Idk if you read the article or not, but most of this can be attributed to the fact that our grid runs on emitters. Fix that and it goes down significantly.
Also, you really shouldn’t be rooting against this tech, its anti-materialist. The quickest way to solve the ethical issues of meat production is with this tech. No, you will never convince America (or any country in the world) to be 100% vegan without full replacements of all meat varieties. This line of thinking that you can persuade all people to stop eating meat is idealism, not materialism. A reduced price and easier manufacture of lab grown meat will accomplish that, however, and I think we’re likely to see this tech being more popular in places like China, as they have taken a focus on it in their 5 year plans.
This paper also ruled out altering the cells of these proteins to be more resistant to endotoxins natively… which is absurd, of course its possible that can be resolved through selecting the most fit cells, and that is another part of the bulk of CO2 emissions mentioned by this paper going away.
I’d also like to point out that this research is not lab tested and is not peer reviewed, they simply amalgamated and indexed other papers and looked for amounts reported. A proper investigation into this would require field work and consistent equipment. Its kinda wild how much of a media footprint this non-peer-reviewed article with no original research has… This is probably the cheapest kind of research paper to commission, I wouldn’t be surprised if the meat industry was astroturfing this.
Believing that this tech will solve the environmental and ethical problems of animal agriculture is anti materialist. Cultured meat is almost certainly going to be way more resource intensive to produce than plant based alternatives. There’s no way around it.
You also don’t need to convince anyone to go vegan. The world at large either has to wind down it’s reliance on animal agriculture or face the environmental devastation that comes with it. Remember culture develops as a consequence of material conditions. It’s anti materialist to think otherwise.
For the record, the CPC disagrees with you and their body consists of thousands of engineers and historically cares a lot about food production. Though they are focusing on different meat products, namely eggs and pig skin. Eggs imo are far more likely to succeed here in the near future based on the research I’ve read in China. I remember researching how much funding this is getting in each country and China was funding this research on a scale of 10-1 over the West.
I’m open to being proven wrong but I just don’t think it’s viable. It’s not as simple as throwing a few cells in a bioreactor.
To make this commercially viable you would have to develop a very efficient supply chain to produce all the complex nutrients and hormones necessary to grown animal tissues in vitro. You would have to do this without relying on the byproducts of animal agriculture as is currently the case. Most of the research I’ve read kind of hand waves away that issue.
Next, you have to culture animal tissues at an industrial scale. This is the challenge some researchers are trying to address. I think this may be possible but it’s unlikely to be very efficient. You still need to “feed” your cells over a long period of time as muscle tissue does not grow quickly, even when stimulated with hormones.
Lastly, if you somehow find solutions to all those problems I think it’s unlikely you’ll have a product that closely imitates the taste an texture of meat. Animal tissues are complex. They contain a variety of cell types and extra cellular proteins that no attempt at lab grown meat has come close to replicating. I think it’s next to impossible for them to get cells to grow into a complex tissue like they would in vivo. So instead you’ll be left trying to cobble together a cell based mush full of antibiotics and growth hormones into something that looks edible.
The alternative is just using plant protein as a basis for meat alternatives. That’s something the CPC is also supporting. Personally I’m already pretty impressed by what’s available now. Improving it to a point where people will be comfortable giving up meat seems much more viable in my opinion than lab grown meat.
I am not totally convinced with that part, but the rest I would critically support.
If you grow plant matter in labs or hydroponics with usage of sunlight and water nutrition enhancement you will be better than lab meat, but there are plenty of plants which in the wild are less good. However there are also plenty which are good enough and widely available in the soils we currently got.
Your point will at least for 15-30 years be totally true (since energy production for both lab meat and hydroponics is on average bad).
PR campaigns to try to “convince people with ideas” to change their ways is definitely more on the idealistic side.
Tech that fundamentally changes the means of production of a fundamental commodity in local, regional, national, and international markets seems more on the materialist side.
I agree that those would be good, commonsense ways of using those words. It’s also not what Marx meant by them. So when you throw them around on a Marxist forum, it gives a weight to what you’re saying, but without actually referencing anything Marx said.
I swear you can have the worst takes and if you say “material conditions,” then hexbear will upvote you 50 times.
You want materialism? The current level of meat consumption in the US is propped up by exploitation of migrant labor and an extractive mode of agriculture which is unsustainable and relies on external inputs like fertilizer which are themselves the product of other extractive industries.
We could dramatically reduce meat consumption without any technological changes by:
–Paying meat packers a living wage
–Organize Whole Foods and Wal-Mart, driving up meat cutters’ wages
–Stop subsidizing meat
–Stop subsidizing feed crops
–Switch to permacultural farming practices
Banking on a tech breakthrough is ideological in the sense that it protects the status quo and marshals venture capital into mostly speculative assets.
Additionally, convincing people to go vegetarian is not idealist. Mass media has a huge effect, and using it to encourage vegetarianism is a material process. So either, we can take material measures to encourage vegetarianism, or you don’t believe we’ll ever wield power. Based on your defense of lab meat (a vc grift similar to tech start-ups), I think it’s the latter.
Theres a lot to break down here, but no, people like eating meat and that is a material fact. If you’re hoping to exterminate the meat industry as it exists today, then you need enhancements in technology. No one really uses horses and buggies for transporting goods anymore, that has been replaced by trains, cars, and trucks. Technological change is one of the greatest examples of material conditions being altered. And as time goes on, tech generally makes us less reliant on animals for labor. And as it stands, meat consumption is rising despite the increase in vegans.
And I’m not ‘banking on tech breakthrough’. Graphs show the price is going down and you can buy a dish of cultivated chicken in China for 15-25 USD. Its very reasonable to assume the ~2030 estimate for mass produced cultivated eggs by the CPC to be genuine. The 5 year plan even suggests the amount of cultivated meat produced will increase by 50% by 2025.
I don’t think you’ve ever met someone from a nomadic-pastoralist culture before if you think veganism/vegetarianism can be encouraged through mass media. Mongols for example have been following a version of buddhism that discourages eating meat for almost a millennial now and their modern diet still consists largely of meat. The only thing that has decreased meat consumption for them is 20th century modernization of agriculture.
Switch to permacultural farming practices
Even the biggest proponents of permaculture maintain that it’s very difficult to do at scale, and that no such large scale solution exists at the moment. Hoping for large scale switchover to permaculture is just as idealistic as hoping for lab grown meat to become economical.
Getting your average suburbanite to eat less meat is different from asking someone whose whole life centers around stock animals. I dont expect everyone to go vegan after an ad campaign, but the UK, where the mass media approach has been tried, has more than twice as many vegetarians per capita than the US.
I agree with the problem of permaculture at scale. Right now the bleak reality is that there is no scalable alternative to extractive agriculture. that said, grain and vegetable farming is far more efficient than meat farming in most cases. The exception is where you’re using animals as part of a grasslands management regime (where the grassland is either yeilding meat or nothing), and i actually do want to see an expansion of Bison farming to that end. I agree with you that that was an idealistic take on my part tho. I think my point about changing farming policy to encourage more efficient crops still stands though, do you agree?
I have a cousin whose entire job is to count Bison. He’s like the most zen person I know and I think it’s because he has such a chill job. Like he just chills in nature and keeps the government up to date on how many bison are there. It rules.
this is a really good question, and I think one that is both necessary to a proper materialist understanding of the issue, as well as a good example of how culture is a material process.
Idk if you read the article or not, but most of this can be attributed to the fact that our grid runs on emitters. Fix that and it goes down significantly.
Also, you really shouldn’t be rooting against this tech, its anti-materialist. The quickest way to solve the ethical issues of meat production is with this tech. No, you will never convince America (or any country in the world) to be 100% vegan without full replacements of all meat varieties. This line of thinking that you can persuade all people to stop eating meat is idealism, not materialism. A reduced price and easier manufacture of lab grown meat will accomplish that, however, and I think we’re likely to see this tech being more popular in places like China, as they have taken a focus on it in their 5 year plans.
This paper also ruled out altering the cells of these proteins to be more resistant to endotoxins natively… which is absurd, of course its possible that can be resolved through selecting the most fit cells, and that is another part of the bulk of CO2 emissions mentioned by this paper going away.
I’d also like to point out that this research is not lab tested and is not peer reviewed, they simply amalgamated and indexed other papers and looked for amounts reported. A proper investigation into this would require field work and consistent equipment. Its kinda wild how much of a media footprint this non-peer-reviewed article with no original research has… This is probably the cheapest kind of research paper to commission, I wouldn’t be surprised if the meat industry was astroturfing this.
Believing that this tech will solve the environmental and ethical problems of animal agriculture is anti materialist. Cultured meat is almost certainly going to be way more resource intensive to produce than plant based alternatives. There’s no way around it.
You also don’t need to convince anyone to go vegan. The world at large either has to wind down it’s reliance on animal agriculture or face the environmental devastation that comes with it. Remember culture develops as a consequence of material conditions. It’s anti materialist to think otherwise.
For the record, the CPC disagrees with you and their body consists of thousands of engineers and historically cares a lot about food production. Though they are focusing on different meat products, namely eggs and pig skin. Eggs imo are far more likely to succeed here in the near future based on the research I’ve read in China. I remember researching how much funding this is getting in each country and China was funding this research on a scale of 10-1 over the West.
I’m open to being proven wrong but I just don’t think it’s viable. It’s not as simple as throwing a few cells in a bioreactor.
To make this commercially viable you would have to develop a very efficient supply chain to produce all the complex nutrients and hormones necessary to grown animal tissues in vitro. You would have to do this without relying on the byproducts of animal agriculture as is currently the case. Most of the research I’ve read kind of hand waves away that issue.
Next, you have to culture animal tissues at an industrial scale. This is the challenge some researchers are trying to address. I think this may be possible but it’s unlikely to be very efficient. You still need to “feed” your cells over a long period of time as muscle tissue does not grow quickly, even when stimulated with hormones.
Lastly, if you somehow find solutions to all those problems I think it’s unlikely you’ll have a product that closely imitates the taste an texture of meat. Animal tissues are complex. They contain a variety of cell types and extra cellular proteins that no attempt at lab grown meat has come close to replicating. I think it’s next to impossible for them to get cells to grow into a complex tissue like they would in vivo. So instead you’ll be left trying to cobble together a cell based mush full of antibiotics and growth hormones into something that looks edible.
The alternative is just using plant protein as a basis for meat alternatives. That’s something the CPC is also supporting. Personally I’m already pretty impressed by what’s available now. Improving it to a point where people will be comfortable giving up meat seems much more viable in my opinion than lab grown meat.
deleted by creator
I am not totally convinced with that part, but the rest I would critically support.
If you grow plant matter in labs or hydroponics with usage of sunlight and water nutrition enhancement you will be better than lab meat, but there are plenty of plants which in the wild are less good. However there are also plenty which are good enough and widely available in the soils we currently got.
Your point will at least for 15-30 years be totally true (since energy production for both lab meat and hydroponics is on average bad).
I really think “materialist” and “idealist” outside the concept of 19th century debates around Hegel are thought-terminating cliches.
Yeah, the common usage on this site is
good realistic idea = materialism
bad unrealistic idea = idealism
I’m glad someone’s said it finally.
From what I see:
PR campaigns to try to “convince people with ideas” to change their ways is definitely more on the idealistic side.
Tech that fundamentally changes the means of production of a fundamental commodity in local, regional, national, and international markets seems more on the materialist side.
I agree that those would be good, commonsense ways of using those words. It’s also not what Marx meant by them. So when you throw them around on a Marxist forum, it gives a weight to what you’re saying, but without actually referencing anything Marx said.
Do you see how this could create issues?
I swear you can have the worst takes and if you say “material conditions,” then hexbear will upvote you 50 times.
You want materialism? The current level of meat consumption in the US is propped up by exploitation of migrant labor and an extractive mode of agriculture which is unsustainable and relies on external inputs like fertilizer which are themselves the product of other extractive industries.
We could dramatically reduce meat consumption without any technological changes by:
–Paying meat packers a living wage
–Organize Whole Foods and Wal-Mart, driving up meat cutters’ wages
–Stop subsidizing meat
–Stop subsidizing feed crops
–Switch to permacultural farming practices
Banking on a tech breakthrough is ideological in the sense that it protects the status quo and marshals venture capital into mostly speculative assets.
Additionally, convincing people to go vegetarian is not idealist. Mass media has a huge effect, and using it to encourage vegetarianism is a material process. So either, we can take material measures to encourage vegetarianism, or you don’t believe we’ll ever wield power. Based on your defense of lab meat (a vc grift similar to tech start-ups), I think it’s the latter.
Theres a lot to break down here, but no, people like eating meat and that is a material fact. If you’re hoping to exterminate the meat industry as it exists today, then you need enhancements in technology. No one really uses horses and buggies for transporting goods anymore, that has been replaced by trains, cars, and trucks. Technological change is one of the greatest examples of material conditions being altered. And as time goes on, tech generally makes us less reliant on animals for labor. And as it stands, meat consumption is rising despite the increase in vegans.
And I’m not ‘banking on tech breakthrough’. Graphs show the price is going down and you can buy a dish of cultivated chicken in China for 15-25 USD. Its very reasonable to assume the ~2030 estimate for mass produced cultivated eggs by the CPC to be genuine. The 5 year plan even suggests the amount of cultivated meat produced will increase by 50% by 2025.
Hey, I think you might want to read my post a little bit closer.
If you’re just gonna post zingers, I’m done here.
I don’t think you’ve ever met someone from a nomadic-pastoralist culture before if you think veganism/vegetarianism can be encouraged through mass media. Mongols for example have been following a version of buddhism that discourages eating meat for almost a millennial now and their modern diet still consists largely of meat. The only thing that has decreased meat consumption for them is 20th century modernization of agriculture.
Even the biggest proponents of permaculture maintain that it’s very difficult to do at scale, and that no such large scale solution exists at the moment. Hoping for large scale switchover to permaculture is just as idealistic as hoping for lab grown meat to become economical.
Getting your average suburbanite to eat less meat is different from asking someone whose whole life centers around stock animals. I dont expect everyone to go vegan after an ad campaign, but the UK, where the mass media approach has been tried, has more than twice as many vegetarians per capita than the US.
I agree with the problem of permaculture at scale. Right now the bleak reality is that there is no scalable alternative to extractive agriculture. that said, grain and vegetable farming is far more efficient than meat farming in most cases. The exception is where you’re using animals as part of a grasslands management regime (where the grassland is either yeilding meat or nothing), and i actually do want to see an expansion of Bison farming to that end. I agree with you that that was an idealistic take on my part tho. I think my point about changing farming policy to encourage more efficient crops still stands though, do you agree?
Tangent related to bisonposting:
I have a cousin whose entire job is to count Bison. He’s like the most zen person I know and I think it’s because he has such a chill job. Like he just chills in nature and keeps the government up to date on how many bison are there. It rules.
“hello mr us government, there are 20 bison”
I wonder how much of this is due to immigration from South Asia, where the rates of vegetarianism are higher.
this is a really good question, and I think one that is both necessary to a proper materialist understanding of the issue, as well as a good example of how culture is a material process.
The Communist Party of China is by far the biggest funder of this research, are you saying they are a VC grift?
No, they’re the funders, they’re the mark.
If you think you’ve outsmarted the CPC I would think again