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> Future Meat Technologies says this facility requires 96-percent less freshwater than livestock production, as well as using 99-percent less land and producing

> Future Meat Technologies says this facility requires 96-percent less freshwater than livestock production, as well as using 99-percent less land and producing 80-percent fewer greenhouse emissions. Even accounting for PR hyperbole, it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do. This is a national security issue. We can choose to curse our younger generations with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future.

ben_w 5y ago
I’m all in favour of this for climate change and animal welfare reasons, but I don’t see how it’s a national security concern in e.g. Europe and America, given they already encourage farming overproduction specifically because food is so important, and that almost everywhere could already be more effective in how many people a given unit of land area or fresh water can support, both by encouraging vegetable-based diets and separately with more poly-tunnels, greenhouses, and aeroponics.
- Retric 5y ago
  Overproduction is based on assumptions around how variable farm output is. Climate change increases variability.
  - airhead969 5y ago
    Climate change isn't the weather. Climate is the average. We are in a global warming emergency and no one is doing enough about it.
    - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      Climate change is literally the weather.
      - ben_w 5y ago
        Long term average weather. But yes, IIRC, climate change is causing more extreme variability, and that variability itself is a problem. Though I do disagree with @airhead969, as the literally exponential growth of PV by itself looks to me to be enough to make us net zero in a decade or two (probably two, given exponentials are often sigmoids in disguise).
    - Retric 5y ago
      Climate isn’t the average weather it’s the expected weather. X hurricanes every Y years for example doesn’t change the average significantly, but their a major climate concern in areas at risk from them.
- ethanbond 5y ago
  Well one mechanism by which this becomes a natsec concern is food scarcity in other parts of the world might simultaneously cause domestic instability as well as mass migration to more food-secure locales. We should also do all of the things you mention here.
devy 5y ago
The greenest protein factory is the one that we don't have to build - even if it's 99% less land or 80% fewer greenhouse emissions than the traditional farming of cows, sheep and poultry. It's actually this: https://interestingengineering.com/the-explosion-of-insect-protein https://interestingengineering.com/the-explosion-of-insect-p...
- ethanbond 5y ago
  We should do that too
- justinmchase 5y ago
  Just eat the bugs...
  - kwere 5y ago
    dont forget to be happy...
- Noos 5y ago
  It's always fun with these kinds of posts, because people never think what their total progressive future will be like. No cars, no pets, eating bugs for protein, taxed to shit to provide a social safety net, forced to clump up in cities for efficiency. Probably a lot more than that. Being an eco-serf.
  - salt-thrower 5y ago
    This is the kind of sentiment that watching too many Alex Jones documentaries will give you. It's funny that you think places like America, which can't even manage to legislate sensible climate-saving policies, would ever get to an extremist state of banning cars and pets, or forcing you to eat bugs for protein. You are laughably out of touch with reality.
me_me_me 5y ago
> sense of ickiness or masculinity If they can keep the cost lower (2/3 or better 1/2 price) than animal meat, all of the stigma will just poof out of existence. This is very exiting, but its a not solution to global warming (only small factor). >> Methane has a large effect but for a relatively brief period, having an estimated mean half-life of 9.1 years in the atmosphere, whereas carbon dioxide is currently given an estimated mean lifetime of over 100 years Still very exiting to possibly live through end factory farming.
- ethanbond 5y ago
  Totally agreed - competitive flavor at superior price will make those other arguments disappear. That’s why I think we should view this as a foregone conclusion and get positioned to simply own the future, or at least not have our future owned by someone else.
  - Noos 5y ago
    ...sure, like Carob was a foregone conclusion to replace chocolate: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/how-carob-traumatized-a-generation https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/how-c... As someone who actually had to eat Tiger's Milk bars as a kid, good luck at it.
    - me_me_me 5y ago
      We are not talking about alternative faux products, but meat fibres that are grown form actual animal tissue at the start (AFAIK thats how they do it). In theory this should taste similar to traditional meat and in the future they will work out marbling etc
everdrive 5y ago
>ickiness or masculinity, How is this related to lab-grown meat?
- sidlls 5y ago
  There's a certain squeamishness some have about eating something labeled as "lab-grown", as if it's somehow tainted with "unnatural" origin. At the same time, there's a certain machismo, bravado, "manliness" associated with eating meat from an actual animal, mainly a vicarious association with hunting, but also by demonstration of some certain kinds of "alpha male" traits (access to resources to afford it, dominance, etc.). Lab-grown meat wasn't hunted or butchered, so may be viewed as "easier" in some sense--less manly, in other words.
hardwaregeek 5y ago
I agree but also "protein security" reminds me of "mineshaft gap" from Dr. Strangelove
hcknwscommenter 5y ago
It is of course impossible to verify either way, but I am very sure these statistics of 96% savings in freshwater are total nonsense. Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc. Moreover, we have seen time and time again, the reporting of extremely high numbers for water usage in beef and milk production, but it turns out they are counting the water that falls as rain on the pasture land, or the rain/ground water used to grow the alfalfa. Should that be counted? Rain seems to be fairly renewable, but I admit that (in the extreme) society can harm ecosystems by diverting too much rain water (see Colorado River). Ground water renewability is a bit context dependent. If the water savings is mostly nonsense, well then I also question the savings in GHG emissions. Land savings? Sure, fine, that makes sense... but farm land is orders of magnitude cheaper than land that has a fully functioning cell culture factory on it. In the end, we will know if this works by what price it can sell at and make a marginal return. The jury is out on that one.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc. Given that this is all happening in a lab, is collecting and filtering for reuse an option?
  - hcknwscommenter 5y ago
    Sure. But then you have to spend way more energy on the "filtering" part. It typically makes a lot more sense in terms of energy usage to just take tap water and run it through a polishing step (deionization and/or reverse osmosis), than to take the comparatively "dirty" water coming out of your process (dirty but not toxic) and try to clean that up.
  - f38zf5vdt 5y ago
    An autoclave requires distilled water and an enormous amount of energy to operate. You could save the water but you'd potentially need to distill it again after. They use an enormous amount of energy and water overall. The feed for the cells still has to come from somewhere too, and the growth of the cells is aerobic and generates CO2. That said, artificial meat is supposed to hit market parity price by 2026 and probably below parity after. [1] We will probably see a rapid transition to cultured meat within a decade. There are a very large number of these companies competing right now. [2] [1] https://www.mitsui.com/mgssi/en/report/detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2021/01/18/2011t_sato_e.pdf https://www.mitsui.com/mgssi/en/report/detail/__icsFiles/afi... [2] https://cellbasedtech.com/lab-grown-meat-companies https://cellbasedtech.com/lab-grown-meat-companies
MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
> We can choose to curse our younger generations with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future. A false dichotomy if I ever saw one.
- ethanbond 5y ago
  It is a false dichotomy currently because the in-between area is largely occupied by “do the economics make sense.” That is very clearly trending in one direction (towards “yes”), so at some point in the future it will largely boil down to something akin to this dichotomy. My framing is definitely dismissive of one side, but it does strike me as a set of arguments that are largely aesthetic on one side and the reality of food security on the other.
bttrfl 5y ago
Every time I read stats like this I wonder what are the externalities the PR team decided to omit. One day you hear that farmed fish are eco, the next day you find out that gigantic trawlers are depleting Antarctic oceans for feed. I tried to google the possible environmental downsides of lab-meat (taste/health aside), but couldn't find anything. Any suggestions?
- frankus 5y ago
  There’s the question of what sort of feedstocks they’re using and where they come from. I would assume that it’s something like what the animals they’re replacing eat, but presumably in smaller quantities since they’re only growing muscle tissue and not an entire animal. There’s something to be said for a device that transports itself around marginally-arable land eating grass and pumping out fertilizer while creating edible protein. Especially if the alternative is intensively-farmed row crops like corn and soy that tend to require tons of fertilizer and herbicides. IMO an equally exciting area of research is taking something like algae that only need water, sunlight, and some minerals to produce food. Which could then be further processed into lab-grown meat or be eaten as is.
tomp 5y ago
> with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future I think you're confusing a few things. I'm very pro lab-grown meat, and I don't see why it would be either "icky" (if anything, it could be much more "pure", able to grow in controlled conditions without any pesticides, hormones or antibiotics) nor less "masculine" (a steak is a steak is a steak). I'm very much against plant-based "fake" meat, because they're usually far from natural (tons of chemicals) and full of propaganda ("red meat is unhealthy" but conveniently conflating pure red meat with highly-processed stuff like sausages and salami, or "red meat is unsustainable" while we keep burning coal and importing plastics from China... don't get me wrong, I strongly support carbon tax, but want to be able to what to consume (drive car vs. eat steak) myself).
- yaseer 5y ago
  > they're usually far from natural (tons of chemicals) I really object to marketing use of the word 'natural' and 'chemicals'. I don't mean to single you out - these concepts are widespread in marketing. Plenty of 'natural' things are bad, like small pox, the Ebola virus and salmonella. Plenty of 'unnatural' things are good, like antibiotics to treat infection. All matter is made from chemicals. Whether a chemical like penicillin or salt is synthesised in a lab, or extracted from the ocean, holds no baring on whether that chemical is good for you. - EDIT - Generalised the penicillin example.
  - dariusj18 5y ago
    I wouldn't say Penicillin is 'unnatural', there are probably better examples out there.
    - yaseer 5y ago
      That's true, I just picked penicillin and salt intentionally as they both can be synthesised in a lab and in nature
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
actuator 5y ago
> it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do This is hardly the only solution though. We can also shift to just plant based diets from crops which are not water intensive. Vegetarianism has been present in many parts of the world from a long time and those parts have also done fine with surviving. We have a plethora of recipes as well which we can import from those parts of the world and add it with other highly nutritious vegan recipes. At least I have been far more impressed with eating those cuisines than eating fake meat as such.
exabrial 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma Good try though.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
You're foolishly projecting ideology and personal beliefs into somewhere so far removed from the consumer that it simply won't matter. Commodities buyers don't care who's corn is ethical or who's corn is unethical. They don't care who's ground beef is manly and who's isn't. It all comes down to cost per results at the end of the day. Resource usage is just a part of that calculation. No different than the cost of shipping. If McDonalds and Walmart can cut their existing beef with fake plant beef or lab beef without hurting their bottom line (by making their products less attractive to consumers) they will. Will there be people who try and capture the high end market with some ideologically themed marketing in the meantime? Of course. But make no mistake, the long term goal for these new synthetic meat (both plant meat and lab meat) producers is not the high end market. It's the thousands of reefer cars that put that house brand 80/20 on a store shelf near you. Pandering to whatever the premium consumer wants to hear until you can make your product cheap enough and good enough to make real money is just a necessary part of bootstrapping that. Putting the McDouble back on the dollar menu with the help of synthetic beef is what societal progress looks like.
- ethanbond 5y ago
  I agree with everything you say here and if I communicated that the arguments against lab meat are durable, that was the opposite of my intention. What I mean to say is that it’s a foregone conclusion and we should be expediting its arrival and gaining an edge in that future.
andscoop 5y ago
I used to feel similarly, but now, I'm not so sure. What worries me is that lab-grown meat will allow big ag practices to continue, which will do more harm to our co2 emissions and world's soil health. To expand on this further, there is active research and practices into sustainable farming practices that show diverse crop rotations along dense but short grazing across the land has the ability to rebuild top soil 10x than previously thought. Most importantly this top soil serves as a MASSIVE CARBON SINK. Using this proven methods, we can leverage the world's farmland to sequester carbon while improving the health of our soil and the nurtition density of our food. The catch is that we need the animals to restore soil health and presumably we need the business model of selling the meat to make this practice sustainable. Further Reading: Dirt to Soil - Gabe Brown Alan Savory's Holistic Management Practices - https://youtu.be/q7pI7IYaJLI https://youtu.be/q7pI7IYaJLI https://www.marincarbonproject.org/ https://www.marincarbonproject.org/
- jurip 5y ago
  How many animals are we talking about in a scenario where all the animals were being used for crop/grazing rotation? I've heard about this and it sounds good to me, but without having looked into it at all, it sounds to me like something that probably wouldn't support the number of animals we're using right now for meat production?
  - greenonions 5y ago
    Even if you could convert all the corn/soybean land in the United States to more regenerative methods, you probably wouldn't be able to meet the current demand for meat. Additionally you have a logistical problem with the animals being distributed across an enormous area vs concentrated in a CAFO. Now, you would easily be able to grow enough food for the country and possibly the globe, but meat demand cannot be sustained.
    - andscoop 5y ago
      Do you have a source for not being able to meet meat demand? using which "regenerative methods"?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
shadofx 5y ago
Maybe eventually eating plant matter won't be considered efficient either, what with the massive expenditure of fertilizer and ecological damage of pesticide and herbicide runoff. We will need to figure out to bio-engineer edible plant matter as well. Then once we've mastered that, we can start bio-engineering ourselves to photosynthesize from the sun directly, to cut out all middlemen from the food chain. Then we can bio-engineer a vacuum-resistant carapace and launch ourselves toward the sun to exist as truly self-sufficient organisms. Then we blot out the sun with our flesh, and find some way to go to a different star.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  I think what the comment above is missing is that these are the metrics that the PR team chose to publish. The lab meat might also use 100x the CO2 in other production materials. It might be more labor and energy intensive. The cost might be 10x higher - even at scale. You cannot trust the PR numbers from a company looking to normalize their product. This is why 3rd party analysis is required.
genericone 5y ago
Depending on the capital requirements and cost of these facilities, and imagining them as semiconductor fab type facilities, a nation would really be putting all their eggs in one basket if their protein security relies on just a few dozen such facilities across the country. This major centralization could be done in by one ransomware attack or activist employee , whereas the decentralized protein production by tens of thousands of producers today is far less susceptible. Once food security becomes tech-driven, its something to worry about.

ben_w 5y ago

I’m all in favour of this for climate change and animal welfare reasons, but I don’t see how it’s a national security concern in e.g. Europe and America, given they already encourage farming overproduction specifically because food is so important, and that almost everywhere could already be more effective in how many people a given unit of land area or fresh water can support, both by encouraging vegetable-based diets and separately with more poly-tunnels, greenhouses, and aeroponics.

Retric 5y ago
Overproduction is based on assumptions around how variable farm output is. Climate change increases variability.
- airhead969 5y ago
  Climate change isn't the weather. Climate is the average. We are in a global warming emergency and no one is doing enough about it.
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    Climate change is literally the weather.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      Long term average weather. But yes, IIRC, climate change is causing more extreme variability, and that variability itself is a problem. Though I do disagree with @airhead969, as the literally exponential growth of PV by itself looks to me to be enough to make us net zero in a decade or two (probably two, given exponentials are often sigmoids in disguise).
  - Retric 5y ago
    Climate isn’t the average weather it’s the expected weather. X hurricanes every Y years for example doesn’t change the average significantly, but their a major climate concern in areas at risk from them.
ethanbond 5y ago
Well one mechanism by which this becomes a natsec concern is food scarcity in other parts of the world might simultaneously cause domestic instability as well as mass migration to more food-secure locales. We should also do all of the things you mention here.

devy 5y ago

The greenest protein factory is the one that we don't have to build - even if it's 99% less land or 80% fewer greenhouse emissions than the traditional farming of cows, sheep and poultry. It's actually this: https://interestingengineering.com/the-explosion-of-insect-protein https://interestingengineering.com/the-explosion-of-insect-p...

ethanbond 5y ago
We should do that too
justinmchase 5y ago
Just eat the bugs...
- kwere 5y ago
  dont forget to be happy...
Noos 5y ago
It's always fun with these kinds of posts, because people never think what their total progressive future will be like. No cars, no pets, eating bugs for protein, taxed to shit to provide a social safety net, forced to clump up in cities for efficiency. Probably a lot more than that. Being an eco-serf.
- salt-thrower 5y ago
  This is the kind of sentiment that watching too many Alex Jones documentaries will give you. It's funny that you think places like America, which can't even manage to legislate sensible climate-saving policies, would ever get to an extremist state of banning cars and pets, or forcing you to eat bugs for protein. You are laughably out of touch with reality.

me_me_me 5y ago

> sense of ickiness or masculinity If they can keep the cost lower (2/3 or better 1/2 price) than animal meat, all of the stigma will just poof out of existence. This is very exiting, but its a not solution to global warming (only small factor). >> Methane has a large effect but for a relatively brief period, having an estimated mean half-life of 9.1 years in the atmosphere, whereas carbon dioxide is currently given an estimated mean lifetime of over 100 years Still very exiting to possibly live through end factory farming.

ethanbond 5y ago
Totally agreed - competitive flavor at superior price will make those other arguments disappear. That’s why I think we should view this as a foregone conclusion and get positioned to simply own the future, or at least not have our future owned by someone else.
- Noos 5y ago
  ...sure, like Carob was a foregone conclusion to replace chocolate: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/how-carob-traumatized-a-generation https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/how-c... As someone who actually had to eat Tiger's Milk bars as a kid, good luck at it.
  - me_me_me 5y ago
    We are not talking about alternative faux products, but meat fibres that are grown form actual animal tissue at the start (AFAIK thats how they do it). In theory this should taste similar to traditional meat and in the future they will work out marbling etc

everdrive 5y ago

>ickiness or masculinity, How is this related to lab-grown meat?

sidlls 5y ago
There's a certain squeamishness some have about eating something labeled as "lab-grown", as if it's somehow tainted with "unnatural" origin. At the same time, there's a certain machismo, bravado, "manliness" associated with eating meat from an actual animal, mainly a vicarious association with hunting, but also by demonstration of some certain kinds of "alpha male" traits (access to resources to afford it, dominance, etc.). Lab-grown meat wasn't hunted or butchered, so may be viewed as "easier" in some sense--less manly, in other words.

hardwaregeek 5y ago

I agree but also "protein security" reminds me of "mineshaft gap" from Dr. Strangelove

hcknwscommenter 5y ago

It is of course impossible to verify either way, but I am very sure these statistics of 96% savings in freshwater are total nonsense. Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc. Moreover, we have seen time and time again, the reporting of extremely high numbers for water usage in beef and milk production, but it turns out they are counting the water that falls as rain on the pasture land, or the rain/ground water used to grow the alfalfa. Should that be counted? Rain seems to be fairly renewable, but I admit that (in the extreme) society can harm ecosystems by diverting too much rain water (see Colorado River). Ground water renewability is a bit context dependent. If the water savings is mostly nonsense, well then I also question the savings in GHG emissions. Land savings? Sure, fine, that makes sense... but farm land is orders of magnitude cheaper than land that has a fully functioning cell culture factory on it. In the end, we will know if this works by what price it can sell at and make a marginal return. The jury is out on that one.

ceejayoz 5y ago
> Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc. Given that this is all happening in a lab, is collecting and filtering for reuse an option?
- hcknwscommenter 5y ago
  Sure. But then you have to spend way more energy on the "filtering" part. It typically makes a lot more sense in terms of energy usage to just take tap water and run it through a polishing step (deionization and/or reverse osmosis), than to take the comparatively "dirty" water coming out of your process (dirty but not toxic) and try to clean that up.
- f38zf5vdt 5y ago
  An autoclave requires distilled water and an enormous amount of energy to operate. You could save the water but you'd potentially need to distill it again after. They use an enormous amount of energy and water overall. The feed for the cells still has to come from somewhere too, and the growth of the cells is aerobic and generates CO2. That said, artificial meat is supposed to hit market parity price by 2026 and probably below parity after. [1] We will probably see a rapid transition to cultured meat within a decade. There are a very large number of these companies competing right now. [2] [1] https://www.mitsui.com/mgssi/en/report/detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2021/01/18/2011t_sato_e.pdf https://www.mitsui.com/mgssi/en/report/detail/__icsFiles/afi... [2] https://cellbasedtech.com/lab-grown-meat-companies https://cellbasedtech.com/lab-grown-meat-companies

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago

> We can choose to curse our younger generations with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future. A false dichotomy if I ever saw one.

ethanbond 5y ago
It is a false dichotomy currently because the in-between area is largely occupied by “do the economics make sense.” That is very clearly trending in one direction (towards “yes”), so at some point in the future it will largely boil down to something akin to this dichotomy. My framing is definitely dismissive of one side, but it does strike me as a set of arguments that are largely aesthetic on one side and the reality of food security on the other.

bttrfl 5y ago

Every time I read stats like this I wonder what are the externalities the PR team decided to omit. One day you hear that farmed fish are eco, the next day you find out that gigantic trawlers are depleting Antarctic oceans for feed. I tried to google the possible environmental downsides of lab-meat (taste/health aside), but couldn't find anything. Any suggestions?

frankus 5y ago
There’s the question of what sort of feedstocks they’re using and where they come from. I would assume that it’s something like what the animals they’re replacing eat, but presumably in smaller quantities since they’re only growing muscle tissue and not an entire animal. There’s something to be said for a device that transports itself around marginally-arable land eating grass and pumping out fertilizer while creating edible protein. Especially if the alternative is intensively-farmed row crops like corn and soy that tend to require tons of fertilizer and herbicides. IMO an equally exciting area of research is taking something like algae that only need water, sunlight, and some minerals to produce food. Which could then be further processed into lab-grown meat or be eaten as is.

tomp 5y ago

> with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future I think you're confusing a few things. I'm very pro lab-grown meat, and I don't see why it would be either "icky" (if anything, it could be much more "pure", able to grow in controlled conditions without any pesticides, hormones or antibiotics) nor less "masculine" (a steak is a steak is a steak). I'm very much against plant-based "fake" meat, because they're usually far from natural (tons of chemicals) and full of propaganda ("red meat is unhealthy" but conveniently conflating pure red meat with highly-processed stuff like sausages and salami, or "red meat is unsustainable" while we keep burning coal and importing plastics from China... don't get me wrong, I strongly support carbon tax, but want to be able to what to consume (drive car vs. eat steak) myself).

yaseer 5y ago
> they're usually far from natural (tons of chemicals) I really object to marketing use of the word 'natural' and 'chemicals'. I don't mean to single you out - these concepts are widespread in marketing. Plenty of 'natural' things are bad, like small pox, the Ebola virus and salmonella. Plenty of 'unnatural' things are good, like antibiotics to treat infection. All matter is made from chemicals. Whether a chemical like penicillin or salt is synthesised in a lab, or extracted from the ocean, holds no baring on whether that chemical is good for you. - EDIT - Generalised the penicillin example.
- dariusj18 5y ago
  I wouldn't say Penicillin is 'unnatural', there are probably better examples out there.
  - yaseer 5y ago
    That's true, I just picked penicillin and salt intentionally as they both can be synthesised in a lab and in nature
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

actuator 5y ago

> it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do This is hardly the only solution though. We can also shift to just plant based diets from crops which are not water intensive. Vegetarianism has been present in many parts of the world from a long time and those parts have also done fine with surviving. We have a plethora of recipes as well which we can import from those parts of the world and add it with other highly nutritious vegan recipes. At least I have been far more impressed with eating those cuisines than eating fake meat as such.

exabrial 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma Good try though.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

You're foolishly projecting ideology and personal beliefs into somewhere so far removed from the consumer that it simply won't matter. Commodities buyers don't care who's corn is ethical or who's corn is unethical. They don't care who's ground beef is manly and who's isn't. It all comes down to cost per results at the end of the day. Resource usage is just a part of that calculation. No different than the cost of shipping. If McDonalds and Walmart can cut their existing beef with fake plant beef or lab beef without hurting their bottom line (by making their products less attractive to consumers) they will. Will there be people who try and capture the high end market with some ideologically themed marketing in the meantime? Of course. But make no mistake, the long term goal for these new synthetic meat (both plant meat and lab meat) producers is not the high end market. It's the thousands of reefer cars that put that house brand 80/20 on a store shelf near you. Pandering to whatever the premium consumer wants to hear until you can make your product cheap enough and good enough to make real money is just a necessary part of bootstrapping that. Putting the McDouble back on the dollar menu with the help of synthetic beef is what societal progress looks like.

ethanbond 5y ago
I agree with everything you say here and if I communicated that the arguments against lab meat are durable, that was the opposite of my intention. What I mean to say is that it’s a foregone conclusion and we should be expediting its arrival and gaining an edge in that future.

andscoop 5y ago

I used to feel similarly, but now, I'm not so sure. What worries me is that lab-grown meat will allow big ag practices to continue, which will do more harm to our co2 emissions and world's soil health. To expand on this further, there is active research and practices into sustainable farming practices that show diverse crop rotations along dense but short grazing across the land has the ability to rebuild top soil 10x than previously thought. Most importantly this top soil serves as a MASSIVE CARBON SINK. Using this proven methods, we can leverage the world's farmland to sequester carbon while improving the health of our soil and the nurtition density of our food. The catch is that we need the animals to restore soil health and presumably we need the business model of selling the meat to make this practice sustainable. Further Reading: Dirt to Soil - Gabe Brown Alan Savory's Holistic Management Practices - https://youtu.be/q7pI7IYaJLI https://youtu.be/q7pI7IYaJLI https://www.marincarbonproject.org/ https://www.marincarbonproject.org/

jurip 5y ago
How many animals are we talking about in a scenario where all the animals were being used for crop/grazing rotation? I've heard about this and it sounds good to me, but without having looked into it at all, it sounds to me like something that probably wouldn't support the number of animals we're using right now for meat production?
- greenonions 5y ago
  Even if you could convert all the corn/soybean land in the United States to more regenerative methods, you probably wouldn't be able to meet the current demand for meat. Additionally you have a logistical problem with the animals being distributed across an enormous area vs concentrated in a CAFO. Now, you would easily be able to grow enough food for the country and possibly the globe, but meat demand cannot be sustained.
  - andscoop 5y ago
    Do you have a source for not being able to meet meat demand? using which "regenerative methods"?

deleted 5y ago

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shadofx 5y ago

Maybe eventually eating plant matter won't be considered efficient either, what with the massive expenditure of fertilizer and ecological damage of pesticide and herbicide runoff. We will need to figure out to bio-engineer edible plant matter as well. Then once we've mastered that, we can start bio-engineering ourselves to photosynthesize from the sun directly, to cut out all middlemen from the food chain. Then we can bio-engineer a vacuum-resistant carapace and launch ourselves toward the sun to exist as truly self-sufficient organisms. Then we blot out the sun with our flesh, and find some way to go to a different star.

koheripbal 5y ago
I think what the comment above is missing is that these are the metrics that the PR team chose to publish. The lab meat might also use 100x the CO2 in other production materials. It might be more labor and energy intensive. The cost might be 10x higher - even at scale. You cannot trust the PR numbers from a company looking to normalize their product. This is why 3rd party analysis is required.

genericone 5y ago

Depending on the capital requirements and cost of these facilities, and imagining them as semiconductor fab type facilities, a nation would really be putting all their eggs in one basket if their protein security relies on just a few dozen such facilities across the country. This major centralization could be done in by one ransomware attack or activist employee , whereas the decentralized protein production by tens of thousands of producers today is far less susceptible. Once food security becomes tech-driven, its something to worry about.