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Lab Grown Meat now on sale in the USA

From the article, looks like the Americans will have to wait a bit longer:

"On Wednesday, the USDA gave Upside Foods and Good Meat the green light to start producing and selling their lab-grown, or cultivated, chicken products in the United States.
Don’t run to the supermarket just yet, though. It’s going to be a while before you can buy cell-based meat in stores, though you should be able to get a taste at a restaurant sooner."
 
Oldvatr said:
For those of us using meat products in our diet, be it Keto or LCHF, the following news item may be of interest to you.
Click to expand...
I am an animal lover and don't like to eat furry friends but I do with great guilt every time. I am not convinced lab grown would be as good as "proper meat" only time will tell I guess. I would give it a go and if I liked it I would be guilt free then. The picture really doesn't look too appetising though!
 
Having worked in the meat trade, many years ago, as a Butcher in shops, then meat packing plant, and as an unlicensed slaughterman. I don't agree with laboratory meat at all, yet more synthetic food. Before you know it we'll be being offered Soylent Green.
 
Here is another article from a possible manufacturer in the UK

Growing Beef — Mosa Meat

mosameat.com


The technique breeds muscle tissue. but is devoid of the normal trace elements that real meat provides. So, all the vitamins need to be stirred into the mix at the right time, same with the basic elements and minerals(calcium, selenium phosphates, sulphur)

Then there is the need for added fat. This will not be Omega-3 fats, and in most cases will be seed oils. They will also need to add choline, and L-carnitine for a start.

B12 will be a challenge as will Haeme iron, but then Impossible Burger have solved that problem.

All these additives need to be super sterile, or the bioreactor will crash and stop working. The bioreactors and cryogenic facility will also need to be thoroughly steralised.

It has been shown that when the production of glucose from cornstarch is factored in, the proposed bioreactor solution will increase CO2 emissions by between 4 and 100 times the amount emitted by a cow producing the same weight of meat naturally. It will cut down on methane emissions but take more water. The energy requirement will only be economical when we are running off 100% renewable and the space required to generate the many added ingredients and steralising/processing units will also require similar acreage as a standard farm. So the environmental benfits are quite small compared to sustainable farming.


Not also the need for an oxygen rich and temperature controlled environment which is not cheap.
 
Hmm ... What are they feeding these lab-grown cells on? If we knew, perhaps we'd regard this 'cultivated' meat as ultra processed food.

Why can't people simply eat less meat?
Like vaping, this is just feeding an addiction instead of weaning people off it.

If it leads to fewer animals and birds being slaughtered and reduces greenhouse gas emissions, I suppose that has to be a good thing.
 
Every carbohydrate that grows regardless of whether animal or vegetable or weed, decays and turns into either CO2 (aerobic decay) or methane (anerobic decay). animals and humans are consumers and processors, but nature is providing the GHG without our help. Fossil Fuels are just carbs in suspension (hydrocarbons) and by using them we release stored gases. Those fuels were originally plants. So it is not animals that are the main problem, it is plants.
 
The animals will be slaughtered anyway, if a herd of 80 dairy cows, each has 1 calf a year. Necessary to ensure milk production. all but perhaps 1 male calf will be put down immediately, Maybe 4 or 5 females will be kept to replace elderly stock which will itself be put down. With pigs they'll simply not see a boar at all, and will eventually go extinct. Sheep all but 1 or 2 male lambs will be got rid of, a few females kept for stock replacement. But for the wool they would go the same way as the pigs. All female chicks, will be kept for egg production, the males disposed of.
Animals do not suffer as much as many would like you to think, but without meat for food, there will be virtually no animals, as they're not needed. Organic veggies will disappear as only synthetic fertilizers will be available. The vast majority of the animals you see in the countryside, would not be there but for the meat industry.
 
Indeed apart from the occsional zoo, then these animals will quickly become extinct simply based on the fact that not many people keep cows or sheep purely as pets. Look at the humnble Horse and apart from horse racing, and disabled riding schools, only the rich keep horses nowadays. Get rid of the cows and sheep and pigs, and the horse and pony will also go into oblivion as they are next in the food chain. The French still eat horsemeat, I believe. Also Bye Bye LLama, Alpaca and Ostrich you too will become targets.
 
I wouldn't disagree.
There would be virtually no livestock, but the wildlife currently being squeezed out of ever-more fragmented habitats would have a home.

Organic vegetable farming and gardening depends on composting rather than animal dung.

That said, this is all somewhat hypothetical. It's hard to persuade some folk to eat less meat, never mind give up meat and poultry altogether and switch to lab-grown products.
 
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My dream is to have a farm and rescue some of these animals it cannot come quick enough I can tell you
 
The wildlife would not thrive, as if everybody ate only plant based food, every last scrap of land would be required, and still would not be enough to provide sufficient food. So the wildlife habitat would need ploughing up.
 
There is an interesting project in the Middle East that uses solar power to de-salinate sea water to produce hydrogen and oxygen and brackish water that is pumped into settling lagoons in the desert.
The hydrogen is converted into methane that can be shipped in existing tankers, and the oxygen is bottled. The brackish water is then planted with seaweed that filters the water and makes it palatable, and the lagoons also support fish farms to produce protein from the kelp and also help clean up the water. It is built on reclaimed desert land that could not be used for other purposes. I undersatand the Cerebos salt factory in South Africa is also being converted to do the same thing there.

Here in the UK we could do similar with tidal barriers but that seems to be impossible to do and there is a lack of political will.
 
I’ll keep eating meat until the cows come home! If fact my diet is almost carnivore now. I’ve just got to try and cut down on cheese.
 
A move to even more ultra processed food. And we know how well that movement has gone for us.

I understand some folks feeling strongly that farming and eating other animals is disturbing and wrong, and choose not to. But hard/impossible to convince a whole species - currently 8 billion, not to eat an ancestral/species appropriate diet, almost straight from the field. Weird for me in my country to consider eating ultra processed lab grown meat, as this country was enormously deforested in order to house the sheep and cows that now grace this land - enormously. If this movement happened here, I know I would be investing in a very large freezer for the duration!

Yes, re some animal lovers not thinking it through about what will happen to the current populations of farmed animals if we stop farming them. They will not be roaming free.

And don't get me started on the b.s. that fruit and vegetables is the only truly nutritious food for us, and the marketing success story that is 5 a day. (I've been watching a lot of 'Eat well for less' - the UK version as well as the NZ one... oh boy!)
 
Anyone remember TVP (Textured Vegetable Protein)? It used to grace TV dinners, and those delightful (?) Vesta 'add water' meals. It was basically Soya chunks, plumped up and fluffed out bit, but Yeuk! to eat. i think they found it was actually hamful to humans. But I saw a pack of Vesta something in the supermarket, so it must still be produced and marketed. I also remember Bernard Mathews reconstituted meat offal products (nuggets, dippers etc) Are they still around? Now those really were Processed food (?)s. The scrapings from the corpse is very close to Soylent Green.

I don;t have a problem at the moment with all these new fangled monstrosities, as I have choice still. But I hope that when they take over the Asylum,they improve the product so it provides reasonable nutrition. It has to do more than look like, taste like, and rot like the real thing IMO
 
I don't have a problem with eating meat that has had a good life and death. I can if necessary hunt, kill and process my own meat from wild sources, have seen what happens in slaughterhouses, and know a lot of farmers. I also for decades had a part-time job on 2 farms (not together!) as well as my full-time work. Nor do I have a problem with people who prefer not to eat meat (or other animal products) at all. We are supremely fortunate to live in an environment where we can choose.

What is perhaps less known is the importance of animal grazing, dung (how exactly would we fertilise soil without it? Yep, chemicals) and footfall in supporting invertebrate life without which we all perish. In UK, much grazing takes place on land that couldn't support crops., and some may not be aware how grazing is used on land that does grow crops in order to stop them growing too fast too soon, or at the other end of the spectrum, cleaning the land prior to sowing.

Which is a long way of saying that meat doesn't have to be synthetic to be moral. And no morals survive famine.
 
This has been coming for a while, I suppose I'm not surprised that the US is close to selling this faux-meat to people. I certainly won't be lining up to go a restaurant that serves if I ever happen to the visit the States again. I like the clarity shown by @Oldvatr about the potential environmental impacts of the faux-meat industry. I'm sure that the marketers will try to promote this processed product as being an environmental saviour however it looks like that will be difficult if the truth is also being spoken. It certainly won't be a health benefit, at least in Europe however in the States so much of the meat on sale in supermarkets has come from industrial farms or feedlots so it's already not very healthy compared to the good quality meat that is available to most people in Europe, geographical Europe that is, not political ;-)

I'm very fortunate to live in rural Ireland and the butcher in my local small town rears most of the beef that he sells and the lamb is always Irish, mostly from not too far away. I think that pork in Ireland is probably the meat that is the least close to a natural meat, our pig farms do not provide what I would call a reasonable life for the animals. It is possible here, as it is in Britain I'm sure, to get good quality pork meat from farms where the anaimals are reared well however it's not widely availble in supermarkets, mostly online from the farms themselves which requires a freezer to make it financially sustainable.
 
Man messing with nature again despite it always coming back to bite us on the bum!
Is there a difference betyween wild salmon and farmed salmon? Dead right there is yet you'd think it would be a simple and safe way to get salmon.
The complexities of factory made meat send shudders through me.
It can only work out bad.
I'm not an animal lover so have no problem eating them.
I live in the Welsh countryside where a huge amount of land can produce no food but meat. That would be become barren land some of it wild land with many family farms going to the wall.
Eventually just massive corporations will be producing the food and it will become ever more removed from what is truly healthy food for humans.
If the world ends up being forced into veganism we'll be heading for famine as the sea currently supplies around a third of our nutrition or is fish going to eventually be coming off a factory conveyor belt too? I don't think mankind can afford to write off a third of it's food supply.
My grandchildren are heading for a very cold antiseptic world of total control.
 
I'm already a label reader because these big corporations don't mind feeding you poisons and unknowns.
I've not noticed here but in America there are even health warnings on food!
May cause cancer may cause birth defects.
If a product in a can a box a packet has chemical names on which are alien to me or I simply can't pronounce they go back on the shelf.
I want food not food like substances. I have put a lot of effort into backing away from laboratory foods.
I have a small garden where my wife produces apples pears plums black currents black berries strawberries loganberries blueberries raspberries garlic ginger onions.
I eat berries daily along with shop bought nuts.
I eat ginger garlic and cloves daily too to control my glucose levels and blood pressure.
I am really not wanting lab food.
 
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