6 ms·

Afraid of high-tech food? Get over it

17 points by orangebanana1 4y ago

stuckinhell 4y ago
I'm getting tired of the self-righteous arrogant tone from journalism these days. Even if they are right, they aren't winning hearts and minds this way.
goldenchrome 4y ago
I’d rather not live in a society where progressives are forcing me to “get over” a dozen different things every year. How about you get your hands off my things? Who made you the arbiter of truth?
- theandrewbailey 4y ago
  And almost all of those things to "get over" were never problems to begin with. Many of these progressives are Karens who can't mind their own business.
- myshpa 4y ago
  How about you get your hands off everybodys things ... the forests [0] [1], biodiversity [2] [3], climate [4], fresh and salt waters [5] ... all of which are being destroyed thanks to people guzzling meat and dairy? Why should a part of population (even the dominant and conservative/atavistic) be allowed to destroy the environment for others and for the future generations, solely for their pleasure? Why should such behaviour be heavily subsidized? Because some people choose to be ignorant and selfish and loud? [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/magazine/amazon-tipping-point.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/magazine/amazon-tipping-p... [1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/weve-lost-35-percent-of-forests-in-the-past-300-years https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/weve-lost-35-pe... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene [3] https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity [4] https://climatehealers.org/the-science/animal-agriculture-position-paper/ https://climatehealers.org/the-science/animal-agriculture-po... [5] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agriculture_production_as_a_major_driver_of_the_Earth_system_exceeding_planetary_boundaries https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu...
  - goldenchrome 4y ago
    In the next few decades the biggest contributors to the issues you mentioned are going to be the billions of people in Africa and Asia who are rapidly developing themselves out of poverty. What do you think we should do about that?
    - myshpa 4y ago
      I'll bite. What about ... a] we could be a positive example of a sustainable approach to earth stewardship, by switching to plant based diets instead of eating ourselves to extinction, what we do they copy, by switching to plant based we would save 75% of agricultural land (enabling reforestation and stopping biodiversity loss if done properly) b] don't f*ck up the climate much more, so they won't have to migrate to save their bare existence, no walls will stop those hundreds of millions once they start moving (50+C temperatures near the equator, melting glaciers threatening water scarcity for hundreds of millions in asia, overfished seas etc.) c] help them develop / educate their population instead of insisting on exploiting their natural resources, only education and abolishing idiocy and indiference can help us (by curbing population explosion and protecting the last remnants of the ecosystems we have) d] help them save/reforest their local ecosystems so they'll be able to take care of themselves, without functioning ecosphere no functioning economy is possible e] stop deforesting ... we could start making clothes, paper, furniture and houses from cannabis again for example, it grows much faster than trees do f] stop behaving immorally, exporting bad laws and practicies to the world, just to protect national interests of a single country - e.g. instead of cannabis for textile production we have clothes from plastic materials (= microplastics in water everywhere), enabling production of forever chemicals and agricultural herbicides/pesticides even if we know how destructive it is, industrialized agriculture degrading soils all over the world, we could go on and on
bwestergard 4y ago
"we’ll need to get used to [artificial meat] to avert a climate catastrophe." Or we could just eat traditional vegetarian dishes, which are superior from the perspective of health, water/land use, and - in my humble opinion - flavor.
- jakewins 4y ago
  There are a lot of things like this, where the logically optimal solution meets social norm reality. Many have or will switch to vegetarian diets! But for many, having an option to continue cooking a variant of pepperoni pizza or a burger will allow much less friction in the transition.
bsenftner 4y ago
I'm not afraid of the food, I'm wary of the corporate governance and legal framework that allows a corporation more freedom than I, and will never face ramifications if what it sells has material side effects to literally anything. It's not the food, it's the organization created to product the food that ends up being, frankly, yet another corporate predator one has to watch and be aware because at any time they can be purchased and start behaving opposite from all their previous values.
shrubble 4y ago
It's just the typical arrogance from people who refuse to acknowledge that we can't see all the ultimate results of technological changes we make. Other examples: drugs like thalidomide that caused birth defects, side effects of amiodarone; importation of non-native species that then caused issues, such as kudzu, Burmese pythons, snakehead fish, etc. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/invasive/what-are-invasive-species.htm https://www.nps.gov/subjects/invasive/what-are-invasive-spec... "Afraid of Kudzu? Get Over It" could have been written in the 1880s by this guy's great-grandfather...
- msrenee 4y ago
  There was a recent article about how some vegetarian processed foods contained the claimed micronutrients, but in a form that is not necessarily fully bio-available. We know so little about how nutrients are processed in our bodies that anyone claiming to have a silver bullet replacement for any part of our diet is a big red flag to me. They also lump GMOs and lab-grown meats together as though the concerns for each are identical and can be dismissed as a whole. I'm very comfortable with GMOs as they pertain to most crop varieties. I'm comfortable eating lab grown meat as well, but off the top of my head, I know the collagen level of a chunk of replicated muscle tissue is not going to be the same as what you'd get from a pork chop. It's bad enough that organ meats have been largely eliminated from our diets and red meat and fat demonized. Who knows what other nutrition we're tossing away by eating only lab-grown meats? I'm not scared of progress. I'm scared of individuals with big ideas who don't know how little they know about the incredibly complex way our bodies utilize nutrition.
ackfoobar 4y ago
When I was young, my mother forbids me and my siblings to eat cup noodle straight from the container. Instead we had to dump the content to a bowl. The instruction is to add boiling water to the plastic cup. I reasoned that must be safe, and she had to "get over" her fear of plastic. Now that I'm aware of xenoestrogen, I'm thankful for her fear of "new" stuff.
a-r-t 4y ago
Sounds exactly how baby formula was pushed to replace breastfeeding in the 20th century to sell more milk. Same language and arguments were used.
MrPatan 4y ago
Afraid of PR pieces posing as news? Get over it
_vertigo 4y ago
Alternative take: high-tech food needs to be better if we want to people to start eating it
mattstir 4y ago
I find it strange that the author is clearly trying to convince some kind of audience, but then goes about it in the least convincing way possible. The self-righteousness and arrogance won't help relay their point to the people they want to convince. I'm not sure who the article is for, to be honest.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  All I can figure is the article's purpose is to generate rage-clicks and rage-shares to drive traffic. It's a totally pointless, if not counter-productive, article, otherwise.
abeppu 4y ago
This is a weird take. The author accepts as unchangeable the fact that people don't want to eat more plant-based foods (a reflection of their preferences and values) but urges that they should change their preferences about novel engineered foods. Both of these preferences contribute to climate and environmental impacts -- why accept one of those as a lost cause and the other as something they must get over?
dns_snek 4y ago
Needlessly inflammatory, I hoped that people might have learned that forcefully projecting their beliefs onto other people in a condescending way doesn't work. I say this as someone who would have no issues with eating artificial meat replacements as long as they were affordable to the average Joe and taste roughly the same. Taste is arguably the most important factor, people don't want "chicken" or "beef" that doesn't brown when cooked and only vaguely resembles the real thing with weird off-flavors. Pushing this hard, this early, for people to adopt "high tech" food will just delay the progress in the long term. I don't have any deep rooted aversion to genetically modified food either, but it needs to undergo an appropriate level of studies to show that the food is safe in the long term. Move fast and break things isn't an appropriate approach when it comes to feeding hundreds of millions, or even billions of people.
myshpa 4y ago
We don't need meat. We don't need dairy. [0] We eat it only for the pleasure, for our taste buds experience, and because it's convenient and we don't want to learn to cook differently. We choose to ignore environmental and moral impacts of doing so, because we believe the stories we've been told (culture), because we don't want to face our cognitive dissonance [1] and/or because we simply choose to be lazy and ignorant. High-tech food is a thing for such people. It's not for the vegans of today, who are perfectly happy eating beans and veggies. It's for people eating meat and dairy, who think that they can't live without it (and how mistaken they are). Insisting that "the only real thing" is the one with all the chemicals, land degradation, endotoxins, stresses and suffering ... that's really hard to fathom. Why not take the "real" cells and let them propagate in the aseptic tank, same as we grow our beer, for example? [2] I for one don't believe we have time for such a solution, that it can come in time to stop us destroying the environment completely, but what's so unnatural about it? If you're against it, or against veganism, you're like the caveman, insisting that the only real substinence is the mammoth meat, everything else is subpar and that you'll eat only mammoth, no matter how few of them remain, your progeny be damned. Nobody shall take away your freedom (to destroy all life on earth), you want to eat mammoth! [0] https://talkveganto.me/en/facts/suitable-for-all/ https://talkveganto.me/en/facts/suitable-for-all/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Meat-eating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Meat-eati... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_fermentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_fermentation
jjtheblunt 4y ago
this is ridiculous: the author presumes synthetic meat must replace animal meat, and entirely ignores (for example) lentils and grains. I find so many who argue for synthetic meat have NO idea that it's not the grams of protein, but the presence of particular amino acids that matters. a synthetic meat with 1000 grams of protein might be entirely useless to human metabolism, but still be 1000 grams of protein.

17 points by orangebanana1 4y ago

I'm getting tired of the self-righteous arrogant tone from journalism these days. Even if they are right, they aren't winning hearts and minds this way.

goldenchrome 4y ago

I’d rather not live in a society where progressives are forcing me to “get over” a dozen different things every year. How about you get your hands off my things? Who made you the arbiter of truth?

theandrewbailey 4y ago
And almost all of those things to "get over" were never problems to begin with. Many of these progressives are Karens who can't mind their own business.
myshpa 4y ago
How about you get your hands off everybodys things ... the forests [0] [1], biodiversity [2] [3], climate [4], fresh and salt waters [5] ... all of which are being destroyed thanks to people guzzling meat and dairy? Why should a part of population (even the dominant and conservative/atavistic) be allowed to destroy the environment for others and for the future generations, solely for their pleasure? Why should such behaviour be heavily subsidized? Because some people choose to be ignorant and selfish and loud? [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/magazine/amazon-tipping-point.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/magazine/amazon-tipping-p... [1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/weve-lost-35-percent-of-forests-in-the-past-300-years https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/weve-lost-35-pe... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene [3] https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity [4] https://climatehealers.org/the-science/animal-agriculture-position-paper/ https://climatehealers.org/the-science/animal-agriculture-po... [5] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agriculture_production_as_a_major_driver_of_the_Earth_system_exceeding_planetary_boundaries https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu...
- goldenchrome 4y ago
  In the next few decades the biggest contributors to the issues you mentioned are going to be the billions of people in Africa and Asia who are rapidly developing themselves out of poverty. What do you think we should do about that?
  - myshpa 4y ago
    I'll bite. What about ... a] we could be a positive example of a sustainable approach to earth stewardship, by switching to plant based diets instead of eating ourselves to extinction, what we do they copy, by switching to plant based we would save 75% of agricultural land (enabling reforestation and stopping biodiversity loss if done properly) b] don't f*ck up the climate much more, so they won't have to migrate to save their bare existence, no walls will stop those hundreds of millions once they start moving (50+C temperatures near the equator, melting glaciers threatening water scarcity for hundreds of millions in asia, overfished seas etc.) c] help them develop / educate their population instead of insisting on exploiting their natural resources, only education and abolishing idiocy and indiference can help us (by curbing population explosion and protecting the last remnants of the ecosystems we have) d] help them save/reforest their local ecosystems so they'll be able to take care of themselves, without functioning ecosphere no functioning economy is possible e] stop deforesting ... we could start making clothes, paper, furniture and houses from cannabis again for example, it grows much faster than trees do f] stop behaving immorally, exporting bad laws and practicies to the world, just to protect national interests of a single country - e.g. instead of cannabis for textile production we have clothes from plastic materials (= microplastics in water everywhere), enabling production of forever chemicals and agricultural herbicides/pesticides even if we know how destructive it is, industrialized agriculture degrading soils all over the world, we could go on and on

bwestergard 4y ago

"we’ll need to get used to [artificial meat] to avert a climate catastrophe." Or we could just eat traditional vegetarian dishes, which are superior from the perspective of health, water/land use, and - in my humble opinion - flavor.

jakewins 4y ago
There are a lot of things like this, where the logically optimal solution meets social norm reality. Many have or will switch to vegetarian diets! But for many, having an option to continue cooking a variant of pepperoni pizza or a burger will allow much less friction in the transition.

bsenftner 4y ago

I'm not afraid of the food, I'm wary of the corporate governance and legal framework that allows a corporation more freedom than I, and will never face ramifications if what it sells has material side effects to literally anything. It's not the food, it's the organization created to product the food that ends up being, frankly, yet another corporate predator one has to watch and be aware because at any time they can be purchased and start behaving opposite from all their previous values.

shrubble 4y ago

It's just the typical arrogance from people who refuse to acknowledge that we can't see all the ultimate results of technological changes we make. Other examples: drugs like thalidomide that caused birth defects, side effects of amiodarone; importation of non-native species that then caused issues, such as kudzu, Burmese pythons, snakehead fish, etc. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/invasive/what-are-invasive-species.htm https://www.nps.gov/subjects/invasive/what-are-invasive-spec... "Afraid of Kudzu? Get Over It" could have been written in the 1880s by this guy's great-grandfather...

msrenee 4y ago
There was a recent article about how some vegetarian processed foods contained the claimed micronutrients, but in a form that is not necessarily fully bio-available. We know so little about how nutrients are processed in our bodies that anyone claiming to have a silver bullet replacement for any part of our diet is a big red flag to me. They also lump GMOs and lab-grown meats together as though the concerns for each are identical and can be dismissed as a whole. I'm very comfortable with GMOs as they pertain to most crop varieties. I'm comfortable eating lab grown meat as well, but off the top of my head, I know the collagen level of a chunk of replicated muscle tissue is not going to be the same as what you'd get from a pork chop. It's bad enough that organ meats have been largely eliminated from our diets and red meat and fat demonized. Who knows what other nutrition we're tossing away by eating only lab-grown meats? I'm not scared of progress. I'm scared of individuals with big ideas who don't know how little they know about the incredibly complex way our bodies utilize nutrition.

ackfoobar 4y ago

When I was young, my mother forbids me and my siblings to eat cup noodle straight from the container. Instead we had to dump the content to a bowl. The instruction is to add boiling water to the plastic cup. I reasoned that must be safe, and she had to "get over" her fear of plastic. Now that I'm aware of xenoestrogen, I'm thankful for her fear of "new" stuff.

a-r-t 4y ago

Sounds exactly how baby formula was pushed to replace breastfeeding in the 20th century to sell more milk. Same language and arguments were used.

MrPatan 4y ago

Afraid of PR pieces posing as news? Get over it

_vertigo 4y ago

Alternative take: high-tech food needs to be better if we want to people to start eating it

mattstir 4y ago

I find it strange that the author is clearly trying to convince some kind of audience, but then goes about it in the least convincing way possible. The self-righteousness and arrogance won't help relay their point to the people they want to convince. I'm not sure who the article is for, to be honest.

yamtaddle 4y ago
All I can figure is the article's purpose is to generate rage-clicks and rage-shares to drive traffic. It's a totally pointless, if not counter-productive, article, otherwise.

abeppu 4y ago

This is a weird take. The author accepts as unchangeable the fact that people don't want to eat more plant-based foods (a reflection of their preferences and values) but urges that they should change their preferences about novel engineered foods. Both of these preferences contribute to climate and environmental impacts -- why accept one of those as a lost cause and the other as something they must get over?

dns_snek 4y ago

Needlessly inflammatory, I hoped that people might have learned that forcefully projecting their beliefs onto other people in a condescending way doesn't work. I say this as someone who would have no issues with eating artificial meat replacements as long as they were affordable to the average Joe and taste roughly the same. Taste is arguably the most important factor, people don't want "chicken" or "beef" that doesn't brown when cooked and only vaguely resembles the real thing with weird off-flavors. Pushing this hard, this early, for people to adopt "high tech" food will just delay the progress in the long term. I don't have any deep rooted aversion to genetically modified food either, but it needs to undergo an appropriate level of studies to show that the food is safe in the long term. Move fast and break things isn't an appropriate approach when it comes to feeding hundreds of millions, or even billions of people.

myshpa 4y ago

We don't need meat. We don't need dairy. [0] We eat it only for the pleasure, for our taste buds experience, and because it's convenient and we don't want to learn to cook differently. We choose to ignore environmental and moral impacts of doing so, because we believe the stories we've been told (culture), because we don't want to face our cognitive dissonance [1] and/or because we simply choose to be lazy and ignorant. High-tech food is a thing for such people. It's not for the vegans of today, who are perfectly happy eating beans and veggies. It's for people eating meat and dairy, who think that they can't live without it (and how mistaken they are). Insisting that "the only real thing" is the one with all the chemicals, land degradation, endotoxins, stresses and suffering ... that's really hard to fathom. Why not take the "real" cells and let them propagate in the aseptic tank, same as we grow our beer, for example? [2] I for one don't believe we have time for such a solution, that it can come in time to stop us destroying the environment completely, but what's so unnatural about it? If you're against it, or against veganism, you're like the caveman, insisting that the only real substinence is the mammoth meat, everything else is subpar and that you'll eat only mammoth, no matter how few of them remain, your progeny be damned. Nobody shall take away your freedom (to destroy all life on earth), you want to eat mammoth! [0] https://talkveganto.me/en/facts/suitable-for-all/ https://talkveganto.me/en/facts/suitable-for-all/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Meat-eating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Meat-eati... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_fermentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_fermentation

jjtheblunt 4y ago

this is ridiculous: the author presumes synthetic meat must replace animal meat, and entirely ignores (for example) lentils and grains. I find so many who argue for synthetic meat have NO idea that it's not the grams of protein, but the presence of particular amino acids that matters. a synthetic meat with 1000 grams of protein might be entirely useless to human metabolism, but still be 1000 grams of protein.