Meat rule, neat rule

But in all seriousness I would love if lab meats became economically viable.
Imagine being able to have some lab grown mammoth. Enjoy something our ancestors did
- The moment corporations see they are cheaper, they'll start pushing for them, exaggerating their benefits like environmental impact as a propaganda tool.
  But there would still be slaughtered meats for as long as there are rich assholes paying for "the true experience" or just because it's not something everyone gets to do and they like to feel unique and superior to the rest of humanity.
  Knowing those out-of-touch monsters, they'd double down in 'the experience' by getting to slaughter the animal themselves or something like that.
  
  rich assholes paying for “the true experience”
  See also: "actually lab diamonds are too perfect, the subtle imperfections and discolorations really enhance the je ne se quoi of blood diamonds"
  
  Honestly, that's almost a perfect win. If farming animals for meat becomes something for the 0.01%, imagine how much better things would be. How much less strain we'd put on the planet, and how much animal suffering would be prevented.
  And we'd be only a few guillotines away from a full solution.
- i just want cheap blocks of TVP available in the store
  we've had the technology to make TVP for decades, it's a perfectly fine replacement for meat if you just marinate it a bit, why the fuck is it not bog standard?
  
  Well it differs per country but in Europe the meat industry holds quite a foot in the door to keep profiting and growing. And tbh large cheap cattle farms have been showing obvious signs over overcrowding and diseases. And I'm not the type to buy more animal ingredients or else meat farmer gets loose. We got to think beyond our bonus.
  
  I swear to god the month that I embraced TVP and started using it in my cooking, it all got pulled from Safeway and Fred Meyers store shelves. It's like they fucking knew. It's like.... Come on you motherfuckers it's literally a basic and highly available food product. Please just stock it.
  
  Textured vegetable protein, so basically bacobits. Nothing wrong with that, I buy frozen veggie burgers that taste better then the ground beef ones.
  
  They sell bags of TVP here in the US for not that much if you buy it in the Hispanic section of the grocery store. I’m a little surprised to hear that’s not available in (assuming based on your instance) Germany.
  
  "perfectly acceptable"
  You stay know the answer to this 🤣
- Dodo birds went extinct for a reason, Galápagos tortoises are almost there too.
  I reckon they must be delicious, cultivated meat is likely the only way we're ever going to find out what the big deal is. If we can find out without slaughtering an animal then I can see no downsides.
  
  Anything is delicious if all you ate was bread and pickled cabbage on long voyages.
  
  Wait a minute, what do dodos have to do with this??
- In Transmetropolitan where they can lab grow whatever they want, I think one of Spider Jerusalem’s favorites was polar bear eyes.
  
  We even see a Long Pork food stand in the background in one issue. If I remember correctly, it was even advertising that they use 100% cloned meat.
- I just realized we coild eat the meat of endangered species
- I'm curious what would happen to all the cattle. We'd only need a tiny fraction. So would some actually be released into the wild? Would probably be hard on them. Many would probably be slaughtered to sell off as "the last real meat".
  
  They would be killed, plain and simple. But that's their fate anyway and in this scenario, at least we'd stop breeding more of them.
  It's sad to think about, but we've bred most of these animals to a point where their very existance includes suffering and their only path in nature would be extinction.
  
  They'd be slaughtered right on schedule and just not replaced. It'd be like when cars took over for horses.
  
  Um the same thing would happen to them that already happens to them: They'd be killed within a few years for people to eat. The only difference is that they wouldn't be forcibly inseminated to have more babies. I must say though, yours is not at all the first time I've heard someone ponder this and the confusion over the scenario always baffles me. You know that we raise cows specifically to kill them and we have complete control over how many are born, yea? No they wouldn't wander aimless into the ecosystem, they'd stay on the farm until slaughtered and we just wouldn't raise more of them.
  
  There would still be a market for "authentic, grass-fed" meat. It would become the fancy stuff, despite not tasting any different. There will also be a market for milk.
- I'm interested in the very conflicying reports about how the dodo tasted!

Meat eating ties into a lot of people conceptions of masculinity. The idea that you might be eating something that didn’t have to die takes the power and dominance out of it - a sexual politics of meat if you will.
I’m not saying this is true of everyone who eats meat - but there is a certain type that this unambiguously true for. Think of the guys with the aviator glasses sitting in the truck pfp - eating dead cow is as American and masculine as fucking women.
(Think about how much the absolutely stupid “if vegs hate meat so much, why do they make fake meat?” sounds like “if lesbians don’t like mean, why do they use dildos?)
- That's... A theory, pretty sure it's more that meat just tastes good though
  
  Yes - it is that way for normal people. Notice the amount of qualifiers in my original statement.
  There is a disturbing undercurrent to some people’s understanding of meat - to the point where people like Jordan Peterson (others too) have made themselves sick on “carnivore” diets.
  I am talking about the kind of people mentioned in the OP that are upset that fake meat options exist. Part of the reason these people are upset - because any rational meat eater would be like cool, more food options - is that they view synthetic meats or even people choosing not to eat meat as an attack on their personal identity, which for these individuals is constructed around this weird patriarchal nationalist thing.
  When I get a honey butter chicken biscuit from Whata, I’m doing it because I’m hungry and those things taste like crack. For some men, eating meat is something they have this complex about - you eat a steak because you aren’t a weak little soy boy.
  
  If you start to look a lot of the advertising is highly masculinized. Meat is definitely masculine in Western culture.
- I don't disagree with the fact that a lot of men obsessively eat meat and act like it is the only food worth eating is because of toxic masculine culture. I have met plenty of those type.
  I do just want to add, in the context of this post, I think the motivation for the group being against meat eating is that it is a farming group, and I'm assuming, at least in some capacity, they represent animal farmers. They have a vested economic interest in stopping the push of lab grown meat. This is not me thinking they should, just thought I would point that out.
  Like I said, my comment is not to take away from your post, just to add what I think is important context to the original post.
  
  No Farmers No Food looks to be one of these right wing conspiracists outfits associated with this phenomenon.
  “NO FARMERS NO FOOD: WILL YOU EAT THE BUGS?” is an Epoch Original documentary exposing the hidden agenda behind global “Green Policies,” the untold stories of farmers forced out of business, the disruption this will have on our food supply, and why edible bugs are suddenly being pushed to the fore as a "Global Green Solution."
  EpochTV program “Facts Matter” host Roman Balmakov travels around the world to investigate this next global food crisis that is being ignored by the world’s media.
  Edit: the guy who runs it isn’t even a farmer.
  I think that specific account strengthens my argument even more.
- Citations Needed: Episode 80: Animal Rights as Media and Pop Culture Punchline
  Episode webpage: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/citationsneeded/CN80_20190619_animal_rights_Gruen_Ko.mp3
  The interviews on this episode are pretty good, Aph Ko talks about how meat eating is an integral part of the patriarchal white supremacy society we line in.
  
  I will always upvote a reference to Nima and Adam's fantastic work.
- It is an artificial politics though. As in we don't naturally have this association with masculinity, it's propagandized by the industry. If we somehow got to the point of society actually divesting from animal farming, I think we'd already have started tackling the masculinity propaganda to some degree. It'll be a long hard fight though.
  
  100% it is artificial and socially constructed. I don’t think Adam’s Sexual Politics of Meat has it all right but it has some interesting ideas about cultural messages about meat and masculinity and got me started thinking about it. (It was written for a Daly class, and Daly is the reason there’s a strain of radical feminism that things womyn are magical spirit beings that are tainted by being in any form of contact with an XY chromosome. There’s a reason Limbaugh attacked Dworkin and not Daly and Raymond cough)
- It’s honestly bewildering to me that people like you actually exist; the “straw man” people on the right like to belittle.
  It does no favors for anyone to have and openly express this opinion.
  
  Eating meat, especially steak, is very clearly a part of masculine identities in many western nations. That's self evidently true. It's well represented in media and if you've ever had to eat with men you must have noticed it.
  I do don't understand what there is to object to in OPs pointing out of a fact of our culture.
  Edit: don't
  
  What? What am I a straw man of? I currently eat meat. This is a clear phenomenon that exists.
  
  It does no favors for anyone to have and openly express this opinion.
  But is the opinion wrong? Do these people on the right you mention not have a slur for effeminate men based on the preference of meat and dairy alternatives?
  
  What part bewilders you? The "sexual politics of meat" part, or that fact that they chose a conservative stereotype to demonstrate an example? Because their theory is absolutely a thing in our society, meat is unarguably and demonstrably tied into masculinity for a lot of men as the result of advertising and social conditioning. If their example is what bewilders you though I think I can empathize, because this phenomenon is not at all something exclusive to conservatives or the right. Maybe just more pronounced on that side of culture. Plenty of liberal men conflate meat eating with masculinity, to degrees.

No more farmers, lab grown food! Better for the environment, better for animals. Win win. Farmers in The Netherlands are seriously fucked up, going as far as threatening politicians with murder at their private home. So fuck meat, dairy and egg farmers. We only need fruits and vegetables, and lab grown meat is a nice addition.
- I didn't find an answer in my very limited search for what is actually used to grow the meat, so depending on what makes up the "stuff" that brings nutrients into the growing part, we may still need a lot of farmers for something like this. There's also no way the growing environment, which seeks to create an artificial "animal", is energyefficient.
  I'll celebrate the day we don't need farmers, and I'll celebrate the day it'll be at least environmentally equivolent, but until I see evidence of those things, I'll be very sceptical of this stuff.
  
  I didn’t find an answer in my very limited search for what is actually used to grow the meat
  If you're referencing how cultured meat used to require amniotic fluids to grow meat, those days are long-since passed and there are multiple companies that have proven methodology for production, the only thing preventing large-scale cultured-meat operations is commercial investment and public sentiment.
  Your skepticism here is a product of the pushback against lab-grown meat, they have injected endless lies and hyperbolic ideas into the public discourse because it threatens the beef industry, which is currently our least efficient protein source by far, so as the climate changes and as our tarifs turn into gulag-like isolation from the international market, you're basically going to have to choose between $40.00 burgers and laboratory-grown beef that tastes the same but is healthier and cheaper.
  Since humans are so easily swayed by the most pathetic arguments and propaganda campaigns, and are so incredibly to make scared, disgusted or hateful of literally anything, I don't expect to see lab-grown meat in my lifetime sadly.
  
  There’s also no way the growing environment, which seeks to create an artificial “animal”, is energyefficient.
  Why not, could you elaborate on this?

Am I the only one that feels bad about how that guy feels about fucking up his marriage? Lol.
- Nah that's real

My vegan perspective: I'm uncomfortable with foods that continue to reproduce the aesthetics of exploitation and probably wouldn't eat it myself. But because it's affect on the world would likely include a sizable reduction in actual real animal exploitation, I'd welcome it's introduction and maybe even promote it to some.
- Thats an interesting take. Most people don't eat meat specifically because its exploitative, they eat it because its easier (relatively) to get the needed nutrients through meat, and because its taste and texture are hard to replicate. Lab grown meat manages to do this (hopefully) without any exploitation.
- I love plant based food and will eat it rather than meat any day. I'm far from a vegan though. A couple of friends are vegan and refuse to eat plant based food which even resembles a meat product. Burgers which imitate beef for example. I personally think these products are great as it gives meat eaters something to relate to and try plant based food.
  Lab meat though. I'm struggling to understand this. Unless the meat industry shuts down most people aren't going to eat lab meat. And like you said it doesn't offer a good enough reason to switch for most people. Some people might switch but it will have no impact on the meat supply chain.
  
  Lab meat though. I’m struggling to understand this. Unless the meat industry shuts down most people aren’t going to eat lab meat. And like you said it doesn’t offer a good enough reason to switch for most people. Some people might switch but it will have no impact on the meat supply chain.
  There's a pretty large amount of people who are vaguely uncomfortable with the animal cruelty in the meat and dairy industries but can't get over themselves to completely change their diet to a plant-based one.
  I also expect lab grown meat to be both cheaper and more environmentally friendly once the technology is more advanced and mature. It doesn't really make sense to compare an immature technology like this to conventional food right now.
  
  Economics of scale, simple. If a sausage with lab grown meat is 75% of the regular sausages, or cheaper a big portion of the populous will switch.
  The more people that switch the bigger the scale gets. Till it gets to the most efficient input -> meat like product.
- Curious because you mention aesthetics being key - do you do black bean burgers, beyond burgers, etc?
  
  Not usually, though I've been in situations where I'm at a bar and that's literally the only vegan option on the menu. I've joked in the past that bean burgers are such a crumbly disasater that they fail to replicate the aesthetics of meat entirely, whereas impossible patties do it so well that I'm paranoid and examining the pattie over and over again and asking the barkeep if he's sure this is the vegan one. Either way it's not my idea of fun.
- Those are aesthetics

the only reason i'd have an issue with it is because of the markup on most items like this (looking in your direction beyond and morningstar).
if they can have a sustainable and ethical method of creating food then it should be free to everyone who needs it.
- Potatoes aren't even free so I doubt that is happening.
  Cheaper food would be a good start, potatoes and rice are incredibly cheap foods.
- Lab grown food is legitimately super expensive to make though.
  
  When I got a playstation 2, my stepfather was amazed it had a blue led. They were crazy expensive just a few years earlier and this console just used one for no real reason other than it looked good.
- At least in the US I'd say it's because the government pumps billions and billions in subsidies to the different farm sectors (70+ billion a year for beef alone). The products you mentioned don't get that funding and don't sell the volume either.
- The tricky part of lab grown meat is you need to keep it from being infected.
  Keep the factory perfectly sterile.
  Any time a vat is colonised by fungi or bacteria or a virus its contents would have to be dumped and the equipment sterilised
  That's going to be expensive.
  It will need feedstock. It will produce waste CO2
  Meanwhile a cow has an immune system and eats low quality grass.
  Lab meat will not be able to compete with field grown meat
  
  I'll bet dimes to dollars that it's not that hard to turn grass into labmeat-consumable nutrients. Cows use bacteria to digest grass, anyway, and enzymes are usually pretty easy to make in a lab, too.
- IMO the biggest customers for this once it reaches parity with real meat for cost and quality will be companies like McDonalds, Sysco and other companies that manufacture foods in biblical quantities. Once they can save money by doing it, they absolutely will and once they start putting their level of investment into the tech, it will advance very rapidly.
  
  They'll still sell regular meat, the lab meat burger will just be ten times the price

Well rn lab grown meat is even worse in terms of CO2 than animal farming, so don't get your hopes up yet. Yeah, sure, it means less animals getting thrown into the torture and murder machine, but if you really want to make a difference it's by convincing peoples to go vegan, at least in this decade
- I was mostly thinking about taste and texture. I never even considered that the CO2 impact might be worse. That sucks.
  
  Lab grown chicken is apparently fantastic, taste and texture wise
  
  From what I’ve read lab grown meat is mushy, like a chicken nugget, because it’s basically a paste that’s extruded into a steak like shape. Been a few years since I’ve read up on it though so maybe they have a new way of dealing with it
- I'm sure the CO2 output will go down over time, considering how new the technology is, relatively speaking.
  When you think about how much water and feed is required to make a substantially smaller portion of meat, then this technology is highly likely to undercut the CO2 emissions of traditional meat production once it's done on a large enough scale, considering that, at least based on what I've seen, the main expenditure of resources is just a pure nutrient solution, with the rest being electricity to generally operate the machinery, and maintain temperature (and of course, we've seen many advancements in heat pump-like technology in recent years making it insanely efficient at maintaining heat for a fraction of the electricity it traditionally costs.)
- I must say, I don't like lab grown meat in the future being the reason why omnivores don't give a fair shake to already-existing vegan meat replacements today. Forever being out there on the time horizon can be misused as a long term excuse for not cutting down on animal exploitation.
- Co2 or Co2e cows are pretty damn farty?

No farmers no food!
lab grown meat joins the game
Oy! That's not fair!
- The thing is they spend so much time protesting, mostly about inconsequential things, I'm not sure they produce any food anyway.
  
  Lab grown meat is so expensive and small in quantities that it is inconsequential alright

I probably wouldn't eat it myself. Not due to "Muh meat. Muh masculinityh!" -- but because i feel like, that everytime we mess too much with food, we end up making it bad for ourselves in some weird way. Processed foods and all that jazz.
So i'll continue eating my legumes, greens and the monthly beef.
- Processed food isn't bad for you.. GMOs aren't bad for you.. that's the propaganda farmers use to keep you from making common sense choices.
  "Processed" is anything that goes into a machine. You want your beef ground up? It's now processed. What's added in the processing is what you need to isolate and be weary of.
  "Genetically Modified Organisms" includes bananas which have been selectively cultivated to provide more nutrition and reduce seed sizes. It's a result of intelligent agricultural practices to maximize food production and minimize inedible waste.
  Plant based meat has been an incredible substitution for meat making it cruelty free without compromising much on taste or texture, if at all.
  Lab grown is the next step, making genuine meat without slaughtering animals. I'm not aligned with PETA but I think an ideal future is one where we don't need to kill sentient life in order to have exactly what we do right now.
  You can have your own opinion but at the very least be aware of the origin of your bias.
  
  I think when most people talk about "processed food", they're referring to ultra-processed food, and just grinding beef would not be enough to classify it as an ultra-processed food
  
  “Processed” is anything that goes into a machine. You want your beef ground up? It’s now processed. What’s added in the processing is what you need to isolate and be weary of.
  I don't disagree necessarily, but food that's been ground up into a paste is essentially pre-chewed. It definitely makes it easier to gulp down more before your brain catches up to your stomach and you start feeling full. This goes for apple sauce as much as it does chicken nuggets.
- I just miss my wife
  
  I also miss your wife
- We've done SO much selective breeding to make our food hardier and more plentiful, that we now have so much that we're complaining about it not being pretty enough, or that the tomato that grows three fruits a year is slightly less tasty than the plant that might produce one, or not.
  Honestly, it's a great time to be alive to eat stuff we couldn't even imagine a century ago.
  
  Agree - but i personally think there's a huge qualitative difference between selective breeding over long periods of time -- and then producing a fully artifical beef in a lab. One is a slow natural process with human intervention and the other is a fully synthetic process.
- Stop doing agriculture. If you're going to be anti-technology on food, then be an anprim.
  
  Nope, agriculture has existed for a looong long time. With that said, i try to limit my intake of food grown in conventional agriculture with pesticides and all that shit.
  I'm not anti-technology on food per se. But i'm very sceptical whenever we introduce new foods or stuff to put into our bodies. It feels like 30 years passes and then the article "X is super fucking bad for you actually" comes out. So i try to limit myself to ingesting stuff that have existed for a long time - because at least then we know the long term effects of them.
- I agree. I remember when skim milk and margarine were supposed to be good for you. Beans and peas already exist, are cheap, store forever, and can be used in so many different ways. Fake meat feels like an overly complicated way to solve a problem that's already solved, with the added bonus that they could cause horrific health problems that won't be identified for decades.

I watched a video (no source) on this stuff a while back and it compared the carbon footprint of plant based diets, meat alternatives and meat and came to the conclusion that the current way lab grown meat (not plant protein shaped like meat like planted, beyond etc) of the kind that article means can actually be more carbon intensive to produce than factory farmed chicken. (The least carbon intense meat). That said it is still better than free range beef, but one should consider the reason why one buys this. Vegans seem to not like it either because it resembles meat or because it contains the cells harvested from real animals and meat eaters don't like it because its not real meat, not to mention it's insanely expensive, just eat the plant protein, its not that bad lol. (Also put on a linear scale the carbon footprint of beef compared to plant based protein and fake meat is insane, thinking about that video alwqys makes me eat less meat)
- That's partly because they fail to market it well. Meat alternatives never taste the same. Trying to replace beef or pork or chicken will always fail to entice people that already enjoy meat.
  It's better described as a new meat with new recipe/cooking requirements. You wouldn't complain about how much the assumed pork ribs didn't taste right if I told you they were beef ribs. You'd agree, because you wouldn't expect them to taste the same.
- I needed cheap protein that stores well for my disaster emergency plan and the best thing I found was peanuts. They can be stored for a long time before they spoil, they're cheap, high in protein, and easy to grow. They grow well in hot weather, so if you can't grow them where you live, wait a few years and climate change will fix that.
- Doesn't this mean that the tech just isn't ready yet?
  As in, they can't sell it if it's more expensive, is fake, and is worse for the environment.
- No new technology ever starts cheap so I would expect to see reductions in carbon use with time.
  There is also the added benefit of land not being used for cattle being regenerated. Looking at the cattle ranches in my state, a quick (very rough) calculation puts that combined size around 200,000km², or the size of Kyrgyzstan. If half of that was reclaimed thanks to ranches being closed, that would pay a huge benefit.
  I wonder if benefits like these are calculated into the carbon footprint.
- It has 2 major use cases as I see it.
  If they can lab engineer super premium cuts consistently and affordably people will come around. I dont buy A5 Wagyu because I cant afford it, not because I dont want it.
  Or
  If they can really pull the ass out of the price on meat destined for processing plants to make premade foods. People arent excited for the meat case and the steaks at the supermarket to be lab grown, but when fast and frozen food switches over to it almost universally people wont have a choice.

I would absolutely eat this if it was the same price, or even slightly more expensive, than equivalent beef.

It’s quite concerning that something like 37% of the land on this planet is used for agriculture with most of it used for livestock. Biodiversity is being destroyed so we can enjoy a grilled ribeye.
So, I understand the enthusiasm for lab-grown meat. At the same time, I don’t trust big corporations and their captured government agencies to be truthful about the long-term health effects of something like lab-grown meat, and I also expect the positive environmental impact may get overstated to push for outlawing traditional livestock in favor of lab-grown meat for which a handful of big corporations will own patents. Patented seeds for plants that don’t produce viable seeds and lab-grown meat sounds like a good way for corporations to have complete control over humanity’s food supply, more so than they do already.

No one will bat an eye once taco bell and McDonalds switch to lab grown meat.
- Nobody will bat an eye until something something prion contamination.
  Never underestimate the ability of capitalism to murder it's customers

Starting to think a significant portion of rich people genuinely view suffering as an essential if not occult component to the value of their products. Like it means more to them when a thing suffers or dies to produce what they have.
- diamond rings come to mind, i dont know why some people have a bone to pick with lab-grown diamonds, does the horrible labor behind mining make the "real thing" better?
  
  Same. To some, yes.
- Not just products but life as a whole.
  Too many people have the mentality of "If I suffered, you should to", or equate their value to their suffering "Suffering builds character", "You only slept 6 hours? Try 4 like me".
  Humanity has an unhealthy obsession with suffering equating validation.
  
  Yes. Hearing about how pre colonial Hawaiians worked like 9-12am and were so efficient they could spend the rest of the day playing, makes me deeply sad to see how far we’ve regressed.

WHERE's NOLAN