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How In-Vitro Meat will Change Our Lives
- dan_the_welder 17y agoI encourage you to read "The Merchants War" by Fredrick Pohl
- jacquesm 17y agoWhich is a sequel to 'the space merchants'. And I really wonder why that got you modded down, it's perfectly on-topic.
- StrawberryFrog 17y agoIt was modded down, probably because if you haven't read this book (which I haven't), the suggestion is unsupported and means little - why should I read it?
- jacquesm 17y agoThe space merchants and the merchants war deal with a society that has 'overshot' in commerce, basically there are only two brands left. And one of the central themes is 'chicken little', a vat grown pile of blubbering cancerous chicken meat that gets 'sliced' off at the edges.
- zitterbewegung 17y agoI think this article doesn't actually address the obvious question of the stigma of actually eating in-vitro meat.
- wisty 17y agoIt does. It suggests that Europe will take it up before USA, for cultural reasons. It might also be popular in the developing world. Our food is already processed within an inch of it's life (then a good three yards past it). Tour Spam will be grown in a vat, rather than fed hormones and ground in a factory. Big deal. You think PETA is unethical? Just wait for the smear campaigns that will crop up when MegaCorp can actually make some money off scaring people out of living meat.
- patio11 17y agoIt suggests that Europe will take it up before USA, for cultural reasons. This mystifies me. All you have to say is "genetically modified" and Europe flips its proverbial wig. Aren't savvy English cattle farmers going to say "Oh-my-Gaia this is Frankenfood! It is unnatural! It is cloned! It probably has DNA in it! Phone your representative, this should be banned!" (The reference to savvy farmers is an oblique reference to the fact that the difference between GMO soybeans/corn/etc and non-GMO soybeans/corn/etc is that a preference or requirement for non-GMO product shuts American-grown stuff out of the market. What a handy coincidence.)
- Gmo 17y agoIt suggests that Europe will take it up before USA, for cultural reasons. I'm european, and I seriously doubt that. I'd say that the US would pick it up before Europe. In Europe, we are much more wary about "unnatural" way of growing things, you just have to see with GMO ...
- JCThoughtscream 17y agoWhat stigma? When it's been gussied up with sauce and a fancy abstract plate, the average diner won't even taste the difference - or notice the fine text on the bottom of the menu, next to the Ethical Meats stamp.
- bwhite 17y agoPostulate two sets of people. Set A consists of those who regularly eat meat, deeply care about the origin of that meat, but care very little about the environmental impact of raising meat and are dismissive of any cruelty or health concerns. Set B consists of folks who are vegetarian or who avoid red meat because of health, environmental, and/or cruelty considerations. I suspect almost all of set B would eat vat meat and that set B is larger than set A.
- StrawberryFrog 17y agoI'm in Set B, and would hesitate before eating Vat-meat. I didn't become a vegetarian in order to pretend to eat meat. And if it's on your fork, how do you tell if it's vat meat or not?
- cmars232 17y agoEspecially the in-vitro human meat. It'll probably cause mad-human disease or zombies.
- wvenable 17y agoDo you know what's in the average hot dog? Hamburger? Package of frozen chicken strips? The fact is that while people do eat a lot of steak, chicken wings, and bacon a lot of meat is merely an ingredient.
- jacquesm 17y agoI hope that food labeling will take care of that, and that any synthetics will be required to carry clear labeling.
- s3graham 17y agoAssuming I believe in this taking over the world, can anyone point to some startups or larger public companies I should be following?
- nikils 17y agoThis means now vegans can eat meat ?
- jamesbritt 17y agoThat would depend on why one was a vegan. Some do it for health, some for various philosophical reasons. For myself (vegetarian for philosophical reasons), if no plausibly sentient being was harmed to create this stuff, I'd likely have no ethical reasons against eating it.
- dejb 17y ago> Some do it for health, some for various philosophical reasons. I'd also add 'Yuck Factor' to that list. I'm not sure how IVM would effect this.
- jamesbritt 17y agoSome current fake meat has a notable Yuck Factor. :)
- berntb 17y agoVegans could even eat long pig... Norwegians and Japanese could eat whale. :-) Anyone else thinking of "Transmetropolitan"?
- colonelxc 17y agoApparently it's all rainbows and sunshine from here on out. I really don't see the meat industry dying out for a long time, and I have some doubts about how easy it will be to be able to ship "in vitro kits" to food deprived nations. Maybe someday, but not for decades is my guess. I'm curious as to how much the materials that the cells grow in will cost, and how hard that will be to make. One of the commenters put it well: "In Vitro meat will do to pasture grown meat what margarine did to butter. Despite nearly 50 years of food science, still the most economical way of getting the wonderfully rich flavor of butter is to milk it out of cows. In vitro meat will be fine for industralized meat products that just want the approximate taste & texture of meat but anybody wanting a fine steak is still going to get it from good old fashioned cows."
- wvenable 17y agoI think that commenter has it right: that "traditionally grown" meat will always have a place in society. However, right now, a significant amount of meat is ground up into hamburgers and sold in McDonalds; that seems like a waste to me. Maybe taking that mass market out we can get back to sustainable farming.
- Dove 17y agoCutting out ground beef consumption entirely wouldn't reduce the number of cows produced. A given cow produces so many T-bone steaks, so many barbecue ribs, and some quantity of ground and stew meat from tougher cuts. The demand is driven by the good, expensive meat; ground beef is cheap because it's the byproduct. If it wasn't cheap, we wouldn't want as much as was produced.
- theblackbox 17y agoIt's the "In-vitro kits" that really get me thinking. I wonder if they will be as magnanimous as the author suspects or if they will simply be another tool of third world oppression. Like with how GMO crops sometimes have a built in dependency on a nutrition product sold by the same company, or how they can be made infirtile so the farmer cannot reseed the same crop. It all seems like another rift in the Socio-technological Divide, to me! On a side note, what would in-vitro mean for Halal/Kosher meat? Anyone care to speculate?
- moonpolysoft 17y agoThis article reads like it was written by someone with an axe to grind against traditional meat.
- nvasilak 17y agoThis scares me to death. There is no way that humanity has figured out all the complexity that billions of years of evolution has created when it comes to animals eating each other. Corporations are now coming up with new types of 'food' that they can sell for much more profit than the things our species have been surviving on for thousands of years. Take margarine for example - no cows to raise and milk, therefore a much bigger profit margin than butter. They also tell us it's much healthier too. But then studies like this come along http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/05/us/study-links-heart-disease-to-margarine.html http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/05/us/study-links-heart-disea... , and the whole french paradox, which indicate the opposite may be true. "When In-Vitro Meat (IVM) is cheaper than meat-on-the-hoof-or-claw, no one will buy the undercut opponent." I seriously doubt it. Even though a grass fed, dry aged steak is quite expensive, many people splurge because they are delicious. Has the author heard of the organic movement growing 20% a year over the past decade? People buying more expensive food because it's healthier and tastes better, that defies logic. The article claims that this IVM is also healthier for the planet, but it neglects to mention where all the raw ingredients for the IVM will come from. Mother nature already created the perfect way to stay healthy - plants get energy from the sun to grow, animals eat plants, and excrete fertilizer to grow new plants. This happened for millions of years before humans came along. Unfortunately, our farms are no longer run using this perfect natural solution (another issue entirely), but I don't see how IVM would solve this. My favorite quote from the article: "We won't even choke to death because IVM contains no malicious bones or gristle." It's amazing our species has survived so long with so many malicious bones and evil gristle after us. Malicious bones - I cant stop picturing zombies, haha.
- SwellJoe 17y agoThis sounds like one of those "In The Year 2000" articles from Popular Science in the '50s. It is hyperbolic beyond credulity, probably missing some extremely important aspects of the central tenet of the story, and too light on cited facts to take seriously. I do think there will be major changes in the way meat for the majority of meat eaters is produced in the future, but it won't be in three years, or even ten. The changes have to happen because meat production is simply too resource intensive for an ever-growing population to keep on eating more and more of the stuff without ever increasing environmental impact. But, they will come extremely slowly, because peoples habits change extremely slowly. People will choose "real" meat for a long time after cheaper in-vitro meats are available. If I ate meat, I would be somewhat suspicious of the new stuff, just as I'm suspicious of most modern, and not so modern, lab-created food additives. As with most artificial sweeteners, HFCS, hydrogenated fats, etc., I'm suspicious of them as beacons for general poor quality when I see them on a label. I know if the manufacturer chose the cheapest options for the sweeteners and fats, they probably chose the cheapest garbage for the rest of the ingredients, too. Much like soy in burgers indicated to people in the '70s and '80s that it was a poor quality, cheap, food, in-vitro meats will probably go through a phase of being thought second rate. And, of course, a few years on, we now know that soy in some forms actually can be detrimental to health, particularly in men. It will take a pretty brilliant marketing coup to overcome that kind of resistance. Splenda and Nutri-Sweet both had very effective marketing that seems to have countered any feelings of badness about them. Though what Nutri-Sweet replaced (Saccharine) had such a bad reputation at the time that anything probably would have been a shoe-in. It's not coincidence that Splenda began to hit big just as questions about the safety of Nutri-Sweet/Aspartame started to get mainstream attention. I'm not sure people will be convinced about the unhealthiness of meat, since artificial meats aren't exactly mainstream today, despite many of them being quite tasty (certainly tastier than diet sodas) and reasonably healthful. This makes me think the desire for healthier substitutes for meat isn't very high, and the awareness of most folks of the environmental impact is even lower.
- HeyLaughingBoy 17y agoNo one will buy ranch raised meat when In-Vitro meat is so cheap? This guy has no business sense. I raise chickens as a hobby. I don't even try to market or sell my product, yet I have people asking me if they can buy eggs (no, I just give them away if they ask) because they're willing to pay more for fresh eggs from chickens living in natural surroundings than the "battery farmed" ones in supermarkets. Premium products will always command premium prices.