to sell :

 

BYND

 

Edited June 23 by rotuts (log)

[gfweb]

All very true, @rotuts