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This seems no different than the ridiculous laws proposed in some US states recently that would ban EV sales to protect the oil and gas industries. I’m sorry t

This seems no different than the ridiculous laws proposed in some US states recently that would ban EV sales to protect the oil and gas industries. I’m sorry that people could one day lose jobs over this, but if lab-grown meat is proven to be a safe and cost/energy/carbon efficient alternative to raising and killing animals, then it would be insane to not pursue that.

sokoloff 4y ago
We could have equally banned internal combustion engines to protect the steam engine and buggy whip industries or phase change refrigeration to protect the jobs of the ice delivery companies.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Not quite a ban on ICEs but nevertheless analog attempts were made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws These laws didn't last long, fortunately, and ostensibly they were to protect cattle, horses and carriage riders but clearly the idea was to slow the car down to the speed of a pedestrian effectively hobbling it to the point that driving a car didn't make sense.
  - CalRobert 4y ago
    Instead, we made our cities so unpleasant and poorly designed that walking doesn't make sense.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      But we made it possible to get to a lot more things in our cities than you can by walking, and enjoy a lot more space. A walk only city is not a pleasant place to live. Your counter to the above should be building more transit. However in the English speaking world we are incompetent in that these decades, and we refuse to learn from anyone else.
      - CalRobert 4y ago
        Transit, and bicycle infra. But sadly you're not wrong regarding incompetence in the English speaking world, which is why I'm visiting Freiburg in a week to help decide whether to move there or Utrecht.
        kibwen 4y ago
        In contrast, I'll be visiting Amsterdam in a week to help understand how I might bring that culture of human-friendly infrastructure back to America. There are plenty of people in the English-speaking world working to fix the problems that our forebears created.
        CalRobert 4y ago
        Good luck! That's great news. I wanted to do the same but I have a 3 and a 5 year old and I need to be somewhere good now, before their childhoods are over. But I still hope the US (and Canada - notjustbikes is keen to point out they're horrible too) can improve.
      - franciscop 4y ago
        > A walk only city is not a pleasant place to live There's plenty of towns and small cities in Europe (specially the "center") that could be considered walk-only and people are pretty happy there, for example Toledo (Spain) or Venice (Italy).
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    For what it's worth: this would still make sense today. It's insane how modern cities restrict the freedom and safety of people just so that a few people can drive SUVs more resembling a tank than a car in a city. Shit like Rezvani Vengeance should not exist, period. It's insane that the top leader in accidental death of children and adolescents involves automobiles [1]. [1] https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001915.htm https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001915.htm
    - CalRobert 4y ago
      We literally turned streets from areas for commerce and recreation in to killing strips.
    - briandear 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - bluGill 4y ago
        Walking in the freezing cold for a couple blocks is not a problem if you dress for it. Waiting for transit in the freezing cold is misery. Riding buses that are quickly get you where you want to go is not a problem. Riding buses that take a convoluted route and thus make slow progress to where you want to go is misery. You are correct for the bad state of transit most people have, but good transit is possible and then the things you are worried about are not misery.
      - timeon 4y ago
        Only vehicle I experienced freedom with was bicycle. Car is further from freedom. Driving in line of cars or finding parking place is not freedom. You are not completely free with bicycle either but everything is more instant with bike. Motorbike is close but since it is so heavy it can be bit of burden.
      - stcroixx 4y ago
        Quite a few places you would never even be able to even reach in a reasonable amount of time via bus/bike/walk. Would be like the part of the world accessible to you just radically shrank overnight.
  - Steltek 4y ago
    Early cars were immediately killing innocent people in the streets and there was totally justified outrage. We've just become numb to the idea that it's okay to be cut down in the street because cars are just too gosh darn convenient. Today in the US, cars are the number one cause of death for children and lag only firearms for accidental death overall. Excusing the daily human slaughter by saying, "Well, they're not _designed_ to kill people like guns are" is not a cunning retort.
- wankle 4y ago
  > We could have equally banned internal combustion engines to protect the steam engine That should actually have been done or better, Stirling Engines.
zirgs 4y ago
Why would EVs threaten oil & gas industry - they contain lots of plastic that is currently made out of oil. Also electricity is still being generated from fossil fuels in many places. And I don't see stuff like diesel generators going away any time soon. Renewables won't help if a hospital loses power.
- epolanski 4y ago
  You can't be serious, it's obvious that EVs curb oil and gas consumption and profits.
  - beepbooptheory 4y ago
    How is that obvious? At least in the U.S., there is a pretty high chance that nonrenewables are charging your battery.
    - crop_rotation 4y ago
      Non renewables are not all the same. What a car runs on and what is used to generate electricity are not the same non renewables.
    - marcyb5st 4y ago
      Power plants are more efficient than engines crammed within the trunk of a car. They have no limitations in space and weight and so you can do fancy things like heat recovery (you use the exhaust to pre-heat your fuel mix or reuse said heat for nearby industries), always have the combustion chamber at the best temperature for efficiency, ... . Plus, you can install much better filtration systems for combustion byproducts. All in all, if everyone would transition to an EV you would see a noticeable drop in oil consumption thanks to the mentioned benefits. EDIT: From a quick Google search I saw that: - The lower end efficiency for oil and coal power plants is 37%. Gas power plants achieve 56% on the lower end according to [1]. - Car engines vary between 20% (gasoline) and 40% (diesel) efficiency according to [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_station#:~:text=Typical%20thermal%20efficiency%20for%20utility,%2Dcycle%20gas%2Dfired%20plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_station#:~:t.... [2] https://rentar.com/efficient-engines-thermodynamics-combustion-efficiency/ https://rentar.com/efficient-engines-thermodynamics-combusti...
gunwd 4y ago
Sure, but that’s a huge if — especially regarding safety and nutrition.
- vidarh 4y ago
  Then regulating criteria for determining that would be reasonable.
- starkd 4y ago
  One factor I am suprised no one seems to be mentioning is taste. In the absence of quality tests for how well lab-grown meat serves as a nutritional substitute, I would think taste would be a good metric. Perhaps even better than tests, since nutritional science still contains a lot of unknowns. Taste is also serves as a good metric, because it supports human happiness and enjoyment. A big factor.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
epolanski 4y ago
There's no "protection" of anything, this is populist vote-grabbing. Lab-grown meat isn't even a reality and won't be for like a decade at least on supermarket shelves. Also, that's not even the worse of the things introduced by our government yesterday, administrations do not need to publish a public contract for works up to 150k euros. Now every single administration can spend and gift corrupted money left and right without any need for any accountability and rules. Disgusting.
- dangwhy 4y ago
  > populist vote-grabbing sorry but how is this different from just democracy ? we have democracy here in USA that allows NIMBY homeowners opposing any new development. Is that also just 'populist vote-grabbbing'
  - krastanov 4y ago
    Populism is part of democracy and some people even like it. But riling up your voter base to be excited about one bombastic law without (1) considering second order effects or (2) talking about what might be more pressing but unpopular problems, is not something I (and, seemingly, OP) like. And this does not even go into the usual malicious uses of populism.
    - dangwhy 4y ago
      > riling up your voter base But where did you get that this happened in italy . I didn't see that in the bbc article.
      - actionfromafar 4y ago
        Are saying this is not supposed to rile up the user base, or not that the law is in Italy?
      - ChrisRR 4y ago
        The title?
pella 4y ago
> but if lab-grown meat is proven to be a safe We need to fully understand its safety, nutritional content, and long-term health effects. Our understanding of the full biochemical spectrum of our diets is still limited. Therefore, it's important to ensure that lab-grown meat adequately replicates the complex array of nutrients and other beneficial compounds found in conventionally produced meat. Long-term effects: Since lab-grown meat is a relatively new technology, the long-term health effects of consuming it are not yet known. Rigorous safety testing and research are needed to establish its safety over time. --------------- Modern nutrition is largely unexplored territory "The unmapped chemical complexity of our diet" December 2019 Nature Food DOI:10.1038/s43016-019-0005-1 "Our understanding of how diet affects health is limited to 150 key nutritional components that are tracked and catalogued by the United States Department of Agriculture and other national databases. Although this knowledge has been transformative for health sciences, helping unveil the role of calories, sugar, fat, vitamins and other nutritional factors in the emergence of common diseases, these nutritional components represent only a small fraction of the more than 26,000 distinct, definable biochemicals present in our food—many of which have documented effects on health but remain unquantified in any systematic fashion across different individual foods. Using new advances such as machine learning, a high-resolution library of these biochemicals could enable the systematic study of the full biochemical spectrum of our diets, opening new avenues for understanding the composition of what we eat, and how it affects health and disease." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337846288_The_unmapped_chemical_complexity_of_our_diet https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337846288_The_unmap...
- _0w8t 4y ago
  By the same reasoning factory farms that feed cows with grain, not grass, should be banned, as it very significantly alter meat nutrition.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Grains are grasses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae The difference is we are feeding them grass seeds vs grass leaves.
kmeisthax 4y ago
Not necessarily. The EV ban bills proposed in those US states are purely there just to irritate liberals. The EU is extremely skeptic of any genetically-modified food, for a whole load of various reasons, and banning lab-grown meat is entirely in line with that. If you can't tolerate one extra disease-resistance gene in your food, you're not going to be happy with lab-grown meat either. Furthermore, the EU has a very long list of foods that are only allowed to be grown in specific areas or in certain ways. While this is nominally because a lot of those foods are named after specific towns, in practice many of them do not have "generic" names, so these are ultimately de-facto trade bans on other people making those foods. Labs being able to grow "perfect" versions of those foods (as opposed to the generic competition being demonstrably worse) would upend this system.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Which is fine. The canonical example: Parma ham has to be from Parma, and that makes good sense to me. It gets more muddy with cheese, lots of cheese named 'Gouda' isn't Gouda, traditionally Gouda (and Alkmaar) were the big cheese trading markets and the stamp 'Gouda' originally meant traded in Gouda, not produced in Gouda (which doesn't really make Cheese). But Edammer cheese really is made in Edam (or Volendam!). And 'Old Amsterdam' is just a tradename for factory produced Gouda like cheese which has nothing whatsoever to do with Amsterdam and isn't really all that old (artificial high speed ripening). Tourists love it though and pay ridiculous amounts of money for it and now you can get it in regular stores as well. So food named after towns isn't always historically - or even at all - connected to the town. But in cases where that is so it makes good sense to respect that history.
  - illiarian 4y ago
    Those name protections also tend to protect established players and regions even if they ultimately may produce utter garbage. I come from a small wine-producing country of Moldova. It produces or produced anything from wine to classical champagne to port to cognacs to... Now it's only wine that can be called wine (thankfully it's been around for longer than most civilizations). And for the rest they had to come up with their own rather awkward names. And now it doesn't matter if a Moldovan "divin" is superior to a French Cognac. Because branding.
unixgoddess 4y ago
[flagged]
lettergram 4y ago
> ridiculous laws proposed in some US states recently that would ban EV sales to protect the oil and gas industries.
lettergram 4y ago
> This seems no different than the ridiculous laws proposed in some US states recently that would ban EV sales to protect the oil and gas industries. Is it not equally ridiculous to ban combustion engine sales? It appears many want the government to “protect them from carbon”. Why is it bad for people to want to protect the robustness of their food supply? If you view government as a way to protect the population (as it seems most here do), then it shouldn’t be surprising people use it to protect themselves. Personally, I think a fair market where regulation is as minimal as possible is best. That said, I wouldn’t want a few corporations controlling my countries food supply. So, please keep the farms active and plentiful. Similarly, I wouldn’t want car manufacturers of EV to receive any government benefit. Let’s see it produced and become dominate. As oil prices rise because it becomes a scarce resource, EVs would become popular. Of course, we haven’t actually seen a decline in oil production where that occurs, so we do it artificially.
nashashmi 4y ago
Man plans. God laughs. I'm calling Bs on the whole cow industry being bad for the planet because of their bodily functions. Any cows, any animals, any living creatures are never going to be bad for the planet. There is more resource consumption and harm in transferring the livestock as meat and farming livestock than there is in the methane gas. And lab grown meat is not going to change that.
- krapht 4y ago
  > Any cows, any animals, any living creatures are never going to be bad for the planet. Trivial counterexample: humanity I think you have a definition of good/bad w/r/t the planet different from the mainstream.
- burkaman 4y ago
  It's not just their bodily functions (which are very significant despite your feelings), it's the enormous amount of land we clearcut and leave basically empty so they can graze. Also, it's not about the planet, it's about us. The planet obviously will be fine, but a lot of humans won't be.
  - nashashmi 4y ago
    The land consumption is enormous, hence why I mentioned it (farming of livestock). There are different opportunities for optimizations here. But I don't think it falls in line with cultures of industrialization.
    - burkaman 4y ago
      Ok, why do you think this? Transport needs to be decarbonized, but it's a very tiny portion of our food system's climate impact. Land use is a major portion, but it's still not as significant as cows themselves. Maybe you're underestimating the scale? There are a billion cows on earth that simply wouldn't exist if we stopped eating them and drinking their milk. It's not like a normal natural resource that we're just tapping into. They do not exist in the wild, and basically any other food (even other animals) could give us the calories and nutrients we need with far fewer emissions. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-chain https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha... https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/ https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/
blululu 4y ago
This is very different. Oil is a modern innovation with a lot of fundamental problems. Animal meat is as old as time and the problems are more about modern scale and consumption and production patterns (mild regulatory changes would suffice). It is a bit of an open question as to whether or not chemical engineers can beat a chicken in a chicken making contest, but should the results come back unequivocally in favor of the chemists, then Italy can simply repeal the law.
- krapht 4y ago
  Chickens make hardly any sense right now, as they are quite efficient at turning feed into meat. The big wins are in expensive cuts of meat from large, popular animals... i.e. beef and tuna.
stametseater 4y ago
[flagged]
- starkd 4y ago
  Italians recognize that food is just as much about taste, enjoyment and life satisfaction than it is about nutrition. Suppose we could have all our meals with just a pill and still fulfill all our nutritional needs, would it be better? Not if the taste is inferior. Or it interferes with our daily rituals.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    Some of my friends would 100% use food pills, and have enthusiastically expressed that opinion for several years. Soylent and Huel exist and are somewhat profitable businesses. Lots of people don't really care about food and just want to get back to things they care about. Your food opinions are not everyone's food opinions and forcing your opinions on others is not freedom.
- bratbag 4y ago
  There is if no threat exists. Then it just becomes a ridiculous performance to suck in the gullible.
  - xdennis 4y ago
    Lab food presents itself as non threatening because it's not generally accepted. But if it gains a significant majority the vegans will be calling for natural meat to be banned. It's best to stop it before it gains a foothold.
  - stametseater 4y ago
    > no threat exists. Because sensible Italian politicians with popular support nip the problem in the bud. Being proactive is generally considered a good thing
eimrine 4y ago
> but if lab-grown meat is proven to be a safe and cost/energy/carbon efficient alternative to raising and killing animals, then it would be insane to not pursue that. You the city people are so cocky in teaching me the village guy about how to live the life. What if I do not want my meat addiction to be controlled by some big corps? For example, they may decide to put in their meat products something I do not want to be put. At least I can grow my food as I like it to be grown and I can kill it in the way I find reasonable (for example, I might like some products from blood and I might use a lot of animal fat). And last but not least, different parts of animal body has totally different taste which might be hard to simulate - that's why I'm sure that nothing will force me to stop holding cattle before end of my life.
- bratbag 4y ago
  How is allowing it, forcing you?
  - eimrine 4y ago
    He's talking that I'm insane if I will keep killing my cattle after "allowing" me to have safe and carbon efficient meat substitutes.
- deergomoo 4y ago
  I didn’t say you shouldn’t be allowed to raise cattle. You should absolutely be allowed. I said it would be insane to prohibit what is potentially a better alternative, just because some people raise cattle.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> This seems no different than the ridiculous laws proposed in some US states recently Proposing ridiculous laws that won’t go anywhere is an age-old tactic for local politicians to grab headlines and fire up their voter base. There are numerous proposed laws like that every week that will never go anywhere and were never intended to. Ridiculous, yes, but don’t let it fool you into thinking that there was a chance of it happening in the US. As for Italy: I have no idea. Their politics are weirder than I can wrap my head around and I’m not familiar enough to know if this is a political bluff or a serious effort.
pella 4y ago
a bigger context: Lab-grown human meat is also a controversial idea. Con: Producing and consuming lab-grown human meat raises ethical questions about human dignity and the potential normalization of cannibalism, even if it does not involve harming an actual person. Many religious and cultural beliefs would likely oppose the production and consumption of lab-grown human meat. The long-term health effects of consuming lab-grown human meat are unknown, and the production process would need to be carefully regulated to ensure safety. The idea of consuming human meat, even if lab-grown, is likely to be met with strong social disapproval and stigma, which could hinder its acceptance. The production and consumption of lab-grown human meat could face legal challenges in many jurisdictions, as it might be considered a form of cannibalism or be subject to other regulations. Pro: Some individuals may be interested in trying lab-grown human meat due to curiosity or as a novel experience, without causing harm to another person. Cultivating human tissue in a lab could have applications in medical research, such as testing drug efficacy, studying human tissue regeneration, or using it for transplantation purposes. imho: lab-grown meat not only a scientific issue.
mnky9800n 4y ago
people should be able to lose their jobs but not their ability to live. that is the actual problem. if losing your job simply meant having less to do during your day until you find a new job, then it wouldn't be much of a problem to obsolete industries that are destructive (e.g., oil and gas).
goldfeld 4y ago
[flagged]
- Kalium 4y ago
  https://www.ft.com/content/6ac009d5-dbfd-4a86-839e-28bb44b2b64c https://www.ft.com/content/6ac009d5-dbfd-4a86-839e-28bb44b2b... Given that this is also current news, I think that might cast this in a slightly different light. Much of the heritage is modern myth-making, rather than centuries-old recipes known only to a handful of families. The feeling of heritage is real, but the history invented. It seems to be national identity and the politics of nationalism in a food-based disguise, rather than sincere concerns for the authenticity of authentic and historic cuisine.
  - kmlx 4y ago
    that's a great article. > Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong > From panettone to tiramisu, many ‘classics’ are in fact recent inventions, as Alberto Grandi has shown
  - goldfeld 4y ago
    It's true that it is always about politics, and lately, populism, all over the world (not that I feel too bad about some leftist populism being able to outvote fascists, as in my country of late, the weapons race of voting almost require a degree of over-appealing to win, since even middle classes are so brain-poor today). Still, the population can have true feelings, if not the politicians, and they have to find the cold hearted suits who will defend their interest, for whatever distorted motives the suits might accrue, so it's a question of ends, not means, sadly. We're on a post-morality world who gives a shitty shit about some classical philosophu unless a youtuber can explain it in under three minutes. After all, maybe AI citizens will be more civic minded, ahem.
- kmlx 4y ago
  > Why not stuff our stomachs with even more lab stuff? more? everything is genetically modified in order to support the current (and future) population levels: https://www.fda.gov/food/agricultural-biotechnology/gmo-crops-animal-food-and-beyond https://www.fda.gov/food/agricultural-biotechnology/gmo-crop... and crops themselves have been selectively grown for the past 30 000 years: https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/crops_evolving_ten/ https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/crops_evol... > I say, good for Italy and France's children that those peoples have any conscience at all it's run of the mill populism, not conscience. there is no conscience in denying science.
pibechorro 4y ago
There are many factors. First is trust, I trust an organism even if pumped full of hormones more than a lab cell culture. Then there is the issue of dependency, raising livestock nad hunting is low tech with no supply chains breaking down. Quality is also a factor, i will believe it when I see it that lab grown meat is nothing more than glorified ground meat. There is a lot to the unique properties of meat (fibers, fat, etc) which will likely take a long while to master, this vs thousands of years of tradition meat preparation and husbandry. I am not for any top down laws banning things, but the idea that lab grown is anywhere an equal swap for real meat is silly. Italy has a genuine concern, they value food, and that comes down to the quality of ingredients.
- its-summertime 4y ago
  I can hardly trust my own body, let alone the body of a different animal. I doubt that we'll see much of mad cow disease in lab meat on shelves. wrt supply chains: > Specifically, the livestock sector and its related industries are among the most impacted sectors. This is mainly ascribed to the limitations of animal movement and the decrease of production inputs' availability. > The availability of animals', feed ingredients, either through foraging or concentrate ingredients, was an additional challenge confronting the sustainability of the livestock supply chain. Data presented in our overview illustrated that one of the livestock supply chain's major disruptors was the inability of farmers to access animal feed. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7593325/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7593325/ And unless I'm rich enough to eat choice cuts regularly, the marbling et al is not going to be amazing regardless, so...
- timeon 4y ago
  > I am not for any top down laws banning things, but But that is what is this topic about. So if something is not "equal swap" then we can consider ban?
photochemsyn 4y ago
No worries, text has a loophole: > "Food or feed consisting of, isolated or produced from cell cultures or from tissues deriving from vertebrate animals is therefore completely prohibited for the use in the preparation of food, drink and feed." Hence, you can make lab-grown meat from various insects (or crab or lobster) if you like with no concerns. Not sure if the public has an appetite for it, but these are apparently delicious when deep-fried: https://www.mysabah.com/wordpress/sago-worm-butod/ https://www.mysabah.com/wordpress/sago-worm-butod/ I think lobster is the way to go. I guess octopus cells would also be an acceptable starting material (octopi are intelligent and shouldn't be hunted IMO).
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
>if lab-grown meat is proven to be a safe and cost/energy/carbon efficient alternative to raising and killing animals, then it would be insane to not pursue that Sadly, it's not. It requires growing tumors based on animal cells, which need to be pumped full of antibiotics to prevent infection, because a clump of cells has no immune system.

sokoloff 4y ago

We could have equally banned internal combustion engines to protect the steam engine and buggy whip industries or phase change refrigeration to protect the jobs of the ice delivery companies.

jacquesm 4y ago
Not quite a ban on ICEs but nevertheless analog attempts were made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws These laws didn't last long, fortunately, and ostensibly they were to protect cattle, horses and carriage riders but clearly the idea was to slow the car down to the speed of a pedestrian effectively hobbling it to the point that driving a car didn't make sense.
- CalRobert 4y ago
  Instead, we made our cities so unpleasant and poorly designed that walking doesn't make sense.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    But we made it possible to get to a lot more things in our cities than you can by walking, and enjoy a lot more space. A walk only city is not a pleasant place to live. Your counter to the above should be building more transit. However in the English speaking world we are incompetent in that these decades, and we refuse to learn from anyone else.
    - CalRobert 4y ago
      Transit, and bicycle infra. But sadly you're not wrong regarding incompetence in the English speaking world, which is why I'm visiting Freiburg in a week to help decide whether to move there or Utrecht.
      - kibwen 4y ago
        In contrast, I'll be visiting Amsterdam in a week to help understand how I might bring that culture of human-friendly infrastructure back to America. There are plenty of people in the English-speaking world working to fix the problems that our forebears created.
        CalRobert 4y ago
        Good luck! That's great news. I wanted to do the same but I have a 3 and a 5 year old and I need to be somewhere good now, before their childhoods are over. But I still hope the US (and Canada - notjustbikes is keen to point out they're horrible too) can improve.
    - franciscop 4y ago
      > A walk only city is not a pleasant place to live There's plenty of towns and small cities in Europe (specially the "center") that could be considered walk-only and people are pretty happy there, for example Toledo (Spain) or Venice (Italy).
- mschuster91 4y ago
  For what it's worth: this would still make sense today. It's insane how modern cities restrict the freedom and safety of people just so that a few people can drive SUVs more resembling a tank than a car in a city. Shit like Rezvani Vengeance should not exist, period. It's insane that the top leader in accidental death of children and adolescents involves automobiles [1]. [1] https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001915.htm https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001915.htm
  - CalRobert 4y ago
    We literally turned streets from areas for commerce and recreation in to killing strips.
  - briandear 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - bluGill 4y ago
      Walking in the freezing cold for a couple blocks is not a problem if you dress for it. Waiting for transit in the freezing cold is misery. Riding buses that are quickly get you where you want to go is not a problem. Riding buses that take a convoluted route and thus make slow progress to where you want to go is misery. You are correct for the bad state of transit most people have, but good transit is possible and then the things you are worried about are not misery.
    - timeon 4y ago
      Only vehicle I experienced freedom with was bicycle. Car is further from freedom. Driving in line of cars or finding parking place is not freedom. You are not completely free with bicycle either but everything is more instant with bike. Motorbike is close but since it is so heavy it can be bit of burden.
    - stcroixx 4y ago
      Quite a few places you would never even be able to even reach in a reasonable amount of time via bus/bike/walk. Would be like the part of the world accessible to you just radically shrank overnight.
- Steltek 4y ago
  Early cars were immediately killing innocent people in the streets and there was totally justified outrage. We've just become numb to the idea that it's okay to be cut down in the street because cars are just too gosh darn convenient. Today in the US, cars are the number one cause of death for children and lag only firearms for accidental death overall. Excusing the daily human slaughter by saying, "Well, they're not _designed_ to kill people like guns are" is not a cunning retort.
wankle 4y ago
> We could have equally banned internal combustion engines to protect the steam engine That should actually have been done or better, Stirling Engines.

zirgs 4y ago

Why would EVs threaten oil & gas industry - they contain lots of plastic that is currently made out of oil. Also electricity is still being generated from fossil fuels in many places. And I don't see stuff like diesel generators going away any time soon. Renewables won't help if a hospital loses power.

epolanski 4y ago
You can't be serious, it's obvious that EVs curb oil and gas consumption and profits.
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  How is that obvious? At least in the U.S., there is a pretty high chance that nonrenewables are charging your battery.
  - crop_rotation 4y ago
    Non renewables are not all the same. What a car runs on and what is used to generate electricity are not the same non renewables.
  - marcyb5st 4y ago
    Power plants are more efficient than engines crammed within the trunk of a car. They have no limitations in space and weight and so you can do fancy things like heat recovery (you use the exhaust to pre-heat your fuel mix or reuse said heat for nearby industries), always have the combustion chamber at the best temperature for efficiency, ... . Plus, you can install much better filtration systems for combustion byproducts. All in all, if everyone would transition to an EV you would see a noticeable drop in oil consumption thanks to the mentioned benefits. EDIT: From a quick Google search I saw that: - The lower end efficiency for oil and coal power plants is 37%. Gas power plants achieve 56% on the lower end according to [1]. - Car engines vary between 20% (gasoline) and 40% (diesel) efficiency according to [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_station#:~:text=Typical%20thermal%20efficiency%20for%20utility,%2Dcycle%20gas%2Dfired%20plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_station#:~:t.... [2] https://rentar.com/efficient-engines-thermodynamics-combustion-efficiency/ https://rentar.com/efficient-engines-thermodynamics-combusti...

gunwd 4y ago

Sure, but that’s a huge if — especially regarding safety and nutrition.

vidarh 4y ago
Then regulating criteria for determining that would be reasonable.
starkd 4y ago
One factor I am suprised no one seems to be mentioning is taste. In the absence of quality tests for how well lab-grown meat serves as a nutritional substitute, I would think taste would be a good metric. Perhaps even better than tests, since nutritional science still contains a lot of unknowns. Taste is also serves as a good metric, because it supports human happiness and enjoyment. A big factor.

deleted 4y ago

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epolanski 4y ago

There's no "protection" of anything, this is populist vote-grabbing. Lab-grown meat isn't even a reality and won't be for like a decade at least on supermarket shelves. Also, that's not even the worse of the things introduced by our government yesterday, administrations do not need to publish a public contract for works up to 150k euros. Now every single administration can spend and gift corrupted money left and right without any need for any accountability and rules. Disgusting.

dangwhy 4y ago
> populist vote-grabbing sorry but how is this different from just democracy ? we have democracy here in USA that allows NIMBY homeowners opposing any new development. Is that also just 'populist vote-grabbbing'
- krastanov 4y ago
  Populism is part of democracy and some people even like it. But riling up your voter base to be excited about one bombastic law without (1) considering second order effects or (2) talking about what might be more pressing but unpopular problems, is not something I (and, seemingly, OP) like. And this does not even go into the usual malicious uses of populism.
  - dangwhy 4y ago
    > riling up your voter base But where did you get that this happened in italy . I didn't see that in the bbc article.
    - actionfromafar 4y ago
      Are saying this is not supposed to rile up the user base, or not that the law is in Italy?
    - ChrisRR 4y ago
      The title?

pella 4y ago

> but if lab-grown meat is proven to be a safe We need to fully understand its safety, nutritional content, and long-term health effects. Our understanding of the full biochemical spectrum of our diets is still limited. Therefore, it's important to ensure that lab-grown meat adequately replicates the complex array of nutrients and other beneficial compounds found in conventionally produced meat. Long-term effects: Since lab-grown meat is a relatively new technology, the long-term health effects of consuming it are not yet known. Rigorous safety testing and research are needed to establish its safety over time. --------------- Modern nutrition is largely unexplored territory "The unmapped chemical complexity of our diet" December 2019 Nature Food DOI:10.1038/s43016-019-0005-1 "Our understanding of how diet affects health is limited to 150 key nutritional components that are tracked and catalogued by the United States Department of Agriculture and other national databases. Although this knowledge has been transformative for health sciences, helping unveil the role of calories, sugar, fat, vitamins and other nutritional factors in the emergence of common diseases, these nutritional components represent only a small fraction of the more than 26,000 distinct, definable biochemicals present in our food—many of which have documented effects on health but remain unquantified in any systematic fashion across different individual foods. Using new advances such as machine learning, a high-resolution library of these biochemicals could enable the systematic study of the full biochemical spectrum of our diets, opening new avenues for understanding the composition of what we eat, and how it affects health and disease." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337846288_The_unmapped_chemical_complexity_of_our_diet https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337846288_The_unmap...

_0w8t 4y ago
By the same reasoning factory farms that feed cows with grain, not grass, should be banned, as it very significantly alter meat nutrition.
- Retric 4y ago
  Grains are grasses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae The difference is we are feeding them grass seeds vs grass leaves.

kmeisthax 4y ago

Not necessarily. The EV ban bills proposed in those US states are purely there just to irritate liberals. The EU is extremely skeptic of any genetically-modified food, for a whole load of various reasons, and banning lab-grown meat is entirely in line with that. If you can't tolerate one extra disease-resistance gene in your food, you're not going to be happy with lab-grown meat either. Furthermore, the EU has a very long list of foods that are only allowed to be grown in specific areas or in certain ways. While this is nominally because a lot of those foods are named after specific towns, in practice many of them do not have "generic" names, so these are ultimately de-facto trade bans on other people making those foods. Labs being able to grow "perfect" versions of those foods (as opposed to the generic competition being demonstrably worse) would upend this system.

jacquesm 4y ago
Which is fine. The canonical example: Parma ham has to be from Parma, and that makes good sense to me. It gets more muddy with cheese, lots of cheese named 'Gouda' isn't Gouda, traditionally Gouda (and Alkmaar) were the big cheese trading markets and the stamp 'Gouda' originally meant traded in Gouda, not produced in Gouda (which doesn't really make Cheese). But Edammer cheese really is made in Edam (or Volendam!). And 'Old Amsterdam' is just a tradename for factory produced Gouda like cheese which has nothing whatsoever to do with Amsterdam and isn't really all that old (artificial high speed ripening). Tourists love it though and pay ridiculous amounts of money for it and now you can get it in regular stores as well. So food named after towns isn't always historically - or even at all - connected to the town. But in cases where that is so it makes good sense to respect that history.
- illiarian 4y ago
  Those name protections also tend to protect established players and regions even if they ultimately may produce utter garbage. I come from a small wine-producing country of Moldova. It produces or produced anything from wine to classical champagne to port to cognacs to... Now it's only wine that can be called wine (thankfully it's been around for longer than most civilizations). And for the rest they had to come up with their own rather awkward names. And now it doesn't matter if a Moldovan "divin" is superior to a French Cognac. Because branding.

unixgoddess 4y ago

[flagged]

lettergram 4y ago

> ridiculous laws proposed in some US states recently that would ban EV sales to protect the oil and gas industries.

lettergram 4y ago

> This seems no different than the ridiculous laws proposed in some US states recently that would ban EV sales to protect the oil and gas industries. Is it not equally ridiculous to ban combustion engine sales? It appears many want the government to “protect them from carbon”. Why is it bad for people to want to protect the robustness of their food supply? If you view government as a way to protect the population (as it seems most here do), then it shouldn’t be surprising people use it to protect themselves. Personally, I think a fair market where regulation is as minimal as possible is best. That said, I wouldn’t want a few corporations controlling my countries food supply. So, please keep the farms active and plentiful. Similarly, I wouldn’t want car manufacturers of EV to receive any government benefit. Let’s see it produced and become dominate. As oil prices rise because it becomes a scarce resource, EVs would become popular. Of course, we haven’t actually seen a decline in oil production where that occurs, so we do it artificially.

nashashmi 4y ago

Man plans. God laughs. I'm calling Bs on the whole cow industry being bad for the planet because of their bodily functions. Any cows, any animals, any living creatures are never going to be bad for the planet. There is more resource consumption and harm in transferring the livestock as meat and farming livestock than there is in the methane gas. And lab grown meat is not going to change that.

krapht 4y ago
> Any cows, any animals, any living creatures are never going to be bad for the planet. Trivial counterexample: humanity I think you have a definition of good/bad w/r/t the planet different from the mainstream.
burkaman 4y ago
It's not just their bodily functions (which are very significant despite your feelings), it's the enormous amount of land we clearcut and leave basically empty so they can graze. Also, it's not about the planet, it's about us. The planet obviously will be fine, but a lot of humans won't be.
- nashashmi 4y ago
  The land consumption is enormous, hence why I mentioned it (farming of livestock). There are different opportunities for optimizations here. But I don't think it falls in line with cultures of industrialization.
  - burkaman 4y ago
    Ok, why do you think this? Transport needs to be decarbonized, but it's a very tiny portion of our food system's climate impact. Land use is a major portion, but it's still not as significant as cows themselves. Maybe you're underestimating the scale? There are a billion cows on earth that simply wouldn't exist if we stopped eating them and drinking their milk. It's not like a normal natural resource that we're just tapping into. They do not exist in the wild, and basically any other food (even other animals) could give us the calories and nutrients we need with far fewer emissions. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-chain https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha... https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/ https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/

blululu 4y ago

This is very different. Oil is a modern innovation with a lot of fundamental problems. Animal meat is as old as time and the problems are more about modern scale and consumption and production patterns (mild regulatory changes would suffice). It is a bit of an open question as to whether or not chemical engineers can beat a chicken in a chicken making contest, but should the results come back unequivocally in favor of the chemists, then Italy can simply repeal the law.

krapht 4y ago
Chickens make hardly any sense right now, as they are quite efficient at turning feed into meat. The big wins are in expensive cuts of meat from large, popular animals... i.e. beef and tuna.

stametseater 4y ago

[flagged]

starkd 4y ago
Italians recognize that food is just as much about taste, enjoyment and life satisfaction than it is about nutrition. Suppose we could have all our meals with just a pill and still fulfill all our nutritional needs, would it be better? Not if the taste is inferior. Or it interferes with our daily rituals.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Some of my friends would 100% use food pills, and have enthusiastically expressed that opinion for several years. Soylent and Huel exist and are somewhat profitable businesses. Lots of people don't really care about food and just want to get back to things they care about. Your food opinions are not everyone's food opinions and forcing your opinions on others is not freedom.
bratbag 4y ago
There is if no threat exists. Then it just becomes a ridiculous performance to suck in the gullible.
- xdennis 4y ago
  Lab food presents itself as non threatening because it's not generally accepted. But if it gains a significant majority the vegans will be calling for natural meat to be banned. It's best to stop it before it gains a foothold.
- stametseater 4y ago
  > no threat exists. Because sensible Italian politicians with popular support nip the problem in the bud. Being proactive is generally considered a good thing

eimrine 4y ago

> but if lab-grown meat is proven to be a safe and cost/energy/carbon efficient alternative to raising and killing animals, then it would be insane to not pursue that. You the city people are so cocky in teaching me the village guy about how to live the life. What if I do not want my meat addiction to be controlled by some big corps? For example, they may decide to put in their meat products something I do not want to be put. At least I can grow my food as I like it to be grown and I can kill it in the way I find reasonable (for example, I might like some products from blood and I might use a lot of animal fat). And last but not least, different parts of animal body has totally different taste which might be hard to simulate - that's why I'm sure that nothing will force me to stop holding cattle before end of my life.

bratbag 4y ago
How is allowing it, forcing you?
- eimrine 4y ago
  He's talking that I'm insane if I will keep killing my cattle after "allowing" me to have safe and carbon efficient meat substitutes.
deergomoo 4y ago
I didn’t say you shouldn’t be allowed to raise cattle. You should absolutely be allowed. I said it would be insane to prohibit what is potentially a better alternative, just because some people raise cattle.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> This seems no different than the ridiculous laws proposed in some US states recently Proposing ridiculous laws that won’t go anywhere is an age-old tactic for local politicians to grab headlines and fire up their voter base. There are numerous proposed laws like that every week that will never go anywhere and were never intended to. Ridiculous, yes, but don’t let it fool you into thinking that there was a chance of it happening in the US. As for Italy: I have no idea. Their politics are weirder than I can wrap my head around and I’m not familiar enough to know if this is a political bluff or a serious effort.

pella 4y ago

a bigger context: Lab-grown human meat is also a controversial idea. Con: Producing and consuming lab-grown human meat raises ethical questions about human dignity and the potential normalization of cannibalism, even if it does not involve harming an actual person. Many religious and cultural beliefs would likely oppose the production and consumption of lab-grown human meat. The long-term health effects of consuming lab-grown human meat are unknown, and the production process would need to be carefully regulated to ensure safety. The idea of consuming human meat, even if lab-grown, is likely to be met with strong social disapproval and stigma, which could hinder its acceptance. The production and consumption of lab-grown human meat could face legal challenges in many jurisdictions, as it might be considered a form of cannibalism or be subject to other regulations. Pro: Some individuals may be interested in trying lab-grown human meat due to curiosity or as a novel experience, without causing harm to another person. Cultivating human tissue in a lab could have applications in medical research, such as testing drug efficacy, studying human tissue regeneration, or using it for transplantation purposes. imho: lab-grown meat not only a scientific issue.

mnky9800n 4y ago

people should be able to lose their jobs but not their ability to live. that is the actual problem. if losing your job simply meant having less to do during your day until you find a new job, then it wouldn't be much of a problem to obsolete industries that are destructive (e.g., oil and gas).

goldfeld 4y ago

[flagged]

Kalium 4y ago
https://www.ft.com/content/6ac009d5-dbfd-4a86-839e-28bb44b2b64c https://www.ft.com/content/6ac009d5-dbfd-4a86-839e-28bb44b2b... Given that this is also current news, I think that might cast this in a slightly different light. Much of the heritage is modern myth-making, rather than centuries-old recipes known only to a handful of families. The feeling of heritage is real, but the history invented. It seems to be national identity and the politics of nationalism in a food-based disguise, rather than sincere concerns for the authenticity of authentic and historic cuisine.
- kmlx 4y ago
  that's a great article. > Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong > From panettone to tiramisu, many ‘classics’ are in fact recent inventions, as Alberto Grandi has shown
- goldfeld 4y ago
  It's true that it is always about politics, and lately, populism, all over the world (not that I feel too bad about some leftist populism being able to outvote fascists, as in my country of late, the weapons race of voting almost require a degree of over-appealing to win, since even middle classes are so brain-poor today). Still, the population can have true feelings, if not the politicians, and they have to find the cold hearted suits who will defend their interest, for whatever distorted motives the suits might accrue, so it's a question of ends, not means, sadly. We're on a post-morality world who gives a shitty shit about some classical philosophu unless a youtuber can explain it in under three minutes. After all, maybe AI citizens will be more civic minded, ahem.
kmlx 4y ago
> Why not stuff our stomachs with even more lab stuff? more? everything is genetically modified in order to support the current (and future) population levels: https://www.fda.gov/food/agricultural-biotechnology/gmo-crops-animal-food-and-beyond https://www.fda.gov/food/agricultural-biotechnology/gmo-crop... and crops themselves have been selectively grown for the past 30 000 years: https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/crops_evolving_ten/ https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/crops_evol... > I say, good for Italy and France's children that those peoples have any conscience at all it's run of the mill populism, not conscience. there is no conscience in denying science.

pibechorro 4y ago

There are many factors. First is trust, I trust an organism even if pumped full of hormones more than a lab cell culture. Then there is the issue of dependency, raising livestock nad hunting is low tech with no supply chains breaking down. Quality is also a factor, i will believe it when I see it that lab grown meat is nothing more than glorified ground meat. There is a lot to the unique properties of meat (fibers, fat, etc) which will likely take a long while to master, this vs thousands of years of tradition meat preparation and husbandry. I am not for any top down laws banning things, but the idea that lab grown is anywhere an equal swap for real meat is silly. Italy has a genuine concern, they value food, and that comes down to the quality of ingredients.

its-summertime 4y ago
I can hardly trust my own body, let alone the body of a different animal. I doubt that we'll see much of mad cow disease in lab meat on shelves. wrt supply chains: > Specifically, the livestock sector and its related industries are among the most impacted sectors. This is mainly ascribed to the limitations of animal movement and the decrease of production inputs' availability. > The availability of animals', feed ingredients, either through foraging or concentrate ingredients, was an additional challenge confronting the sustainability of the livestock supply chain. Data presented in our overview illustrated that one of the livestock supply chain's major disruptors was the inability of farmers to access animal feed. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7593325/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7593325/ And unless I'm rich enough to eat choice cuts regularly, the marbling et al is not going to be amazing regardless, so...
timeon 4y ago
> I am not for any top down laws banning things, but But that is what is this topic about. So if something is not "equal swap" then we can consider ban?

photochemsyn 4y ago

No worries, text has a loophole: > "Food or feed consisting of, isolated or produced from cell cultures or from tissues deriving from vertebrate animals is therefore completely prohibited for the use in the preparation of food, drink and feed." Hence, you can make lab-grown meat from various insects (or crab or lobster) if you like with no concerns. Not sure if the public has an appetite for it, but these are apparently delicious when deep-fried: https://www.mysabah.com/wordpress/sago-worm-butod/ https://www.mysabah.com/wordpress/sago-worm-butod/ I think lobster is the way to go. I guess octopus cells would also be an acceptable starting material (octopi are intelligent and shouldn't be hunted IMO).

TurkishPoptart 4y ago

>if lab-grown meat is proven to be a safe and cost/energy/carbon efficient alternative to raising and killing animals, then it would be insane to not pursue that Sadly, it's not. It requires growing tumors based on animal cells, which need to be pumped full of antibiotics to prevent infection, because a clump of cells has no immune system.