Beef without Cows

Finally, my chance to legally eat a human heart!

Looks like large slices of pepperoni.

If every package of naturally grown meat by law should have the text, 'Beware, animals have been killed for this product,' I can imagine a gradual cultural shift," Post said. "Of course, we still have a long way to go to make a product that is even remotely competitive with current products.

Uh...I don't know about you, but this is horrifying. What sort of moron doesn't realize animals are killed for meat? And who cares?

The very idea of growing "fake" meat is not only unecessary, but a waste of scientific research. I have a few questions for whomever decides it would be a good idea to no longer slaughter animals for consumtion.

1) Once synthetic meat is able to be mass produced, I'm assuming that it would become illegal to slaughter an animal for consumption. Due to the fact that they already can't afford to make a comparable meat substitute, I'm assuming it's an expensive process. So does this mean the price of meat will skyrocket? What happens when, for some reason, scientists are unable to produce it?

2) Population control? I'm from Oregon, and every year, oregonians are allowed a hunting season. When activists tried to prohibit hunting, the deer population rose out of control. Hundreds of deer died simply because the terrain could support the numbers. Deer were starving because there wasn't enough food to go around. Roadkill increased exponentially. What's going to happen with random cattle and chickens and sheep and whatever else being allowed to roam around?

3) Job market? Think about how many jobs will cease to exist? no more slaughterhouses, meat packing plants, butcher shops, farmers...not to mention all the secondary jobs that provide building materials, maintenance, feed, machinery, farm equipment...

4) Taste? There isn't a scientist alive that can make bacon as well as a pig. Say good bye to such delicacies as kobe beef, or bear that's eaten nothing but fish and berries all it's life. What about fish? What about specialty meats like alligator or rattlesnake?

5) Speaking of snakes, what are we supposed to feed our pets? Are they going to make feeder goldfish or mice or rabbits?

People eating animals, and other animals eating animals is natural. Basic principles of the food chain. People are meant to eat meat. If they werent, vegetarians and vegans wouldnt have to take supplements just to keep themselves from looking like luekemia patients.

Think vegans will have a problem eating this?

If they're going to manufacture fake meat it should be bison meat. Not only is it less fatty than beef, but bison don't get cancer. The plains Indians who lived off bison meat also didn't get cancer. Bison burgers are also delicious.

But I'd rather kill the animals for my meat. If they could make synthetic lettuce I wouldn't eat it, so why would I eat synthetic beef?

This. I would not want to eat any sort of meat that was artificially produced.

Vegans can't eat animal biproducts. Techically, this qualifies. And of course, knowing how pretentious vegans can be, they'll come up with some excuse as to how "straight edge" not eating fake meat is...

...I don't really know where to start. I think the main thing is to point out that the whole 'animal-rights' arguments isn't the be all and end all of vegetarianism/the search for meat substitutes. Meat is an extremely inefficient way of gaining protein and nutrients, it takes a lot of energy and resources to raise animals. People can live perfectly healthy lives on a vegetarian diet, but the fact is people aren't willing to give up meat. So scientists are looking to find meat substitutes that a more resource-efficient sources of nutrients (and hence cheaper) and taste close enough to the real thing to still be appealing. They're not looking to completely ban the killing of animals, they're looking for a way to provide food for an ever-growing population with the limited resources we have available.

How is it more cost efficient? They can't afford to do it now. And anybody can raise a cow. I've never tried to make fake meat, nor do I have the knowledge to do so. Lets say, oh, 10 people out a thousand know how to produce this stuff. How many people out of a thousand can raise a chicken, catch a fish, keep a cow or pig?

And yes, pork is very unhealthy. I fucking love it, but even I will admit it's a shitty source of nutrition. But chicken? Venison? Fish?

And America is collectively more overweight than anyone else in the world. I don't think we're suffering from a lack of food here. Take that fake shit to Africa. Oh wait...they can't afford it.

Um, yeah, it isn't cost/energy efficient yet. That's why people are working on it! The aim is develop an efficient, reproducable and largely automated way of growing a convincing meat substitute.

Yuck. There is no substitute for a bloody strip steak.

Yeah...again...not yet. That's why people are working on it. Steaks are great and all, the problem is that as the population continues to increase and we run out of oil and land the price of meat is going to rise until eventually the vast majority people won't be able to afford it as their primary source of proteins, and then they'll two choices- meat substitutes (if we can develop them in time) or beans.

I think the problem is that too many people try to fuck with nature. Now, it can be debated, although to what extent I'm not sure, whether people are truly meant to be largely carnivorous or mostly herbivorous. Either way, it's natural. We got to this point by evolving, and we can choose which to be. But now we want to artificially create meat? We try to find cures for every disease under the sun. How many people do you want in the world? People have to die sooner or later. And we have something called the food chain for a reason. There is a balance in nature, and it appears to me that humans are more and more trying to usurp it in their self-serving ways.

These are the benefits touted:

* Avoiding animal suffering by reducing the farming and killing of livestock.
* Dramatically cutting down on food-borne ailments such as mad cow disease and salmonella or germs such as swine flu, by monitoring the growth of meat in labs.
* Livestock currently take up 70 percent of all agricultural land, corresponding to 30 percent of the world's land surface, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Labs would presumably require much less space.
* Livestock generate 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than all of the vehicles on Earth, the FAO added. Since the animals themselves are mostly responsible for these gases, reducing livestock numbers could help alleviate global warming.

The only two that I would consider being worthy of any real observence is the third, and I'm unsure what to do about that, and the fourth. The fourth, however, annoys me, because of course, rather than make the effort to cut down on green house gases from things that we use, we have to say "oh, well livestock makes more than we do, so we should just get rid of that instead."

And seriously, I don't think there would be a shift if there was a warning on the meat that said an animal had been killed to produce it. If people don't know where meat comes from, they're fucking retarded.

Given the science is sound, there is no reason that I wouldn't eat lab meat. There is also no reason lab meat couldn't be made to be as delicious are 'real meat'.

The whole argument that it wouldn't be 'natural' is laughable at best. None of the foods we eat are in their 'natural' form anymore, including vegetables. They have all been modified to grow faster, larger, last longer, transport easier, etc. If it weren't for our ability to modify foods, we wouldn't have anywhere near the food supply we currently have, and we still have a large number of people who go hungry.

As for this statement:

...I don't really know where to start. I think the main thing is to point out that the whole 'animal-rights' arguments isn't the be all and end all of vegetarianism/the search for meat substitutes. Meat is an extremely inefficient way of gaining protein and nutrients, it takes a lot of energy and resources to raise animals. People can live perfectly healthy lives on a vegetarian diet, but the fact is people aren't willing to give up meat.

"Efficiency" has nothing to do with vegetarian/vegan diets. I'm not saying eating meat is the most efficient way to get protein, but vegetarian diets are also highly inefficient. You have to consume a lot of food to get the required amount of certain vitamins. If you are living a "Perfectly healthy" vegan lifestyle, you're aware of this. Again, I'm not debating the decision to not eat animal products.

Hadn't considered that.

Waste of time I say.
They should be focusing their efforts on bringing back dinosaurs. We need a Jurassic Park. I mean seriously, who wouldn't want to go see dinosaurs on some island park minus all the death and destruction at the end?
That or they sould try and produce dinosaur meat, then we could know what they tasted like!

ross, we have people working on that too.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/03/05/dinosaur-chicken.html

I cant tell you how awesome that makes me feel. High fives all around!

Hell, I'll eat anything meat related, I don't care if it's cow, pig, dog, cat or petri dish variety.

I'm a carnivore, for crying out loud.

I've seen how this ends. It turns out they never could really make it in a lab and were using human meat the entire time, passing it off as lab meat!

Why don't we just decimate the human population? Then we have enough space for food production without using pesticide, enough water, and less annoying fuckers.
Bring back the eugenic policy.

Double posting is not the way of life.

We should just start eating more goose. Each pair of geese produces 8-12 other geese every year.

I was talking specifically about vegetarian diets, rather than vegan diets. There was a Dutch paper in a climate journal that came out earlier this year that was comparing the land uses and environmental impact of a standard, meat-heavy diet against four variants: a no ruminant meat diet (so only allowed to eat pork and chicken meat), a vegetarian diet, a vegan diet and a 'healthy diet' with reduced meat intake. They found that the vegan diet, which is based on gaining nutrients from plant products instead of from animal products did require more farm land but the rest significantly reduced environmental impact. And these were all healthy, balanced diets as well.

I care. I love burgers, but if there's a way to produce meat that's just as safe a eating a cow, I'd love to not have to kill an animal just to fill my stomach. I call that evolution.

Which is why the marketplace for scientific research ought be freed up, so you can support whatever sorts of research you would like to see done, and I can support mine, and we can agree to disagree. When the gov't is holding the reins, one of us is forced to support the other without consent.

And I don't see how this is a waste considering where its coming from. The same research that's working on cloning organs without humans is what's going into this (which I imagine few people would call 'wasteful', the medical potential in cloning organs is bueno). It seems wasteful not to take advantage of that R&D and apply it to food.

Why would killing animals become unlawful? I wouldn't support that, who honestly would who doesn't now? Maybe once this technology is perfected, and synthetic meat becomes commonplace, the slaughter of animals will naturally wither away, not because people ban it, but because people aren't paying for it. There's always gonna be a market for real animal meat, banning anything just sends that market underground.

Nobody's proposing ending meat consumption tomorrow.

Protectionism! That's like saying computers created an unfair advantage for those skilled in programing, and those who were employed in paper companies lost their jobs when people consumed x-amount less paper when everything started going digital. Historically, protectionism has only slowed human progress. Either you're forcing the scientists out of work of the slaughterhouse guy, either way, you're forcing someone out of work. I say let the market decide, people will pay for the service they want. People want both right now, so R&D is funded as is Farmer Bill's steady supply of dead cows.

Who said this technology could never work for alligator? And just because something may not taste as good no doesn't mean it never will. Remember that scene in 2001 when they depart Clavius and head towards the monolith on the moon? On the way there, they eat space-food sandwich things and comment, "these taste better all the time".

Nobody suggested outlawing nature.

Eating a proper vegetarian diet is not bad for you, neither is a proper diet with meat in it. Most people just don't eat this healthy. Yes, its natural that animals kill each other for food, but that doesn't make interspecies slaughter a good thing. Nobody should be happy about the fact that an animal was off'd so their tastiness quotent can be met. I'm not saying killing animals is 'wrong', I love eating them more than most people, but its not 'right', either.

Goose is awesome! It's like duck without the greesiness and tastes better. Expensive though...way cheaper if you shoot them yourself.

Man, Goose sounds great. I might see if I can get some.

So you're saying you don't like cancer?

Ah, Giggan...I've missed you! P.S. Your last statement kinda negated your whole arguement...