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Lab-Grown Meat
This article was linked from Slashdot today. It talks about various efforts to artificially grow meat in a lab. Hydroponic beef!
I'm a confirmed omnivore, but I recognize that there are several problems with eating meat. Most pragmatically, meat is enormously inefficient. For every pound of beef you have to feed the cow 40 pounds of grain. Pretty silly on a planet quickly approaching its carrying capacity. There are also some vaguely uncomfortable ethical issues. Not enough to make me go veggie, but I certainly wouldn't mind them going away. What surprised me, though, was the reaction in the Slashdot comments. A very high percentage of posters were disgusted by the concept. Even factoring in the slashdot-twerp effect it seems like an unusual response.
So, what does the audience at home think? Which is worse: a slab of meat growing in a harshly lit laboratory, pulsing slowly to the rythm of electrical impulses, or carving a steak out of a big dumb dirty cow, with all its parasites and bacteria and waste products?
I'm a confirmed omnivore, but I recognize that there are several problems with eating meat. Most pragmatically, meat is enormously inefficient. For every pound of beef you have to feed the cow 40 pounds of grain. Pretty silly on a planet quickly approaching its carrying capacity. There are also some vaguely uncomfortable ethical issues. Not enough to make me go veggie, but I certainly wouldn't mind them going away. What surprised me, though, was the reaction in the Slashdot comments. A very high percentage of posters were disgusted by the concept. Even factoring in the slashdot-twerp effect it seems like an unusual response.
So, what does the audience at home think? Which is worse: a slab of meat growing in a harshly lit laboratory, pulsing slowly to the rythm of electrical impulses, or carving a steak out of a big dumb dirty cow, with all its parasites and bacteria and waste products?
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In a more serious response, though, I guess it would depend on how well they pulled it off. I mean, if it actually tasted like meat and had the texture of meat, as well as the Good Things nutritionally (i.e. it didn't have the nutritional value of, say, ramen or the other artificially created substances out there for consumption), I'd be all in favor of it.
And yeah, it's a nice resolution to the dilemma of eating-meat-versus-ethics. Until someone decides that lab meat is alive dammit and we're all evil for eating it and blah blah blah, anyway.
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I am certainly looking forward to grown meat. I already find Quorn to be a good chicken substitute - give me lab hamburger and I practically never need to eat meat again! (Still need something to replace ham/turkey sandwiches.)
I have no need for a muscle-twitching steak.
I'm kinda creeped by the girl who suggested eating meat cultures of herself, though... THat just sounds wrong. :)
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The other reason I'm veggie, though, is that meat gradually just started to gross me out, and vat meat might still do that. I dunno, I'd have to see. That part wouldn't necessarily be rational, though, but then most foods that gross people out aren't, really.
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I don't eat beef and pork (for ... well, since 1986, however long that is) because of the synthetic hormones and antibodies and other really nasty stuff they load into cattle and pigs, and also because of concerns about other chemical and biochemical concentrations (like, say, prions.) As such, lab meat *might* be better, but I'd want to know a lot about what they were feeding into it before I'd touch it. There is extensive evidence of widespread toxic effects on people from chemical contamination (not, by any means, only via food) and lab steak might well have even MORE of these nasties. We've lived with bacteria for thousands of years; nearly every adult on the planet is carrying at least a kilogram of bacteria (and has more bacterial cells than body cells in eir body) but we have not been living with fluorinated anabolic steroids for thousands of years. We know a fair bit about how bacteria can kill us; we know a lot less about the long-term effects of food that is steeped in tons of exotic, non-human-rated antibiotics, or, for that matter, growth hormones and cell adhesion molecule stimulators that might be involved in vat steaks.
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Not that any of that explains why I would dislike eating lab-grown meat. It is my general preference for natural things and dislike of synthetics. It is as much an aesthetic as rational preference in many cases. I do agree that it is environmentally sounder to eat vegetable protein rather than meat. But, why lab-grown meat instead of tofu, etc?
Reminds me of a SF story I read once where the characters lived in a poor home and were forced to kill and eat actual animals--which was a very taboo/disgusting thing to the society that had become used to eating "Reel" meat, a synthetic name-brand product. Perhaps that is part of the disgust factor to me...I could see this being yet another part of the McDonald/Disney-fying of our culture. Also reminds me of the short-story on PLIF where the children of whole countries were genetically modified to be dependent on McDonalds food. It's bad enough that many children these days have no sense of where meat (or any other food for that matter) really comes from.
Ugh.
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