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?
As long as it scaled to reasonably the same price as current meat, I’d absolutely do it unless there were some significant downsides like it somehow being even worse for the environment.
This ^
If it’s better for the environment and doesn’t involve the industrial scale poor treatment and wanton slaughter of animals, AND it tastes just as good, I’d be on-board instantly. Even with a premium price hike for consistency.
Roll on quality facon, wagu beeef, and octo-chi k en drumsticks.
I do think that flora missed a trick with vegan, fake meats though…
“I can’t believe it’s not bacon/ burger/ chicken” they would have slaughtered that ad campaign
Is this really up for debate?
Florida bans lab-grown meat, adding to similar efforts in three other states
Much like with the fossil fuel industry squeezing out renewable energies at every opportunity, I suspect we’re going to see the powerful agricultural lobbies shut down competitors until the owners of these big businesses can insert themselves as the sole proprietors of the lab meat industry.
On the flip side, retailers are going to want to drive down their costs, so they’ll only switch when the price drops below the current floor set by firms like Tycoon and Cargill. But once it does… you’ll be foolish to assume what you’re eating isn’t lab grown if it means a business increasing its profits.
The end result will be people who want lab meat finding themselves prohibited from buying it and people who don’t want lab meat unwittingly consuming it.
There exists a world outside corpo US. Like europe which has better competition in every way. Even ads are better here than in the US.
europe which has better competition in every way
M&A is coming for Europe in a big way as the neoliberal policies of the states seep in through all the cracks. 2025 is gearing up to be a big year for Euro bank consolidation. We’ve already seen a lot of the industrial sector hollowed out of the Southern EU states and consolidated in Germany. Crackups like what happened in Yugoslavia in the 90s and border wars like what we’re seeing with Ukraine/Russia have also immolated domestic industry in a way we haven’t seen since the Years of Lead.
Even ads are better here than in the US.
We’ll see how long that lasts. If the UK is a bellweather, it looks like the Elon-ification of your economy is just a matter of time.
European sad agreeing noises
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.
What kinda idiot would want no fat?
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.
Yes and I hope the tech can replace dairy too.
Almond milk is good. Tastes really close to dairy milk, IMO. Dare I say it’s even better.
A lot of milk replacements are common allergens. I can’t eat almonds. A lot of people can’t have soy. I’m guessing very few people are allergic to all of them, though.
I would sooner argue for eating insects vs. lab-grown protein made by a corporation. I have no trust for corporations to produce safe and emergent solutions to the problems we face as a species and world. They have no incentive to do the right thing and put the brakes on when things are looking bad.
And the insects would be provided by whom if not a huge corpos? You create some false equivalence here, it’s the ages old struggle of lowering the food costs of feeding workers by making us eat worse things. Potatoes instead of wheat, highly process foods, fats and sugars in everything and ultimate fucking step is looming: eating bugs. You can’t go worse than that unless it’s a fucking soylent green which i can guarantee you would be somewhere next in the line after you allow the mega rich to feed you bugs.
If it was healthy, affordable, and tasty, then yes.
If it isn’t all three, then Veganism can continue to go fuck itself.
You are not limited to meat and lab-created meat, you know? Vegetarians can tell you to eat eggs and cheese if you want. Vegans will tell you that there are large varieties of plant-based proteins, amongst: lentils, soy, whole cereals, even green vegetables. While these tend to not be as complete nor bio-available as meat or eggs, if you combine them you can have various, delicious and protein-rich meals. I am personally working out a lot and my mostly vegan diet (some eggs and cheese from time to time) is enough for my protein needs.
I mean, if your goal is to keep the meat experience, then yeah, I get your point. But other than that…
I mean, if your goal is to keep the meat experience, then yeah, I get your point.
I think that was indeed very obviously the point. The point of both the comment you were replying to and this lab grown meat idea as a whole.
I’m not really good with obvious subtexts, I’m sorry ^^
Veganism is already healthy, affordable, and tasty. Ever heard of a bean? And only doing the ethical thing when it is also the easiest thing to do is just extreme egotism. I’m not saying anyone has to be a saint, but they should at least put more consideration into their actions than “How does this affect me personally?”
Jesus, people bitch about processed foods but have no issues with whatever shit has to be put into this to make it grow?
Most that bitch about processed foods have no idea what “processed” actually means.
Most of the ‘chemicals’ they’re worried about occur naturally at quantity in plants and fruit.
The lab-grown meat uses the same organics that happen in the animal to trigger growth.
That said, price-wise, real meat will have to become very very expensive before lab-grown meat will be competitive. Breeding cattle is expensive, but a lot of it is just making sure life happens. Cows are hearty, self feed and have immune systems.
That said, price-wise, real meat will have to become very very expensive before lab-grown meat will be competitive.
At least in the U.S., meat production/pricing is heavily subsidized.
That article is highly suspect. The prices of beef cows sans tax credits is readily available, as is the average meat yield. A Big Mac uses 1/5 of a pound of lean cooked meat (2x 1.6 oz patties). So let’s be generous assume that it’s one quarter pound uncooked. $30 per quarter pound would put your average beef cow up around $54,000. At that price, The farmers would be getting 1 million a year per 19 head of cattle.
And all that’s assuming that we’re just grounding up all the random beef into ground beef. Ground beef is generally taken from the trimmings of the steaks and roasts or we’re volume is required at least the cheapest of the roasts.
Certainly the subsidy is there, But it’s more like pennies on the dollar rather than dollars on the penny.
$30 per quarter pound
The second sentence of the article gives $30 as the unsubsidized price of one pound of hamburger meat, not 1/4 pound. You have to read it more carefully if you want to get into the details.
Setting aside the details for a minute, how would a subsidy of only pennies on the dollar even be plausible? One purpose of agricultural subsidies is to stabilize prices; pennies on the dollar can’t do that.
Ok, had to go to a computer to properly answer this.
First, subsidies aren’t explicitly designed to make meat cheaper. They’re intended to keep farms in business and provide a safety margin for food stocks. They subsidize cheese, wheat, meat, soya, corn, everything. In some cases, they pay farmers not to grow crops. It’s about food security. If a farm goes under, it becomes housing land, and we lose that growing capability. That said, most of the subsidies aren’t going to individual farmers, but we’ll get to that later.
A calf costs somewhere in the range of $300. They can have their first calf around 2 years old. And every year after that. They cost about $2-3 a day each to feed. Given there are veterinary needs, hay in the winter, After a year of growth, they sell for ~$3000-$4000 and provide about 450 lbs of meat. That’s somewhere around 30-40% profit calf to slaughter.
If you’re just buying them to slaughter, that’s $6-$8 / lb average, then butchering and transport. But that includes ribs, roasts, steak, filet, liver, and tongue. Tenderloin sells for $15-$20/lb. Steaks sell for closer to $12.
If you managed it calf to beef, that’s closer to $4 a lb at cost.
The caps on the subsidies to the individual farmers are insanely low (something like 150k / farmer). Most of those billions go to the mega-corps who can skirt the caps. Those subsidies are primarily funding the oligarchs.
So let’s reverse that again with the proper claim as you pointed out. $30/lb. 450lb/cow. That’s a $13,000 cow. They’re not getting that much in subsidies either. That would cap out at 11 head.
I think our problem is that the paper is trying to calculate a societal cost, while we’re arguing fiscal cost.
https://sentientmedia.org/government-subsidies-make-meat-cheaper/
It’s also frequently argued by vegan and food justice activists that the price of a Big Mac would jump from $5.00 to $13.00 without federal subsidies. This claim, however, is based on a misreading of the aforementioned UC Berkeley paper.
What the paper actually says is that a Big Mac would cost $13.00 “if the retail price included hidden expenses that meat producers offload onto society.” That’s a much broader category than just subsidies. It includes things like the health and environmental costs associated with meat production and consumption, neither of which are subsidies.
If you want to lump in health costs, every high-fat, high-sugar food skyrockets. French Fries, oils, eggs, bread, cookies.
Lab-grown meat will still have all those hidden health costs. The only true win is for the environment, and to be clear, I want lab-grown meat for all the environmental and ethical considerations, I’m just saying the article is trying to paint a picture that’s much worse than it really is.
Reminder that the meat you buy at the grocery store is as also as human modified as it gets and NOTHING like the wild game that our ancestors ate or even the farm animals from 100 years ago. The animal itself is probably GMO, spends its entire life in a steel cage standing in its own shit and piss and is given specialized processed feed to optimize how much meat it produces (or just has a tube down its throat so we don’t have to worry about it eating fast enough). Not to mention tons of antibiotics that are given to the animal just to ensure it survives the hell we put them through which definitely makes it into the meat and therefore into you as well. And they’re slaughtered and butchered by underpaid overworked factory workers who have to balance fulfilling brutal quotas with carefully extracting the meat and not getting it contaminated with shit from the animal’s guts or the myriad other disgusting things around the meat that you wouldn’t want to eat (you can guess how well that usually goes).
Animal cells (without the animal itself and also no central nervous system to experience suffering) growing in a clean, well controlled lab in tanks of sterile cell media doesn’t sound so bad in comparison.
Additional reminder that nearly all of the worst infectious diseases in history have been caused partially or completely by animal agriculture: the plague, spanish flu, smallpox, whooping cough, swine flu, bird flu, covid, etc. So if you’re worried about the long term health implications of lab grown meat, you should be ten times more worried about long term the health implications of regular meat, to the point where you should be worried even if you don’t eat meat.
