It's a baby step, to be sure, but it's a step. I really, really enjoy the taste and mouthfeel of meat, but I've been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of eating animals. For years, I've been wishing that they'd develop meat grown in the lab so that I could indulge without having to kill a vertibrate in order to do so. Looks like they're finally getting there. It'll be a long time before I can have, say, a humanely produced T-bone steak, but still.
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But then we'll be endangering the lives of vegetarians who are because it's cool!
I'm not sure how I feel about this- at least in the beginning- I rather like knowing the idea that at one time the meat I'm eating came from somewhere other than a lab.
Although if the grain that's used now was used to feed peoeple instead of animals (some of it anyways) I would imagine that the price of grain(s) would fall substantially. Might be good for places like Africa.
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Try buying either organic meat, or kosher meat. You know that the animals were at least killed humanely then, in the case of organic they probably even had a decent life.
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I don't know, Noemon. I'm more incline to think of "Damn, the bastards are trying to make steps towards vat grown meat!"
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Mmmm, ground meat. I wonder if all of this fake meat would taste like veal, as the muscle hasn't been used.
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quote:Try buying either organic meat, or kosher meat. You know that the animals were at least killed humanely then, in the case of organic they probably even had a decent life.
Top 10 Largest Misconceptions Ever:
1) "Organic" or "Free Range" meat & animal biproducts are usually produced more humanely. 2) ...
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So Stephan made an unsubstantiated claim, and you made an unsubstantiated counter-claim. That leaves us... well, I'm not sure where, exactly, but somewhere inconclusive. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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I agree this is really really cool.... but...
In only replaces ground meat. And the meat that gets ground currently is the "left over" meat.
That left over meat might now go into the trash.
Plus if they managed to replace the whole cow, pig and chicken these animals would possibly go extinct. They're only survival trait is "Useful to Humans"
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It looks like he has it a little more right then I do. If you really worry about it, track down the farms where the meat comes from.
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Hasn't it been argued by animal rights activists that the specific ritual for killing the animal in kosher shops is not humane? I mean, it doesn't matter to me, but if it matters to you, you should at least consider looking into that before you make such statements.
I eat kosher meat because I know it is going to be clean and free of blood and such.
Posts: 4753 | Registered: May 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Primal Curve: Hasn't it been argued by animal rights activists that the specific ritual for killing the animal in kosher shops is not humane? I mean, it doesn't matter to me, but if it matters to you, you should at least consider looking into that before you make such statements.
I eat kosher meat because I know it is going to be clean and free of blood and such.
I'm sure Tante, Rivka, or StarLisa would be better equipped to answer that. But in my opinion many vegetarian environmentalists see any death as inhumane, I would like to find a non biased source myself.
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Stephan, I do. I'd prefer to not have to kill an animal at all if I can help it though.
Primal Curve, why do you feel that way? Here are my thoughts on the plusses and minuses of this technology, were it to mature and become widespread:
Positives (in the order that they popped into my mind as I was composing this post):
No animals killed, and no possibility of inhumane treatment of animals
Fewer resources needed to produce a given quantity of meat
meat can be tailored to contain "heart healthy" fats, as well as being nutritionally fortified
Slow down the destruction of rain forests, as one of the primary reasons for doing so is to clear land for cattle grazing
Decrease incidence of damaging food born prions, bacteria, and parasites
allow stretches of prairie to return to natural state, improving biodiversity
Possibly lower the cost of meat for the consumer (although there is no guarantee that lowered production costs would result in lower prices for consumers)
Negatives (again in no particular order):
Those lands that could be returned to prairie would need to be managed, as the prairie ecosystem was not a natural one any more than the current grazing lands are.
The bottom would very likely fall out of the ranching industry, unless present ranchers were able to move in and make extensive use of this new technology
The bottom would also likely fall out of the meat packing industry, since slaughter houses would largely become a thing of the past. Therre would still be meat to pack, but the process would be much different, and could likely be completely automated.
It's possible that some species of domesticated animal would become extinct, and fairly certain that at least some breeds within species would.
This extinction could prove disasterous if we are plunged into circumstances in which we lose the technology to grow meat in the lab.
Anybody able to think of any other postives or negatives? While real, the negatives seem like ones that have accompanied most technological advances, and strike me as things that could be managed.
Could vat grown, say, beef be kosher? What about vat grown pork? Hm. Doesn't David Brin have a short story about exactly this question?
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quote:Both battery cage and "free-range" egg hatcheries kill all male chicks shortly after birth. Since male chicks cannot lay eggs and are different breeds than those chickens raised for meat, they are of no use to the egg industry. Standard killing methods, even among "free-range" producers, include grinding male chicks alive or throwing them into trash bags and leaving them to suffocate.
quote:According to The Washington Post Magazine, in the case of birds, the term "free-range" "doesn't really tell you anything about the [animal's]…quality of life, nor does it even assure that the animal actually goes outdoors."
quote:Companies want consumers to believe that products labeled “free-range” or “free-roaming” are derived from animals who spent their short lives outdoors, enjoying sunshine, fresh air, and the company of other animals. Labels, other than “organic,” on egg cartons are not subject to any government regulations, and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) does not regulate “free-range” or “free-roaming” claims for beef products.
quote:Like the “free-range” label, the “organic” label does not indicate that animals were treated any differently while being transported or slaughtered than animals raised on factory farms.
The original news story that brought this to my attention was on my local news and, unfortunately, I can't seem to find the article online, but the farmer testimonies were interesting:
1) A farm can call itself "free range" if it opens the main gate (not the cage doors) for its animals for a minimum of 30 seconds (in WA state).
2) Emphasizing, again: they DO NOT need to open the cage doors.
Edit to add: Just to clarify, I really don't care what happens to our furry little friends - farm animals are only on my radar insofar as they feed me. To this day, my favorite animal is the adorable filet mignon.
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Thanks for that link Zeugma. I've been trying to follow that tech since the story broke back in 2003, but haven't found much news about it. It's good that they seem to be ironing out the problems with the tech. I hope it eventually gets somewhere useful on a large scale.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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Man, a lot of posts got made between the time I started writing my last one and the time I finished it. Looks like I ended up repeating what other people had said in some of the positives and negatives.
quote:Originally posted by The Pixiest: I agree this is really really cool.... but...
In only replaces ground meat. And the meat that gets ground currently is the "left over" meat.
That left over meat might now go into the trash.
Plus if they managed to replace the whole cow, pig and chicken these animals would possibly go extinct. They're only survival trait is "Useful to Humans"
Right *now* they can only create a ground meat replacement. That's why I referred to this as a baby step toward what I'm wanting. According to the article, though, they're actively working on ways of producing lab grown meat that would have the properties of an actual cut of meat.
The possibility of extinction is the only negative I've thought of that leaves me feeling a little chilled. We can come up with ways around most of the other problems, but that one...humans being what they are it isn't unlikely that we'll let them die out. If that happens and we enter a dark age we'll be screwed on a number of levels.
Of course, pigs go feral pretty easily, and cattle probably could--certain breeds of them, anyway. The question is whether there would be space for them to do so.
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Thanks Zeug! I read about it 3 years ago and had wondered what had happened with it. With the booming price of oil over the past year I had hoped he had started opening plants everywhere he could. This technology should be part of every big city's waste program and every food processing plant with by products.
quote:According to the article, though, they're actively working on ways of producing lab grown meat that would have the properties of an actual cut of meat.
It will be interesting to see how they can get specialized structures to grow, without forms of cloning getting uncomfortably close to full-on animal duping.
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What if they could grow whole animals without a brain (except the parts required to keep the heart beating and such)
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Thanks for the information on free range and organically raised animals, erosomniac--I knew a bit of that, but not all of it.
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quote:It will be interesting to see how they can get specialized structures to grow, without forms of cloning getting uncomfortably close to full-on animal duping.
There will be challenges to be overcome in order to get us there, but I don't think that they'll be insurmountable. I read what you wrote, erosomniac, as implying that you thought that they would be. Was that something you were trying to convey?
Pix, growing whole animals with just a brain stem wouldn't provide much of a gain in terms of the whole "resources spent to units of food produced" ratio, which is one of the primary drivers behind this (I'm well aware that my concern for animal welfare isn't even on the radar of the people working on this technology).
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quote:There will be challenges to be overcome in order to get us there, but I don't think that they'll be insurmountable. I read what you wrote, erosomniac, as implying that you thought that they would be. Was that something you were trying to convey?
Sorry, there was no intended sneer; I'm actually INTERESTED to see how it will be done!
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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Noemon: The left over parts can be dumped into the Oil-Making-Machine and will be used to generate electricity and drive cars. We'll use every part of the animal, even if we're not eating it.
posted
Ah, glad I asked! I didn't think that it seemed in character for you, which is why I did so.
I know that they can currently grow blood vessels on biodegradable scaffolds. I wonder if they'll do that first, and then, with another biodegradable scaffold built around the blood vessels, grow the muscle cells, using the blood vessels to get nutrients to the growing cells. That way they could grow much thicker slabs of meat.
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Pix, I do hope that the anything to oil technology takes off in a big way--it's one of those technologies that has the potential to change everything. If other waste streams that can produce oil include sewage, random junkyard crap, and agricultural waste, though, I don't know that the price that they'd be able to get for the unused portions of the brain-stem animals you're talking about would be high enough to offset the costs of growing them. Maybe so, though--I'm certainly not an expert in any of this.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:Originally posted by The Pixiest: What if they could grow whole animals without a brain (except the parts required to keep the heart beating and such)
I don't know. As I recall from my days reading Howard the Duck, the kidney is the seat of the soul. We could be treading in dangerous waters here.
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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The thought that comes into my mind thinking about this lab-grown meat is that there will be a sinister disease gotten from eating it, sort of as a cosmic punishment for messing with life or sidestepping the "natural order" of things.
The official cause of the disease will be all scientific, though, but definitely the result of something unforeseen.
But then, I must just be paranoid.
Posts: 2880 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Katarain: The thought that comes into my mind thinking about this lab-grown meat is that there will be a sinister disease gotten from eating it, sort of as a cosmic punishment for messing with life or sidestepping the "natural order" of things.
I know that the cosmic punishment when we started moving around on trains was pretty severe. The one when we started flying around in airplanes was even worse. Both of them pale in comparison to the one we received when we abandoned our hunting/gathering ways and started farming though. Don't even get me started on that one.
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My guess is that even if this technology becomes so good that a vat-grown steak tastes more or less exactly like a range-grown steak, the rich will still want the real thing sometimes just to say they can. Also, third-world countries will take longer to acquire the technology, so their populations of domesticated animals will still be in existence if and when we ever plunged into another dark age.
Posts: 1903 | Registered: Sep 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Katarain: The thought that comes into my mind thinking about this lab-grown meat is that there will be a sinister disease gotten from eating it, sort of as a cosmic punishment for messing with life or sidestepping the "natural order" of things.
I know that the cosmic punishment when we started moving around on trains was pretty severe. The one when we started flying around in airplanes was even worse. Both of them pale in comparison to the one we received when we abandoned our hunting/gathering ways and started farming though. Don't even get me started on that one.
Well, the farming thing really was problematic. It created a population explosion, more wars then even religion can be blamed for, and introduced many diseases into the human population. It's probably the single biggest cause of the harm done to the Earth's biosphere.
Hunter-gatherers never hunted species into extinction. It actually took farmers to do that.
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Brinestone: My guess is that even if this technology becomes so good that a vat-grown steak tastes more or less exactly like a range-grown steak, the rich will still want the real thing sometimes just to say they can. Also, third-world countries will take longer to acquire the technology, so their populations of domesticated animals will still be in existence if and when we ever plunged into another dark age.
I could definitely see slaughtered meat consumption becoming a status symbol, and you're right about third world countries likely ending up as reservoirs for domesticated animal populations. Good points!
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:Well, the farming thing really was problematic. It created a population explosion, more wars then even religion can be blamed for, and introduced many diseases into the human population. It's probably the single biggest cause of the harm done to the Earth's biosphere.
Hunter-gatherers never hunted species into extinction. It actually took farmers to do that.
Agriculture has given us the breathing room to explore and express the best and worst elements of our species' character, I'd say. I don't really see that as a cosmic curse.
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There was a story in one of the Dangerous Visions anthologies that dealt with vat-grown meat. I need to dig those up and look for it. It was kind of freaky, in the way that most of the stories in those anthologies were. I think someone winds up falling into a vat and becoming part of the culture.
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Noemon: Agriculture has given us the breathing room to explore and express the best and worst elements of our species' character, I'd say. I don't really see that as a cosmic curse.
How has it done that? Agriculture takes much, much more work than hunting. So much work that people have to have more and more kids to do it, and only some of those kids can stay on when they get older, so the rest have to go off and find their own land to farm.
Agriculture made slavery and serfdom possible, and it made war necessary (because there's only so much arable land in any given place).
I'm not sure what kind of breathing room we got from agriculture. Honestly. Am I missing something?
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quote:One side-effect of domestication has been disease. For example, cattle have given humanity various viral poxes, measles, and tuberculosis; pigs gave influenza; and horses the rhinoviruses. Humans share over sixty diseases with dogs. Many parasites also have their origins in domestic animals.
As far as wars are concerned, agriculture requires enormous tracts of land, which is in limited supply. Further, clearing and working that land can easily be done by captives. Hunting can't. If hunters capture others, it just means more mouths to feed, and little benefit accrues. Farmers can always use the help.
There's much more need for specialization with farming, because it's so labor intensive. If someone is going to be working the fields from dawn to dusk, someone else is going to need to take care of protecting the area from others who might want to take it. So you need a "protector" class, which inevitably mutates into a nobility and/or a warrior class.
Everything gets stratified. People start to see other people as their prey, rather than animals.
A lot of it becomes a cycle. The increased populations can only be supported by agriculture. But it was agriculture that created the increased population in the first place.
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Presumably, we'd have come into contact with cattle, pigs, and horses eventually. After all, we were hunting them, too.
quote:Agriculture takes much, much more work than hunting.
This is actually the opposite of the typical claim. The big advantage of agriculture is that one person can grow enough food for many, which directly led to the formation of villages and then towns by allowing people to perform specialized jobs and trade services.
The farmer sells his crops in the market, or trades them for a blacksmith's services, or a seamstresses, or a miller's. Granted, these things didn't happen overnight, but one can hardly argue against the good done by agriculture. Especially arguing on the internet, on a computer, in a room with electricity, none of which would likely exist were we still hunting and gathering.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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What Lisa is saying isn't completely wrong--people come into contact with living animals for much longer periods of time if they live with them and tend them than they do if they simply hunt them, and that does give diseases an opportunity to jump between species. Another important way in which agriculture leads to increased disease is that it leads to the formation of cities, where population density is high enough for diseases to really take off.
In addition, her claim that agriculture leads to warfare is also right--it provides populations large enough (and food surplusses large enough) to support the creation of armies.
I disagree with her about the superiority of hunter/gatherer societies to agricultural societies, though. I'll talk about it more later, but I'm having an unusually busy day at work, and haven't had as much time for hatracking as I'd like. In the interests of posting *something*, I'm going going to click "Add Reply" for now and come back and talk more about all of this later.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Read Guns, Germs and Steel, it does a FAR better ob of explaining how domesticated animals lead to most human diseases. Also, without farming the population densities we now have would be impossible to maintain, and it is those population densities that cause contagions to spread so quickly.
While we might have had some domesticated animals before farming, we didn't have enough to spread disease...at least not anywhere near the same rates. Repeated contact with animal viruses allowed them to adapt to human hosts, with disastrous results. Also, waste products from humans (garbage and food mostly) contributed to the spread of a lot of vermin, which have very short life cycles. A lot of our diseases are/were spread by those vermin, and their diseases mutate often, allowing them to jump species unusually fast. Their close proximity to human habitation provided many chances for exposure, leading to many diseases.
Also, before farming we didn't "own" land in the same fashion, did we? Most societies were hunter-gatherers, and while they had "ranges" they didn't own property on a regular basis, not as individuals. Also, once again the population density caused my a sustainable food resource is what caused many wars....everyone wants the best growing land, and are willing to fight for it.
Without farming and animal husbandry it would have been impossible to support the massive armies needed to wage war as well.
Once we had a surplus of food specialty classes, such as protector classes and priest classes, because possible. So even religious wars were caused by farming and animal husbandry, at least indirectly.
Farming and animal husbandry caused many problems for humans. I still think it was worth it, of course, but they were NOT problem free at all.
quote:In addition, her claim that agriculture leads to warfare is also right--it provides populations large enough (and food surplusses large enough) to support the creation of armies.
Yeah, I forgot to mention this, but that part is also true. The thing about it I disagree with is the statement that agriculture has caused more wars than god. Not that it can't be true, I just can't see a way to prove it one way or another. Wars usually come from more than one cause, and I don't think it's as simple as grabbing a list of wars throughout history and checking either (a)agriculture or (b)god under "Cause of War?"
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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So, um, would vat grown meat be considered kosher? And, would it be considered meat in the sense of not being able to mix it with dairy? What if you also had vat grown dairy?
This thought struck me today... I don't know why.
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