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>substantially cheaper price why substantially cheaper? Break-even would be fine too, no? And as a plus, lab-grown meat is much more ethical. I also think tha
by TomJansen 28d ago
>substantially cheaper price
why substantially cheaper? Break-even would be fine too, no? And as a plus, lab-grown meat is much more ethical.
I also think that replacing 'cheap' meat like ground beef would already be sufficient and would make a huge impact, there is really no need make it difficult for ourselves and try to replace rib-eye.
- wonderwonder 28d agoI don't think most people are going to grab lab grown out of the grocer fridge if normal beef is available for the same price. I know I would not. But if its 25% cheaper I'm happy to try it
- loloquwowndueo 28d agoI would for the same price as it doesn’t involve killing a cow. That’s a plus for me!
- fooker 28d agoFor me, it would have to be mass produced and about an order of magnitude cheaper. I'd rather not be testing/tasting experimental lab stuff. And mass production bringing down the price with economies of scale is the real proof that the technology is ready.
- willsmith72 28d agothere's nothing holy about eating real animals (unless you're religious) i'm no vegan, but if identical lab-grown alternatives are available at near same cost without the hormones, antibiotics, emissions, I'll take it
- fooker 28d agoIdentical is the point here. The test of 'identical' to me is going to be mass production with economies of scale. I surely don't have the equipment to test whether it's identical, nor would I trust the marketing.
- ozyschmozy 27d agoWhat does that have to do with the price? If it's mass produced, widely available, thoroughly tested, and the same price as regular meat, why wouldn't you prefer it?
- fooker 27d agoEverything in history that was mass produced was priced more than an order of magnitude lower than the 'original'. I don't see artificial meat being the first exception to this. I'd see 'same price as meat' being an indication of something going wrong here.
- ozyschmozy 27d agoAre you implying that the meat industry as it is currently, producing nearly 400 million tonnes of meat annually, isn't mass production? Why would we assume that lab grown meat, even if it's mass produced, would be much cheaper than that well oiled machine?
- fooker 27d agoBecause it wouldn't involve handling live animals, could be significantly more automated, would not need as much real estate, would eliminate wastage of the parts we don't really consume, could be done at larger scales in a more centralized way where energy is cheaper, the stages could be pipelined with processing/packing/etc happening at the same place. I'm sure there are a dozen other reasons I didn't immediately think of.
- skeledrew 28d agoMaybe there's something about lives being taken to provide the food that appeals to certain people.
- SoftTalker 28d agoBecause if it costs the same, people will just keep buying the "real" thing.
- mcv 27d agoExpect the meat industry to lobby against being allowed to call it meat, if it didn't involve real living animals. In Europe they managed to get words like burger, nugget and sausage to only be legally applicable to meat. They'll definitely do the same for words for actual meat.
- watwut 27d agoWhich is ok and entirely valid regulation. It is ok to not want the industries to rewrite meanings of words.
- msm_ 27d agoWhat is a burger? If it looks like a burger and tastes like a burger I'm fine with calling it a burger. Nobody complains about halloumi burgers. Why is "coconut milk" OK, but "soy milk" is not? Blood sausage has nothing similar with the regular sausage. Hey, there are people who put pineapple on dough and call it "pizza"[1]. I agree that industries should not be able to intentionally mislead people, but informing customers was not the primary motivation behind those laws - protecting existing monopolies was. [1] Relax, I'm joking.
- mcv 27d agoRequiring pork, beef, etc to come from the actual animal sounds completely reasonable to me, and although I do like vegetarian products that try to taste like them, they should also be easily identifiable as not being the actual meat. But burger, sausage and nugget are just about the shape. Restricting that only to meat is silly. Veggie burgers have been around for multiple decades. There's absolutely nothing misleading about that. Also consider the many products that are something-flavoured (often fruit, but also other things) without containing the actual thing, yet clearly marketed with the thing they don't contain. Or fake chocolate. Pizza containing mostly fake cheese. Is that not far more misleading?