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> This movement towards synthetic meat seems very antithetical to the natural foods heuristic. I can't take that heuristic seriously while eating any kind of f
by msla 6y ago
> This movement towards synthetic meat seems very antithetical to the natural foods heuristic.
I can't take that heuristic seriously while eating any kind of fruit or vegetable, given how selective breeding has turned them all into utterly unnatural creations, even the so-called non-GMO varieties. At that point, "natural" just means "not using any technology developed after an arbitrary cutoff date" and it's meaningless.
- andrewla 6y agoFor what it's worth, most modern food animals and plants are still capable of producing natural offspring and sustaining life on their own. GMO presents some interesting challenges, but the main thing is that modern offshoots of wild organisms are bred to produce these outcomes, but they are bred, which means that they are within the range of variability of the population in question, even if they're out in the bell curve a bit. I think there's a significant qualitative difference between cheese, for example, of any variety, and "processed cheese" which is designed to mimic cheese properties but make it uniform over time and region by substituting simple chemicals (i.e., reductive by definition) for ingredients which came about by co-evolution in our ecosystems.