As a thinking experiment, let us consider that on the 1st of January of 2025 it is announced that an advance making possible growing any kind of animal tissue in laboratory conditions as been achieved and that it is possible to scale it in order to achieve industrial grade production level.

There is no limit on which animal tissues can be grown, so, any species is achieveable, only being needed a small cell sample from an animal to start production, and the cultivated tissues are safe for consumption.

There won’t be any perceiveable price change to the end consummer, as the growing is a complex and labour intensive process, requiring specialized equipments and personnel.

Would you change to this new diet option?

  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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    44 minutes ago

    Reminder that the meat you buy at the grocery store is as also as human modified as it gets and NOTHING like the wild game that our ancestors ate or even the farm animals from 100 years ago. The animal itself is probably GMO, spends its entire life in a steel cage standing in its own shit and piss and is given specialized processed feed to optimize how much meat it produces (or just has a tube down its throat so we don’t have to worry about it eating fast enough). Not to mention tons of antibiotics that are given to the animal just to ensure it survives the hell we put them through which definitely makes it into the meat and therefore into you as well. And they’re slaughtered and butchered by underpaid overworked factory workers who have to balance fulfilling brutal quotas with carefully extracting the meat and not getting it contaminated with shit from the animal’s guts or the myriad other disgusting things around the meat that you wouldn’t want to eat (you can guess how well that usually goes).

    Animal cells (without the animal itself and also no central nervous system to experience suffering) growing in a clean, well controlled lab in tanks of sterile cell media doesn’t sound so bad in comparison.

    Additional reminder that nearly all of the worst infectious diseases in history have been caused partially or completely by animal agriculture: the plague, spanish flu, smallpox, whooping cough, swine flu, bird flu, covid, etc. So if you’re worried about the long term health implications of lab grown meat, you should be ten times more worried about long term the health implications of regular meat, to the point where you should be worried even if you don’t eat meat.

  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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    4 hours ago

    If it was healthy, affordable, and tasty, then yes.

    If it isn’t all three, then Veganism can continue to go fuck itself.

    • OmegaLemmy@discuss.online
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      42 minutes ago

      Cutting down on eating meat is as good as going vegan

      Villianising anyone and everyone who even so much as touches a chicken breast is a damn blunder and totally puts me off against the community

      Then again, most vegans that are decent wouldn’t be pushy and tell people they’re vegan

  • Noxy@pawb.social
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    3 hours ago

    Impossible Burgers already exist and are fucking delicious.

    But, sure, if I can have pastrami or corned beef again without requiring a cow experience a life full of torment, emit a cow’s lifetime of methane, or have any of that happen where a forest should instead have been left untouched, I’d try it!

  • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
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    4 hours ago

    I’ve been vegan for almost 25 years, and vegetarian for couple years before that… and I’d be happy it existed, but I wouldn’t eat it. I don’t miss meat, and the idea of eating any of it just grosses me out.

  • juliebean@lemm.ee
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    13 hours ago

    hell yeah. soon as its not way more expensive than normal meat, i’m down. your proposed technology also sounds like it should mean lab grown replacement organs with zero chance of rejection, which would be amazing.

  • Shimitar@feddit.it
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    15 hours ago

    Yes, absolutely. No risk of virus or bacteria, or worse…

    Grown to the size you want…

    Of the shape and type you want…

    No fat (maybe?)…

    What’s not to like.

    • doingthestuff@lemy.lol
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      15 hours ago

      I’d say price is definitely a factor. I already pass over good cuts of meat for that reason. Also taste/texture/overall experience. If it checs those boxes, and it has been on the market long enough to be confident I won’t get instant cancer, then 100%! A little marbled fat makes it better though.

      • Shimitar@feddit.it
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        2 hours ago

        Yeah, definitely some fat is needed…

        But I can see hordes of healthy people looking for fatless meat, as they already do I the supermarkets.

  • communism@lemmy.ml
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    15 hours ago

    You haven’t mentioned if there are any ethical concerns with this new meat; e.g. environmental cost of the production process, what kind of human labour is required to create it, who is providing that labour and under what conditions are they working.

    Provided I had no ethical concerns with it, sure, but a lot of modern innovations tend to have these issues and I assume lab-grown meat would have these issues too.

    Edit: Also, I’m opposed to animal captivity, so if there’s an ongoing need to collect samples from captive livestock then no, I wouldn’t. If it’s a “collect it once then it keeps reproducing from the lab samples forever” type of thing then sure.

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
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    24 hours ago

    The only thing I’d wait for is for the process to be refined enough to be more eco friendly than just eating real meat. I’d do it, but until there’s proof of it being more sustainable and won’t tank my blood thin/thickness levels (blood thinners sometimes suck), I would be down to try it at the very least.

    Though I would receive resistance in changing my diet until either my dad changes his eating habits or I move out on my own because my dad absolutely refuses things like plant based meats, so I know he’d most likely resist lab grown meat as well. It’s also hard for my mom and I to switch to a healthier dinner diet since both my dad and older brother wouldn’t dare change their diets to something like a Mediterranean or some other healthier because they can be picky eaters (especially my older brother).

  • Birdie@thelemmy.club
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    1 day ago

    I’ll move to it in a second. Protein with no need to slaughter animals would be so fantastic for the animals, the earth, and people.

  • jet@hackertalks.com
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    1 day ago

    I would be wildly optimistic, but very cautious.

    I’d want to see multi-year randomized control trials comparing the bioavailability of not only protein, but also vitamins and minerals from the synthetic meat and liver, to natural meat and liver.

    Assuming the RCTs show no issues, then I would happily move over.

    Modern meat products are on a spectrum as well, it’s not just having the meat, it’s what the meat ate before it became me that’s important. Grass-fed, versus grain fed for beef. Insect, and protein for chickens, grain fed for chickens etc. antibiotics, hormones being supplemented into the feed to improve yields.

    One massive problem the industry globally suffers from is overpromising. Just like multivitamins, which are very poorly bioavailable, and mostly peed out, they promise a lot but don’t deliver much.

    Factors I would look for:

    • can somebody sustain life eating only the synthetic meat for multiple years?
    • oxidative stress, and oxidation in the synthetic food?
    • The temptation to engineer sugar, and carbohydrates, directly into the meat to increase sales yields.

    Green sustainability:

    • can the synthetic meat be produced globally?
    • Will poor farmers in the middle of nowhere be improved or hurt by this? Will they have access to the synthetic meat?
    • in the event global logistics fail, like an a war, will moving over to synthetic meat severely hurt critical infrastructure and ability to feed populations?