Recently tried an Impossible burger and nuggets and thought that if nobody told me it wasn’t meat, I’d have thought the patty was made out of a weird kind of meat, rather than make a connection with the taste and texture of plants. Honestly, I might not complain if that was the only kind of “meat” I could have for the rest of my life.
Well, maybe I’d miss bacon.
I’ve yet to find the opportunity to try lab-grown meat, but I for sure would like to try it out and don’t see much wrong with it as long as it’s sustainable, reasonably priced, and doesn’t have anything you wouldn’t expect in a normal piece of meat.
Also, with imitation and lab-grown options, I’d no longer have to deal with the disgust factor of handling raw meat (esp. the juices) or biting into gristle. I’ll happily devour a hot dog, but something about an unexpected bit of cartilage gives me a lingering sense of revulsion.
if they were cheaper and with near same nutrition, what’s there to not like? thing is that they’re just not economically viable atm.
Have you tried mushroom bacon? I havent, but seems like an alternative.
I’m a vegetarian. I’m just going to continue eating beans.
I find it so strange that people think handling meat and biting grissle is revolting, but not the fact that you’re eating a dead creature that had a life. There is clearly some weird compartmentalization happening separating “meat” from living creature.
Plants are living creatures as well
If living and creature are the characteristics we have issue with, we’ll be left with mostly fruits and nuts to eat. Is there a more specific description to your objection? It feels overly broad otherwise
I think part of it is the fact that raw meat gets you sick, and people are afraid of the germs more so than the ethics of it.
the كبة نية enjoyers would like to have a word with you.
As far as I understand it’s best to eat raw meat on the same day it is cut to lessen those risks. And speaking of cuts, it may also be that not many people witness the animal being killed, skinned and cut to be turned into food, so it’s easier to consume.
Why would you write in Arabic and link to the Arabic article?
Why would you want to eat lab-grown and imitation meats? Next thing you know, you could be eating stuff with exoskeletons, which would actually be very unhealthy for people.
I’m sorry, but I’d rather my beef and chicken, thank you very much.
I can’t tell if you’re joking or not, but people do already eat plenty of animals with exoskeletons. Insects, lobsters, crabs, etc.
Certain insects I could see being viable (almost any locust), but other bugs… just why? That’s been proven unhealthy, and is actually an intolerance of mine (food intolerance, and I would get sick for eating).
Lol, I wish edible insects were more available for purchase in the states. They are delicious and chock-full of protein. Might have to farm my own.
Even without diving into ethics, lab meats avoid all the inefficiencies of a complete animal, while providing effectively the same product. Especially beef, no need to clear forests for pasture and worry about cow burps.
Existing meat substitutes are so, so much better than they were when I first gave up meat.
Lab-growing is really hard to make work, since muscle just doesn’t like to develop that way, and solves a problem that now barely exists because of the plant-based substitutes.
They’re good for cravings, and absolutely help keep cultural foods alive even when going vegan. However, these days I’m very tofu-pilled (and tempeh-pilled), and don’t really rely on imitation meat.
Im game as long as the taste is good and the price is competitive (currently it would have to be the lowest price but if my situation changes I would pay a bit extra but not twice as much. well unless my circumstances changed enough for the spleurge). Im not sure if its impossible or beyond but I have had the bk plant one and the white castle. Both were fine especially in comparison to the fast food places regular fair. For those places I could see taking the plant based on just on taste as their regular burgers sorta suck.
Imitation meats have never impressed me. They get close, but they inevitably fall just enough short of tasting and feeling like real meat that it feels to me like a wasted effort. I think I’d like them better, oddly enough, if they didn’t even pretend to be meat - if they were marketed as something else entirely.
I love the concept of lab-grown meat, and it seems as if it should be without issue, since it basically is meat in all senses, except that it’s grown in a vat instead of inside an animal’s skin. But since I haven’t had a chance to try it, I can’t say.
Can’t wait for a future, where all livestock is raised on free-range farms, and treated like pampered pets, with all their earthly needs, more than satisfied. All that would ever be required of them, is to provide the occasional tissue sample to keep the cloning stock fresh. But other than that, they would live long and happy lives, under the care of kind and gentle human attendants.
Sorry, best I can do is the sci fi dystopian option where we grow entire cows in vats, but we make it humane by just growing them without brains.
If they’re tasty, no less unhealthy, and affordable, I’ll eat ’em. Grown muscle tissue isn’t connected to a nervous system, never mind a brain. They’re no more “animal” than tofu as far as I’m concerned.
But I can think of a couple of major likely problems:
- They’ll probably still require more resources (energy, water, etc.) to produce than plants, so I’d probably limit my consumption.
- Given the history of capitalism and the meat industry, I’d be suspicious of them still harming animals behind the curtain somewhere, somehow. The industry ought to be heavily regulated to ensure they aren’t doing that, but again, history shows that under late capitalism they probably won’t be.
no less unhealthy
Yeah, given the history of capitalism, that will not happen. Look, they even made real meat unhealthy just to increase the profit (meat “yield” from animal), with lab-grown meat they would cut corners even further.
Chickens we are given today weight at least 5 times more than chicken 50 years ago (or “heritage breed”) and reach that weight in 6 weeks vs a year. To even buy a heritage breed chicken you need to have time, money and know-how, and you’re still likely to get just a 100 days old chicken.
I can’t even predict how they will enshittify lab-grown meat if it’s ever perfected.
I’m very much not up-to-date on the lab grown meat industry (so take this with a grain of salt), but I have done cell culture.
There’s a reason most scifi with food grown in vats references bacteria, yeast, and algae. Single celled organisms have to be relatively self sufficient. You can grow more yeast/bacteria by feeding plain sugar to it. There are other nutrients eventually needed, but they can be given in simple forms (e.g., oxygen, inorganic salts, etc.) that you can isolate or create through simple chemistry alone.
Vertebrate cells are part of a highly complex system where they require sugars/salts/etc, but also growth factors, antibodies, and a whole host of other proteins, fats, steroids, etc. Some of those can be created in a lab with chemistry or special bacteria/yeast, but for the most part, scientists use fetal bovine serum. It’s a byproduct of slaughtering pregnant cattle, and it contains a lot of those things that are just too hard to create otherwise.
Cells also need to be given the right niche do grow and differentiate into the target cell type, so muscle needs to exercise, arteries need pulsatile fluid flow, nerves need electrical signals, etc. Without an immune system, everything needs to be done in a sterile environment.
All of that adds up to an ecological footprint that’s extremely difficult to reduce below the natural product.
Lab grown muscles don’t need exercise, nor do they need arteries or nervous systems
Your conclusion is simply wrong. Much of the resource requirements in a natural product is the non-muscle portions of the animal, and most importantly the cost of keeping all those cells alive until slaughter
It’s incredibly easy to reduce the ecological footprint, because most of it is not necessary for lab grown meat
I love a good impossible burger over a normal burger for the big reason of how I feel after. Eating a normal burger as I am getting older means that I feel full in a gross way after, like I can feel the fat from the burger slowing me down, and I feel tired both physically and mentally and I sometimes feel borderline sick for an hour or so after. But with the impossible burgers I can just feel full in a healthy way. I love it. I will admit to also getting it with bacon though for that extra flavor.
I an pretty anti factory farm and love the idea of cutting out at least burgers from their industry. I also enjoy their sausages. Highly recommend them if you have not tried them. I try to cut out bulk meat eating for the environment and keep it to occasional, smaller portions, and even then it is normally chicken. Impossible meat helps scratch that itch if I want some meat but don’t want to commit to blowing my personal weekly allotment of red meat.
I’m all for it.
Gimme that vat grown cloned shit. I don’t care. Meat is meat. If my guts recognize it as protein then that’s all that matters.
If I had my druthers I’d get rid of industrial meat farming entirely. It is a major contributor to climate change. Plus all the death involved.
And while I was at it I’d end industrial farming all together. We could convert a state or 2 worth of farmland into hydroponic and feed the world. Instead we engineer scarcity and guarantee starvation for profit. It’s fuckin disgusting.
I haven’t tried any, but it seems like an inevitable endpoint. I’ve long held a rule that I can’t meet a cow in person because they look so cute on the internet and if I met one, I fear I’d have no choice but to go vegan.
I feel like the ethics of meat consumption is inarguably bad, but it’s a fundamental part of my diet and meat is some of my favorite stuff to eat. If I could eat meat like stuff that’s indistinguishable from the real stuff, that would be ideal.
If it makes you feel better, cows themselves are opportunistic carnivores.
I’ve had a few miracle burgers. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. It just kind of tasted like a mediocre fast food hamburger. I don’t eat burgers that often anymore so when I do have one I want it to be really good so I probably won’t get another one unless there’s some great innovation in plant based meat in the future.
I suppose it accomplishes its goal in that it does taste like a hamburger, just not a particularly great one
I kinda feel like the name is part of the problem there. If someone says they’re serving me something called a “miracle” burger the expectation created is that it will taste exceptionally good, or at least better than average
Yeah, this is one of those areas that capitalism really screws us over.
The natural and most obvious use for these lab-grown and imitation meats are for filler meats. Think a ground beef replacement. Something that would be added to a casserole, a burrito, or any other dish where meat is present, but not the primary focus of a dish.
But it costs money to develop lab-grown meats. And to pay that investment back, for-profit companies have to target the luxury market first. It’s like how Tesla started with building an expensive sports car. Then they used the profits from that to build a cheaper next generation car, and so on. That’s what the lab grown meat companies have had to do. The ideal market for products like these would be things like chicken nuggets or the meat inside hot pockets. But those are also the cheapest form of meat sold, and they need to target the upper end of the market to have any hope of profitability.
