16 ms·

Fake meat cannot come soon enough - poor bird was encouraged to grow in an unhealthy manner resulting in dead tissue inside it while it was still alive. I wonde

by ncr100 10y ago

Fake meat cannot come soon enough - poor bird was encouraged to grow in an unhealthy manner resulting in dead tissue inside it while it was still alive. I wonder if it was painful for the bird having this tough dead tissue at the core of its breasts.

omginternets 10y ago
And here I was thinking "(true) free-range as the norm can't come soon enough". I'm very skeptical of fake meet insofar as nutrition involves highly complex systems. Surely the risk of a trans-fat-like health debacle is non-negligible ... tl;dr: fake meat isn't a problem per se, but I sure as hell won't be the first one to eat it. I'll consider it when there's >50 years of hard data on the record.
- Baeocystin 10y ago
  Cell expansion already has decades of science behind it. There isn't anything hard about it, either. You or I could expand cultures in our kitchens with minimal difficulty as it is. The hard part of 'fake meat' (which isn't fake, it's real muscle tissue, it's just grown differently) is that muscle alone doesn't taste good, or have a pleasing texture. You need connective tissue, fat, blood vessels... The whole lot, really. And that is a much more difficult problem.
  - ericdykstra 10y ago
    I'm with omginternets on this one. On a spectrum of "herbivore that has roamed relatively freely and eaten a variety of vegetables according to it's nature" to "animals raised in factory farms, fed defect candy, and grown to 3x it's natural size before reaching physical maturity" to "lab grown muscle tissue" I'm sticking as close to the first one as I can, and I'm going vegetarian before making lab grown tissue a part of my diet.
    - Baeocystin 10y ago
      I wouldn't want to force anyone to eat anything they don't want to. I'm personally looking forward to it, though.
  - omginternets 10y ago
    >Cell expansion already has decades of science behind it Not where nutritional epidemiology is concerned. Not by a long shot.
    - Baeocystin 10y ago
      Not for meat, but we've been eating yeasts, algae, bacteria, and other cellular cultures for thousands of years. It's not like the concept is new across the board.
      - omginternets 10y ago
        That's not quite what we're talking about though. We're talking about synthetic meat, not meat-substitutes, i.e.: lab-grown muscle tissue with (something like) cow-DNA involved.
        Baeocystin 10y ago
        Expanding animal cells really isn't all that different than expanding anything else. It was expensive because the details needed to be refined, but what cost $250,000 a couple years ago costs ~$8 today. Like I said before, I really don't want to push anyone to try anything they don't want to. But people know how hot dogs are made ( https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pw_CTCSkOZI/WAPJuZWaF5I/AAAAAAAAmTE/jtLkSXKlkKoadpEuHU_TpWmqenATiUBAQCLcB/s320/HotDogFillingMade.gif https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pw_CTCSkOZI/WAPJuZWaF5I/AAAAAAAAm... ), and it hasn't stopped them, so I expect cultured meat will probably take off pretty quickly once it becomes cheaper than farming.
        omginternets 10y ago
        Yes, and changing fat molecules into trans-fat molecules isn't all that different than any other chemical reaction. The devil is in the details, and nutrition touches upon highly complex systems. The point being, we've already seen how seemingly simple, innocuous changes to nutritional substances can have nasty consequences. To think this time is different is pure hubris. I get your point, but you seem to be missing mine.
pavlov 10y ago
This is just the tip of the iceberg in how animals are treated. Industrial meat production practically runs its margins on increasing the suffering of animals in a manner that narrowly avoids this kind of visible anomalies in the product. As many others have noted in the past, slave labor and concentration camps operated on a similar industrial calculus of forcibly squeezing out value from living beings before putting them to death. Waiting for "fake meat" to fix the problem is like saying: "I can't wait until we can grow zombies to pick cotton, then all the slaves can finally go free."
- qubyte 10y ago
  Not if we're talking about advances in textured vegetable protein. When I read "fake meat" I take it to mean that it's not animal derived. Otherwise it'd just be meat.
  - ikurei 10y ago
    Still, we can do something about it right now. We may need meat, but we don't need meat in every meal; if we reduced the consumption of meat, we could conceivably switch to more expensive, less efficient, more humane ways to grow animals. If you can afford it, you can also only buy meat from non-intensive farming. Or stop eating meat all together. I just don't think it's morally right to wait for a solution that may not ever come, or not for a long time. I eat veggie fake-meat often, and sometimes it's great, but it's not close to real meat and I don't know that it'll ever be accepted by most of the population.
    - qubyte 10y ago
      I absolutely agree. Reducing consumption is a win on pretty much every front. Another thing to do is diversify what is eaten. Have some (sustainably sourced) fish or shell fish a couple of days a week.
    - jshevek 10y ago
      "We may need meat, but we don't need meat in every meal" Is it still a common belief that we 'need meat'? I thought it was well established that humans in normal health do not _need_ meat to thrive - especially with our current technology and industry. We can easily meet all of our nutritional needs without any animal flesh.
batiudrami 10y ago
In the meantime you might find vegetarianism surprisingly easy - I know I did. It is initially a bit of extra effort because you need to learn brand new recipes and depending on where you live you might have limited restaurant selections but I mostly gave up meat 18 months ago and was surprised at how easy it was. Plus it's way cheaper and you get to massively reduce your carbon footprint too. It's not for everyone but maybe worth thinking about? :)
- curiousDog 10y ago
  I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Particularly going Vegan. What sorts of protein do you usually eat?
  - mandrake-c-papi 10y ago
    Beans and tofu are the obvious ones. Stuff like quinoa and nuts are good too. Even green vegetables are good, you just need to eat a lot of them which you can because the calorie density is typically so low.
  - manibatra 10y ago
    Here are a couple of posts that I wrote when about my fitness routine and diet when I transitioned from being an omnivore to a vegan. Hope it helps even though I am not a great writer. Happy to answer any more questions too :) https://medium.com/@manibatra23/2016-a-reflection-e80378393f3b https://medium.com/@manibatra23/2016-a-reflection-e80378393f... https://medium.com/@manibatra23/2016-a-reflection-diet-30c15970e7f7 https://medium.com/@manibatra23/2016-a-reflection-diet-30c15...
  - jlebrech 10y ago
    you can make really tasty tofu nuggets.
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    Lentils (any kind of beans/peas) and rice will give you complete proteins. When I was vegan (gave it up when I got married, like many things ;-) ) I didn't eat much tofu mainly because it has a huge amount of fat. I actually eat a lot more now that I'm not vegan. Vegan is a bit challenging for nutrition because things like zinc are fairly hard to get. Although the UI is fairly poor, I recommend using nut [0] to help you calculate how you are doing. I haven't actually seen anything else even close for a nutrient calculator (which is strange since you would think it would be an obvious piece of software for people to write). Also take this advice from the Vegan society on vitamin B12 [1]. There is a lot of dangerous information out there, so be careful. I really enjoyed being vegan. Unlike many vegans, I was not an ethical vegan. I just like eating that way. I actually became vegetarian to save money when I was young and poor (meat or beer was an easy equation for me to solve). After a while, I just found that the foods I enjoyed the most and that made me feel the best were vegan. YMMV :-D No reason to go crazy at first, though. Just start cooking vegan meals. If you become vegan full time, you'll be cooking a lot in most countries, so be prepared for it. [0] http://nut.sourceforge.net/ http://nut.sourceforge.net/ [1] https://www.vegansociety.com/resources/nutrition-and-health/vitamins-minerals-and-nutrients/vitamin-b12-your-key-facts/what-every-vegan-should-know-about-vitamin-b12 https://www.vegansociety.com/resources/nutrition-and-health/...
DonHopkins 10y ago
Like "Chicken Little" from "The Space Merchants" (1952) by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth [1]: He swung open her door. “This is her nest,” he said proudly. I looked and gulped. It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored. Chicken Little filled most of it. She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter. Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh. You could see that she was alive. Herrera said to me: “All day I walk around her. I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice.” His two-handed blade screamed again. This time it shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak. (Ch. 9) Also [2]: Scum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America. On January 17, 1912, Nobel prize-winning physician Dr. Alexis Carrel placed a part of a chicken's embryo heart in a nutrient medium in a glass flask of his own design. Every forty-eight hours the tissue doubled in size and was transferred to a new flask. Twenty years later, it was still growing. In his 1941 story Methuselah's Children, Robert Heinlein paid homage to his work by referring to the famous chicken as a research tool for the long-lived Howard Families: Lazarus found her servicing the deathless tissue of chicken heart known to the laboratory crew as "Mrs. 'Awkins." Mrs. 'Awkins was older than any member of the Families save possibly Lazarus himself; she was a growing piece of the original tissue obtained by the Families from the Rockefeller Institute in the twentieth century, and the tissues had been alive since early in the twentieth century even then. Dr. Hardy and his predecessors had kept their bit of it alive for more than two centuries now, using the Carrel-Lindbergh-O'Shaug techniques and still Mrs. 'Awkins flourished. [1] http://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.nl/2012/08/this-is-her-nest-space-merchants-and.html http://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.nl/2012/08/this-is-her... [2] http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002
- pjc50 10y ago
  The real, human equivalent is "HeLa", taken without her consent from Henrietta Lacks in the 50s and grown endlessly since then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
np422 10y ago
Most of us here on hacker news can afford to buy real food such as grass feed beef/lamb, forage egg/chicken, etc Seems like a more natural evolutionary correct way to get our food rather than some kind of franken-meat grown i lab. Every autumn I buy a lamb from the farmer living next to my father, I kind of like it when I can watch my food being happy before I eat it.
- rickycook 10y ago
  most of us in hacker news aren't most of the world. also, "natural" is a kind of ridiculous term. plenty of food additives are natural, but that doesn't make them good. also plenty that are unnatural aren't all bad. medicines are highly "unnatural", but they save lives. why is food any different? given how quickly we're heading toward a world in which we don't have the land area to be able to feed our population (and by "heading toward" i mean we already don't and it's getting worse), grass fed anything is totally unsustainable. lab grown meat, or lab vegetables might be our best option, and i'd go with that over a tortured chicken any day
  - ericdykstra 10y ago
    > medicines are highly "unnatural", but they save lives. why is food any different? Many medicines also cause more harm than they provide help. Just look at the history of drugs that have had to be taken off the market due to crippling or deadly side effects just to treat some mild cold symptoms or something equally minor. "Natural" is not at all a ridiculous term. It can be made ridiculous when things like "natural flavoring" aren't any different from "artificial flavoring," but I will take natural (or at least human incrementally improved over generations and generations) over artificial (top down diet science-ing) any day.
    - Aaron1011 10y ago
      > Many medicines also cause more harm than they provide help How many is 'many'? 50%? 25%? Or simply 'more than zero'? > but I will take natural (or at least human incrementally improved over generations and generations) over artificial (top down diet science-ing) any day. I assume that you would prefer an 'unnatural' vaccination to the 'natural' disease it prevents. If so, which categories of 'natural' do you prefer?
jmngomes 10y ago
>> poor bird was encouraged to grow in an unhealthy manner The bird was not "encouraged to grow", it was forcefully bred by a corporation that treated it like trash to increase their financial gains... >> I wonder if it was painful for the bird I seems very safe to assume that it didn't have a remotely pleasant or normal life...
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  > it was forcefully bred by a corporation that treated it like trash to increase their financial gains The same could be said for plants.
  - i_cant_speel 10y ago
    Plants don't feel pain.
    - samueladam 10y ago
      https://www.ted.com/talks/stefano_mancuso_the_roots_of_plant_intelligence https://www.ted.com/talks/stefano_mancuso_the_roots_of_plant...
      - fredley 10y ago
        Plants react to things that can harm them. Pain, however, is something that it requires neurons to experience.
        stagbeetle 10y ago
        A rash rejection of dialog. Plants are very lowly sentient through structures that are the plant-counterparts to animalian neurons. They communicate with other plants and they sense what can be described as "pain." But, I don't think arguing on the sentience of an unprotected kingdom will further this discussion. The discussion on animal welfare seems to be an emotional one alone. As long as our mirror neurons aren't firing in response to the perceived pain animals feel, all is millhouse. This is why, I believe very few care about plant welfare. They have no mouths with which to scream, so we believe (or make ourselves believe) that they aren't in pain. That they are too dumb to feel pain (this parallels sinisterly with the cruelty of psychological medicine in the 20th century). Not to mention how silly it is to care about plant welfare... or is it? There have been little studies done on how the constant slaughter of plants affects the secondary factors (maturation speeds, yield, etc. -- as apposed to the primary: deforestation, etc.). However, I don't think there ever will be such advances in this field. Perhaps because they have no way of polluting this discussion with emotions, unlike their animal counterpart.
jherdman 10y ago
> Fake meat cannot come soon enough - poor bird was encouraged to grow in an unhealthy manner resulting in dead tissue inside it while it was still alive. It's really interesting to me that you reached for fake meat instead of better farming practices.
- tartuffe78 10y ago
  In the long run fake meat will probably become more affordable than better farming practices with the size of our population.
- lawik 10y ago
  It is interesting and I believe a lot of people view this vastly differently. I'm vegan, I've decided against the current practices. I applaud any attempt to move towards or support better practices. But I don't think eating meat from previously living creatures is for me. But I am seriously undecided for lab meat. I don't really mind the chemical components of meat, some of them seem really useful. And no animals were harmed, it could probably be a lot more energy efficient. Also, there is the potential for serious scale I imagine, which interests me. Not sure when it could get there though. If that happens I think "real meat" might end up being the fancy expensive stuff :)

by ncr100 10y ago

omginternets 10y ago

And here I was thinking "(true) free-range as the norm can't come soon enough". I'm very skeptical of fake meet insofar as nutrition involves highly complex systems. Surely the risk of a trans-fat-like health debacle is non-negligible ... tl;dr: fake meat isn't a problem per se, but I sure as hell won't be the first one to eat it. I'll consider it when there's >50 years of hard data on the record.

Baeocystin 10y ago
Cell expansion already has decades of science behind it. There isn't anything hard about it, either. You or I could expand cultures in our kitchens with minimal difficulty as it is. The hard part of 'fake meat' (which isn't fake, it's real muscle tissue, it's just grown differently) is that muscle alone doesn't taste good, or have a pleasing texture. You need connective tissue, fat, blood vessels... The whole lot, really. And that is a much more difficult problem.
- ericdykstra 10y ago
  I'm with omginternets on this one. On a spectrum of "herbivore that has roamed relatively freely and eaten a variety of vegetables according to it's nature" to "animals raised in factory farms, fed defect candy, and grown to 3x it's natural size before reaching physical maturity" to "lab grown muscle tissue" I'm sticking as close to the first one as I can, and I'm going vegetarian before making lab grown tissue a part of my diet.
  - Baeocystin 10y ago
    I wouldn't want to force anyone to eat anything they don't want to. I'm personally looking forward to it, though.
- omginternets 10y ago
  >Cell expansion already has decades of science behind it Not where nutritional epidemiology is concerned. Not by a long shot.
  - Baeocystin 10y ago
    Not for meat, but we've been eating yeasts, algae, bacteria, and other cellular cultures for thousands of years. It's not like the concept is new across the board.
    - omginternets 10y ago
      That's not quite what we're talking about though. We're talking about synthetic meat, not meat-substitutes, i.e.: lab-grown muscle tissue with (something like) cow-DNA involved.
      - Baeocystin 10y ago
        Expanding animal cells really isn't all that different than expanding anything else. It was expensive because the details needed to be refined, but what cost $250,000 a couple years ago costs ~$8 today. Like I said before, I really don't want to push anyone to try anything they don't want to. But people know how hot dogs are made ( https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pw_CTCSkOZI/WAPJuZWaF5I/AAAAAAAAmTE/jtLkSXKlkKoadpEuHU_TpWmqenATiUBAQCLcB/s320/HotDogFillingMade.gif https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pw_CTCSkOZI/WAPJuZWaF5I/AAAAAAAAm... ), and it hasn't stopped them, so I expect cultured meat will probably take off pretty quickly once it becomes cheaper than farming.
        omginternets 10y ago
        Yes, and changing fat molecules into trans-fat molecules isn't all that different than any other chemical reaction. The devil is in the details, and nutrition touches upon highly complex systems. The point being, we've already seen how seemingly simple, innocuous changes to nutritional substances can have nasty consequences. To think this time is different is pure hubris. I get your point, but you seem to be missing mine.

pavlov 10y ago

This is just the tip of the iceberg in how animals are treated. Industrial meat production practically runs its margins on increasing the suffering of animals in a manner that narrowly avoids this kind of visible anomalies in the product. As many others have noted in the past, slave labor and concentration camps operated on a similar industrial calculus of forcibly squeezing out value from living beings before putting them to death. Waiting for "fake meat" to fix the problem is like saying: "I can't wait until we can grow zombies to pick cotton, then all the slaves can finally go free."

qubyte 10y ago
Not if we're talking about advances in textured vegetable protein. When I read "fake meat" I take it to mean that it's not animal derived. Otherwise it'd just be meat.
- ikurei 10y ago
  Still, we can do something about it right now. We may need meat, but we don't need meat in every meal; if we reduced the consumption of meat, we could conceivably switch to more expensive, less efficient, more humane ways to grow animals. If you can afford it, you can also only buy meat from non-intensive farming. Or stop eating meat all together. I just don't think it's morally right to wait for a solution that may not ever come, or not for a long time. I eat veggie fake-meat often, and sometimes it's great, but it's not close to real meat and I don't know that it'll ever be accepted by most of the population.
  - qubyte 10y ago
    I absolutely agree. Reducing consumption is a win on pretty much every front. Another thing to do is diversify what is eaten. Have some (sustainably sourced) fish or shell fish a couple of days a week.
  - jshevek 10y ago
    "We may need meat, but we don't need meat in every meal" Is it still a common belief that we 'need meat'? I thought it was well established that humans in normal health do not _need_ meat to thrive - especially with our current technology and industry. We can easily meet all of our nutritional needs without any animal flesh.

batiudrami 10y ago

In the meantime you might find vegetarianism surprisingly easy - I know I did. It is initially a bit of extra effort because you need to learn brand new recipes and depending on where you live you might have limited restaurant selections but I mostly gave up meat 18 months ago and was surprised at how easy it was. Plus it's way cheaper and you get to massively reduce your carbon footprint too. It's not for everyone but maybe worth thinking about? :)

curiousDog 10y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Particularly going Vegan. What sorts of protein do you usually eat?
- mandrake-c-papi 10y ago
  Beans and tofu are the obvious ones. Stuff like quinoa and nuts are good too. Even green vegetables are good, you just need to eat a lot of them which you can because the calorie density is typically so low.
- manibatra 10y ago
  Here are a couple of posts that I wrote when about my fitness routine and diet when I transitioned from being an omnivore to a vegan. Hope it helps even though I am not a great writer. Happy to answer any more questions too :) https://medium.com/@manibatra23/2016-a-reflection-e80378393f3b https://medium.com/@manibatra23/2016-a-reflection-e80378393f... https://medium.com/@manibatra23/2016-a-reflection-diet-30c15970e7f7 https://medium.com/@manibatra23/2016-a-reflection-diet-30c15...
- jlebrech 10y ago
  you can make really tasty tofu nuggets.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  Lentils (any kind of beans/peas) and rice will give you complete proteins. When I was vegan (gave it up when I got married, like many things ;-) ) I didn't eat much tofu mainly because it has a huge amount of fat. I actually eat a lot more now that I'm not vegan. Vegan is a bit challenging for nutrition because things like zinc are fairly hard to get. Although the UI is fairly poor, I recommend using nut [0] to help you calculate how you are doing. I haven't actually seen anything else even close for a nutrient calculator (which is strange since you would think it would be an obvious piece of software for people to write). Also take this advice from the Vegan society on vitamin B12 [1]. There is a lot of dangerous information out there, so be careful. I really enjoyed being vegan. Unlike many vegans, I was not an ethical vegan. I just like eating that way. I actually became vegetarian to save money when I was young and poor (meat or beer was an easy equation for me to solve). After a while, I just found that the foods I enjoyed the most and that made me feel the best were vegan. YMMV :-D No reason to go crazy at first, though. Just start cooking vegan meals. If you become vegan full time, you'll be cooking a lot in most countries, so be prepared for it. [0] http://nut.sourceforge.net/ http://nut.sourceforge.net/ [1] https://www.vegansociety.com/resources/nutrition-and-health/vitamins-minerals-and-nutrients/vitamin-b12-your-key-facts/what-every-vegan-should-know-about-vitamin-b12 https://www.vegansociety.com/resources/nutrition-and-health/...

DonHopkins 10y ago

Like "Chicken Little" from "The Space Merchants" (1952) by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth [1]: He swung open her door. “This is her nest,” he said proudly. I looked and gulped. It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored. Chicken Little filled most of it. She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter. Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh. You could see that she was alive. Herrera said to me: “All day I walk around her. I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice.” His two-handed blade screamed again. This time it shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak. (Ch. 9) Also [2]: Scum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America. On January 17, 1912, Nobel prize-winning physician Dr. Alexis Carrel placed a part of a chicken's embryo heart in a nutrient medium in a glass flask of his own design. Every forty-eight hours the tissue doubled in size and was transferred to a new flask. Twenty years later, it was still growing. In his 1941 story Methuselah's Children, Robert Heinlein paid homage to his work by referring to the famous chicken as a research tool for the long-lived Howard Families: Lazarus found her servicing the deathless tissue of chicken heart known to the laboratory crew as "Mrs. 'Awkins." Mrs. 'Awkins was older than any member of the Families save possibly Lazarus himself; she was a growing piece of the original tissue obtained by the Families from the Rockefeller Institute in the twentieth century, and the tissues had been alive since early in the twentieth century even then. Dr. Hardy and his predecessors had kept their bit of it alive for more than two centuries now, using the Carrel-Lindbergh-O'Shaug techniques and still Mrs. 'Awkins flourished. [1] http://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.nl/2012/08/this-is-her-nest-space-merchants-and.html http://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.nl/2012/08/this-is-her... [2] http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002

pjc50 10y ago
The real, human equivalent is "HeLa", taken without her consent from Henrietta Lacks in the 50s and grown endlessly since then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

np422 10y ago

Most of us here on hacker news can afford to buy real food such as grass feed beef/lamb, forage egg/chicken, etc Seems like a more natural evolutionary correct way to get our food rather than some kind of franken-meat grown i lab. Every autumn I buy a lamb from the farmer living next to my father, I kind of like it when I can watch my food being happy before I eat it.

rickycook 10y ago
most of us in hacker news aren't most of the world. also, "natural" is a kind of ridiculous term. plenty of food additives are natural, but that doesn't make them good. also plenty that are unnatural aren't all bad. medicines are highly "unnatural", but they save lives. why is food any different? given how quickly we're heading toward a world in which we don't have the land area to be able to feed our population (and by "heading toward" i mean we already don't and it's getting worse), grass fed anything is totally unsustainable. lab grown meat, or lab vegetables might be our best option, and i'd go with that over a tortured chicken any day
- ericdykstra 10y ago
  > medicines are highly "unnatural", but they save lives. why is food any different? Many medicines also cause more harm than they provide help. Just look at the history of drugs that have had to be taken off the market due to crippling or deadly side effects just to treat some mild cold symptoms or something equally minor. "Natural" is not at all a ridiculous term. It can be made ridiculous when things like "natural flavoring" aren't any different from "artificial flavoring," but I will take natural (or at least human incrementally improved over generations and generations) over artificial (top down diet science-ing) any day.
  - Aaron1011 10y ago
    > Many medicines also cause more harm than they provide help How many is 'many'? 50%? 25%? Or simply 'more than zero'? > but I will take natural (or at least human incrementally improved over generations and generations) over artificial (top down diet science-ing) any day. I assume that you would prefer an 'unnatural' vaccination to the 'natural' disease it prevents. If so, which categories of 'natural' do you prefer?

jmngomes 10y ago

>> poor bird was encouraged to grow in an unhealthy manner The bird was not "encouraged to grow", it was forcefully bred by a corporation that treated it like trash to increase their financial gains... >> I wonder if it was painful for the bird I seems very safe to assume that it didn't have a remotely pleasant or normal life...

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
> it was forcefully bred by a corporation that treated it like trash to increase their financial gains The same could be said for plants.
- i_cant_speel 10y ago
  Plants don't feel pain.
  - samueladam 10y ago
    https://www.ted.com/talks/stefano_mancuso_the_roots_of_plant_intelligence https://www.ted.com/talks/stefano_mancuso_the_roots_of_plant...
    - fredley 10y ago
      Plants react to things that can harm them. Pain, however, is something that it requires neurons to experience.
      - stagbeetle 10y ago
        A rash rejection of dialog. Plants are very lowly sentient through structures that are the plant-counterparts to animalian neurons. They communicate with other plants and they sense what can be described as "pain." But, I don't think arguing on the sentience of an unprotected kingdom will further this discussion. The discussion on animal welfare seems to be an emotional one alone. As long as our mirror neurons aren't firing in response to the perceived pain animals feel, all is millhouse. This is why, I believe very few care about plant welfare. They have no mouths with which to scream, so we believe (or make ourselves believe) that they aren't in pain. That they are too dumb to feel pain (this parallels sinisterly with the cruelty of psychological medicine in the 20th century). Not to mention how silly it is to care about plant welfare... or is it? There have been little studies done on how the constant slaughter of plants affects the secondary factors (maturation speeds, yield, etc. -- as apposed to the primary: deforestation, etc.). However, I don't think there ever will be such advances in this field. Perhaps because they have no way of polluting this discussion with emotions, unlike their animal counterpart.

jherdman 10y ago

> Fake meat cannot come soon enough - poor bird was encouraged to grow in an unhealthy manner resulting in dead tissue inside it while it was still alive. It's really interesting to me that you reached for fake meat instead of better farming practices.

tartuffe78 10y ago
In the long run fake meat will probably become more affordable than better farming practices with the size of our population.
lawik 10y ago
It is interesting and I believe a lot of people view this vastly differently. I'm vegan, I've decided against the current practices. I applaud any attempt to move towards or support better practices. But I don't think eating meat from previously living creatures is for me. But I am seriously undecided for lab meat. I don't really mind the chemical components of meat, some of them seem really useful. And no animals were harmed, it could probably be a lot more energy efficient. Also, there is the potential for serious scale I imagine, which interests me. Not sure when it could get there though. If that happens I think "real meat" might end up being the fancy expensive stuff :)