Would you eat laboratory grown meat? (Gotta be better than soylent green?)

@dlowan,

I just wanna know why you say it'd be better than soylent green. How do you know? Ever have any soylent green? Could be delish, y'know.

1 Reply

@dlowan,

dlowan wrote:

Quote:
From The Sunday Times
November 29, 2009
Scientists grow pork meat in a laboratory

“You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals,” said Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University, who is leading the Dutch government-funded research.

If domesticated "food source" animals cease being a food source, then they will rapidly become extinct. Wild versions may persist for some time, but there are currently huge herds of domesticated animals on this planet which only survive and reproduce because we help them. If we become indifferent to their survival they will quickly vanish. I'm not saying whether that's good or bad, only that it will happen.

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I would only eat such meat about fifteen years after the general public starts to do so. I don't like to be a guinea pig.

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@Merry Andrew,

Soylent green was made from humans, as I recall?

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@rosborne979,

Yes...I thought of that.

But...wouldn't a prudent world (yes, I know, we ain't good at prudence) keep a good kernel of such animals in case something went wrong with the lab meat production?

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@dlowan,

Yes. Yes it was.

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@dlowan,

dlowan wrote:

Yes...I thought of that.

But...wouldn't a prudent world (yes, I know, we ain't good at prudence) keep a good kernel of such animals in case something went wrong with the lab meat production?

One would hope so. But it would be hard to reproduce enough herd animals fast enough to feed the world if the artificial production were to fail suddenly (not sure why that would happen though).

But my point had more to do with simply observing that many species/breeds of animals that exist today do so only because they are food sources for us. Any attempt to replace them as food sources really doesn't do much good for the animal populations themselves because they will quickly vanish. Unless you argue that it's better to not exist at all rather than existing as a food source.

I guess it depends on why we would want to produce artificial meat. If it's for a new flavor, or for a redundant source of meat, then I guess we have little to lose (and may even gain as a result of redundancy and variety of sources). But if we're trying to do it to be kind to the existing herds, then it may not have the effect we expect.

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@rosborne979,

Yes....I had thought of way less of them existing.

I dunno....I suspect there'd always be a market for natural meat for those able to pay for it.

And, animal production for food is responsible for so many environmental ills it seems worth looking for alternatives.

I think I'd rather not exist than "live" in factory farm conditions.

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@rosborne979,

I dont preict that this method will overtake and pass normal meat production. Animal production is "portable" this techy way doesnt seem to be.

Feeding a large population with lb meat seems far in the future. This announcement is sort of a proof of concept.

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@dlowan,

dlowan wrote:

Soylent green was made from humans, as I recall?

Yes. And your point is . . .?

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@farmerman,

I agree. I didn't think it would happen anytime soon.

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@Merry Andrew,

Also known as "Long Pig".

Around here, cows are sometimes called "Slow Elk", just for your general information.

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Wait...what will happen to greased pig chasing? Country fairs will have to close and two people will be put out of work.

What will happen to cow tipping ? Young people will be bored with an over suppy of energy..

What will happen to sheep dogs ? Clowns who live in the city will have large dogs in their apartment. Laps will have to grow fatter...

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I'll sign in with an instinctive no.

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I'm not sure why people are so reserved about this. Pork muscle tissue is pork muscle tissue regardless of where it was grown - be it in a pig or in a dish. I imagine it could be said to be much better for you if it is lab-grown. In a lab, there is no need for highly processes animal food, no contaminated living quarters, no antibiotics. Growing meat in a lab allows us to very, very tightly control what is put in the product and could render many of the concerns over "non-organic" foods moot.

I think people just have a general distrust of anything scientific or done in "a lab" for some reason. It seems to me people associate labs with the unknown and that anything that comes from a lab can't be trusted. It's really too bad.

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

Tai Chi, why do you think genetically engineered animals are creepy? I would have thought it's the conditions in factory farms that are creepy.

As an aside, I'm surprised that our A2K Gun-toters aren't using these animal welfare threads to make their sales pitch. Hunting your own meat brings a healty dose of reality to the process of killing sentient beings for food. And, no matter how much it sucked for Bambi to see its mother killed, at least both of them had a reasonably decent life before the hunters got her. The same goes for whales of course. (Hello MsOlga!)

It was the story as written by Atwood that I thought was creepy. Vast hordes of the underclass being kept content with lab-grown chicken mcnuggets. Now that genetic engineering is more mainstream I really should re-read it. There was a great deal more to concern a reader in her dystopia that just food production.

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@tsarstepan,

tsarstepan wrote:

It could bring on a Utopian future for the global food market. There is a lot of potential here in terms of bringing this product to the third world where too many people suffer from diets that are protein deficient.

But this future shouldn't be dictated by the powerful, unreliable, greedy, and untrustworthy hands of the conglomerate food system we have today.

Would you eat laboratory grown meat? (Gotta be better than soylent green?)

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