The main reasons I’ve seen from vegans for not eating meat seem to be all about the morality of eating a sentient animal, the practices of the modern meat industry, and the environmental impact of it. And don’t have anything to do with the taste of meat.
Since lab-grown meat doesn’t cause animal suffering, and assuming mass production is environmentally friendly, would you consider going back to eating meat if it were the lab-grown kind?
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If it’s cheap, sure.
For sure
I don’t have any ethical issues with it, I just don’t find meat appetizing anymore. I’m all for having the option for people who want it though.
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but people regularly think I’m 10 years younger than I am.
This is the same kind of magical thinking that leads some vegans to believe that they don’t produce any body odor, or that they can cure cancer through diet. I eat meat, I’m nearing 50, I’m physically healthy, and regularly mistaken for being in my 30s. The idea that vegan = healthy diet is, well, pretty obviously nonsense, since Oreos are vegan and still terrible for you.
A lot of aging is just genetics.
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It would depend how this lab grown meat affects the environment or who produces it, how, what price it is… I’m not opposed to it, just need to see the details.
I’ve been vegetarian my whole life and vegan for ~4 years or so, and I would definitely eat lab grown meat (assuming the conditions you stated).
I almost certainly wouldn’t eat it often but there is sooo many cultural dishes I haven’t ever tried due to them containing meat, which I would love to try sometime.
Admittedly I expect that most things I would not end up liking, but the ability to try would be really nice.
Why not celebrity meat?
If that’s fine for them, why not? But I’d rather like to have a taste of myself. Always wondered what I would taste like.
As a vegan, I would not eat lab grown meat.
It’s mainly a texture/concept thing, my food needs to be safe from disembodied muscle, fat, skin, cartilage, bone, minced meat containing the combined flesh of thousands of raped and tortured carcasses, the faecal matter and bacterial colonies all meat is covered with, and the horrifying possibility of meat containing hidden cysts full of pus, bits of hair, teeth, genitals, eyeballs, parasites, tumours, zoonotic diseases, prions, etc.
Lab grown flesh would hopefully be exponentially cleaner, and far less problematic than the current rape torture factories and abattoir system, but I will never be able to thematically seperate labgrown meat from what meat currently is, not enough to be able to put it in my mouth and chew it anyway.
Also, all sentient life (as we know it) is made of flesh. Lab growing billions of disembodied chunks from a handful of sentient animals? There is still deep horror to this. Granted it’s on a completely different scale to the current system of livestock atrocities, but it’s still horrifying none the less.
Oh, better to eat only broccoli. In the third world, with poop of human cow pig. With a lot of antibiotics, pesticides and other chemicals.
Did I really trigger you so badly that your feeble hormone addled carivore brain tried to get you to think about eating broccoli?
Wow. New vegan power unlocked.
Just fyi, when I’m trying to stem the flow of vegan hate I see online, I find way, way, way more success in not being an obnoxious asshole. It’s a stupid trend, bashing and shitting all over vegans and vegetarians saying the habit is a good thing. Don’t make it harder for everyone else to get on board with this kind of shit.
Did you mean to reply to me?
…yes. Did you read what I said? Because it should be clear I mean you.
So you think vegans should passively put up with bullshit from trolls and never poke fun back? Why?
Are you-
Um. I don’t know what’s even happening here. How do you not get what I’m saying.
Just fyi, when I’m trying to stem the flow of vegan hate I see online, I find way, way, way more success in not being an obnoxious asshole.
Or put another way: “it’s best when trying to make sure not everyone hates a good cause, to not be a total dick.” (Read: you’re being a total dick and not helping your cause.)
It’s a stupid trend, bashing and shitting all over vegans and vegetarians saying the habit is a good thing.
“I understand it’s a stupid trend that people on the internet hate vegans and anyone speaking positively about veganism/vegetarianism.”
Don’t make it harder for everyone else to get on board with this kind of shit.
“You’re making sticking up for veganism/vegans much harder by, as mentioned before, being a dick.”
Get it now?
Let’s take this a step farther.
Would you eat human meat that was grown in a lab, if you could know for certain that the cells that were used to form the cultures were harvested from a consenting adult that was duly compensated? What if that person not only had consented, but wanted to be eaten, because they had a vore fetish, and enjoyed the thought of people eating pieces of them?
No, but the reason for it is one of safety, not morality:
Every bacteria, virus, fungus or other germ that can contaminate that lab and that meat is already adapted to hurt me, there is no species barrier. Nature generally abhors cannibalism because of this.
Now if you grow it in a lab, that might not be too much of a risk, but once you enter capitalist industrial production there are numerous incentives to cut corners and increase the risk of contamination.
Contamination also exists in factory farming, but at least there, there’s a species barrier and the impact of that cannot be overstated.
Alternatively, you’ll create a swamp of human meat factory farms that use huge amounts of antiviral, antifungal and antibiotic agents and just get soooooo much more effective in training multi-resistant germs, already adapted to human tissue.
there is no species barrier
There are a few things to unpack here.
First, most of the bacteria, et al. that we have to worry about right now from meat production and consumption are already well-adapted to human hosts. The solution, in most cases, is to adequately cook the meat, and to practice very basic food safety at home. Most food-borne illnesses are the result of inadequate cooking time and temperature. Other toxins–like botulism–are actually a biproduct of bacteria that colonize meat during putrefaction; you can kill the bacteria that produce the botulism toxin, but once it’s present, there’s not a lot you can do. (This is why you refrigerate meat. Clostridium botulinum reproduction is primarily room temperature, and anaerobic, so it’s mostly a problem with canned goods that weren’t sterilized properly during canning.)
The same solution to bacterial contamination in meat now would be the most effective solution for any lab-grown meat: cook your food correctly.
you’ll create a swamp of human meat factory farms that use huge amounts of antiviral, antifungal and antibiotic agents
I think that it’s unlikely that, aside from cleaning agents, that you would need antibacterial/antifungal/virucidal agents in producing lab-grown meat of any kind. Many of the most effective cleaning agents work because there’s no way to evolve protections against them. 70% isopropyl alcohol for instance; any resistance that bacteria evolved would also severely inhibit their ability to have any other functions. You can use radiation, or heat + steam (or even dry heat) to sterilize all of your equipment prior to introducing cells, and you have more control over the nutrient bath that it grows in. Depending on the nutrient bath, you can sterilize that by filtration; .22μm filtration is the standard for sterilizing IV and IM compounded medications. (.22μm is smaller than all bacteria, and many viruses. Molecules will still pass through that filter pore size though. You can also get filters down to .15μm if you need to remove more viruses.) Cows, chickens, etc. use so many antibacterials because they aren’t able to put them in ideal conditions and maintain the desired production levels.
I think that the lack of a species barrier is a far, far smaller risk than you might believe it to be.
BUT.
I think that there is one enormous risk: prions. Misfolded proteins are exceptionally hard to detect, and anything that denatures them will denature other proteins as well. The risk is likely very, very low, given how uncommon prion diseases are, but it’s definitely a risk when you can grow a culture indefinitely.
Typically the major threats from canniblism are bacteria, viruses, fungus, parasites and prions. The bacteria, viruses, fungus and parasites shouldn’t exist under properly maintained lab conditions. But prions are just misfolded proteins. They happen rarely and typically they are quarantined in the cell they were produced in. A number of things have to go very, very wrong for them to get out into your body from your own cells. However, eating and digesting cells can let out the prions they contain. Once they get out they’ll start triggering other proteins to misfold but only if the right materials are present and if the prion came from human tissue you can be sure they are.
The human immune system is incredible, it has impressive countermeasures for almost anything you could think of. Heck it’ll even attack solid objects that get stuck inside you. If you get shot by a bullet and don’t get it removed (not recommended) your body will layer by layer eat that bullet. Slowly dissolving it and passing it into your blood so your kidneys can filter it and you can piss out that bullet over the course of decades. (Though having a bunch more metal in your blood causes its own problems). Your body has a response to just about everything including cancer which to get anywhere has to have some mutations to deceive your immune system.
Your body has no answer to prions whatsoever. Your body puts up no fight. If you are infected by a prion disease you are going to die. There is no vaccine, no cure, no treatment.
Once symptoms appear you’ll have at most a few years if your very lucky but more likely a few months. Most prion diseases attack the brain. (side note; don’t eat the brains of any animal regardless of circumstances)
Will perfectly sterile lab conditions eliminate prions as a concern? No If anything it might be possible that growing the meat artificially might result in more misfolded proteins. I’d still happily eat lab-grown animal meat. But lab-grown human meat? No thank you
I would. Ever since I singed my arm with a small explosion in high school, I’ve been intrigued to try. It smelled delicious.
I have a brand (yeah, the kind done with red-hot metal); my impression was that burning skin and subcutaneous fat smelled like a delicious pork roast.
If it’s not wasteful/polluting to produce it, I don’t see why not
Still need to investigate the sustainability of it before I would try, but presently there’s no produce on sale here. But I’m pretty used to dishes without meat by now, so there’s no direct need. I suppose it would be more targeted towards current meateaters, hopefully they stop destroying life on the planet at some point.
I, a meat eater, and you, presumably not, will both continue to destroy life on this planet for as long as we exist.
Causing no damage isn’t really an option for one who exists.
10-year vegan here , 20-year veg. My answer is no no no.
Other than the taste and what it represents, there is far better food to eat which is grown outside than animal flesh… grown inside a lab no less.
I’m vegetarian, my wife is vegan and I think this best reflects how I feel about it. Once you remove meat from your diet, you start to explore how flavourful everything else is.
Vegetarian not vegan, but I wouldn’t really have an issue if ethical. Nutrition is another matter to consider.
