Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't

> Then, suddenly, the nausea hit... The problem was not the flavor, not the texture, but the knowing. The Knowing. Knowing about the fat tank, about the sticky white substance...

I feel like squeamish people are probably not the best ones to write about novel meat products...

it is sad how the lobbying of old evil industries like tobacco and animal-killing can convince the politicians and the public to outlaw and demonize their less-evil competition like vaping and lab-grown meat to make sure to hold on to the status quo.

but why write more than 7000 words to communicate a simple point (lab-grown meat was promised 1-2 decades ago but failed to arrive and won't arrive in the foreseeable future)?

I'm a bit surprised that we got disembodied intelligence before we got deathless meat. If you'd told me in the year 2000 that one of these would happen, I'd have put my money on the meat.

I had long given up on lab-grown meat. It started feeling like fusion, always around the corner, but never there (or at least not in an affordable way).

What replaced almost all ground beef (except in burgers) for me, was Jackfruit. More specifically, the combination 90% pea protein, 10% jackfruit. Granules that can be rehydrated with boiling water in 2 minutes, price competitive with discounter mince, no extra ingredients, no high carb count. It has a good texture and tastes mostly like whatever you season it with.

Would it make the meat industry more ethical if happy drugs were made available to animals? If I had to choose between a meaningful (even if I didn’t know it when living), blissful unnatural life and none at all, I’d choose the former.

It’s the negative affect and suffering (stress, pain, boredom etc) that is the bad part of eating animals.

(I think— I know others have thought more than I on this topic)

It just seems like an easier tech solution might be promising

Why eat meat at all is the big question? Impossible and Beyond satisfy the taste and craving without the nastiness.

Turns out that nature is a lot more efficient at producing meat; I don’t think this will change for a while, if ever.

Bugs for chickens, grasses/grains for cattle and omnivorous pigs are their own kind of bio-reactor…

People have fetishized animals so much that creating synthetic goop in the form of flesh somehow got billions in founding. Omnivores eat meat, even herbivores do it sometimes, get over it.

To a large extent it's probably explainable through meat industry lobbyism and shadow campaigns over the years.

I was hoping for Deathless Meat [1] Looks like this does not happen anytime soon.

[1] see https://www.daniel-suarez.com/changeagentsynopsis.html

I eat meat and like it, but I also feel kind of sorry for cows, sheep, pigs, chickens etc.

I was initially positive about lab grown meat, but then you realise that Kraft Foods or someone will get hold of it and turn it into the most unhealthy slop you could imagine.

There might not be much of a market for it. Vegetarians and vegans are used to industrially processed protein substitutes but most of them don't really want meat and its flavor. In contrast, many non-vegetarians want natural high-quality products from real animals, they don't want to eat industrially processed lab meat. A market would have been low-cost ultra-processed meat products but for that it seems that lab grown meat is too expensive.

This can still change though, if the products of animal farming were to become more expensive and with higher mandatory quality standards, as they in my opinion should be.

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