• arrow74@lemm.ee
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    4 days ago

    But in all seriousness I would love if lab meats became economically viable.

    Imagine being able to have some lab grown mammoth. Enjoy something our ancestors did

    • MithranArkanere@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      The moment corporations see they are cheaper, they’ll start pushing for them, exaggerating their benefits like environmental impact as a propaganda tool.

      But there would still be slaughtered meats for as long as there are rich assholes paying for “the true experience” or just because it’s not something everyone gets to do and they like to feel unique and superior to the rest of humanity.
      Knowing those out-of-touch monsters, they’d double down in ‘the experience’ by getting to slaughter the animal themselves or something like that.

      • abbotsbury@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        rich assholes paying for “the true experience”

        See also: “actually lab diamonds are too perfect, the subtle imperfections and discolorations really enhance the je ne se quoi of blood diamonds”

      • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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        4 days ago

        Honestly, that’s almost a perfect win. If farming animals for meat becomes something for the 0.01%, imagine how much better things would be. How much less strain we’d put on the planet, and how much animal suffering would be prevented.

        And we’d be only a few guillotines away from a full solution.

        • MithranArkanere@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          You will always need farmers growing cows to constantly produce new ‘original samples’, tho. But they would have to focus on quality rather than quantity, and the animal would not have to be slaughtered for muscle samples.
          So that would keep them from going extinct without humans.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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      4 days ago

      i just want cheap blocks of TVP available in the store

      we’ve had the technology to make TVP for decades, it’s a perfectly fine replacement for meat if you just marinate it a bit, why the fuck is it not bog standard?

      • Flemmy@lemm.ee
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        4 days ago

        Well it differs per country but in Europe the meat industry holds quite a foot in the door to keep profiting and growing. And tbh large cheap cattle farms have been showing obvious signs over overcrowding and diseases. And I’m not the type to buy more animal ingredients or else meat farmer gets loose. We got to think beyond our bonus.

        • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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          4 days ago

          right but like… i buy products at the store that contain TVP and taste and feel great, that’s why i’m so baffled by the lack of TVP just being sold on its own

          if it was difficult to make i’d get it, but the whole point of TVP is that it’s really easy to make on an industrial scale, and since it’s clearly being sold as part of other products… It’s just absurd that no company has taken the step of selling the leftover bits on the side!

      • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net
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        4 days ago

        I swear to god the month that I embraced TVP and started using it in my cooking, it all got pulled from Safeway and Fred Meyers store shelves. It’s like they fucking knew. It’s like… Come on you motherfuckers it’s literally a basic and highly available food product. Please just stock it.

      • Simulation6@sopuli.xyz
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        4 days ago

        Textured vegetable protein, so basically bacobits. Nothing wrong with that, I buy frozen veggie burgers that taste better then the ground beef ones.

      • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        4 days ago

        They sell bags of TVP here in the US for not that much if you buy it in the Hispanic section of the grocery store. I’m a little surprised to hear that’s not available in (assuming based on your instance) Germany.

        • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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          3 days ago

          it is available in sweden (my brother in christ my username has “swed” and my icon is a swedish flag, i cannot make this more obvious) but for some insane reason the only normal place to get it is apothecaries and ONE normal brand that’s only carried in a scant few grocery stores. It’s a bit irrational but i’m not fucking buying it from a drug store and it’s bloody expensive anyways.

          (edit: well never fucking mind, that one normal brand stopped making it, fuck me)

          i want TVP sold next to the pork cutlets, with a comparable price, pre-marinated and ready to fry.

    • Affidavit@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      Dodo birds went extinct for a reason, Galápagos tortoises are almost there too.

      I reckon they must be delicious, cultivated meat is likely the only way we’re ever going to find out what the big deal is. If we can find out without slaughtering an animal then I can see no downsides.

        • Affidavit@lemm.ee
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          4 days ago

          I get the point, but, well… Have you tried bread!? It’s pretty bloody awesome and amazingly versatile! Pickled cabbage is alright, but BREAD! Come on! Discounting ethical considerations, I would 100% choose bread over meat any day.

          Side note: apparently ships could keep a Galápagos tortoise unfed and unwatered in their holds for up to 6 months before they slaughtered them for food. This sounds like a truly torturous death, but from a practical view this would certainly explain why they are now endangered.

            • sh__@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              I have a feeling they didn’t exactly have the quality of ingredients we had now too. Also I’m sure it had to have less water to keep longer, thus being harder in the first place.

          • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
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            3 days ago

            Have you ever tried hard tack? Even just researching a couple images and reading how it’s made shows pretty immediately that it’s not that similar to tasty, regular bread.

        • Affidavit@lemm.ee
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          3 days ago

          Some companies (e.g. Vow) are focusing on producing niche deluxe products that are generally unavailable to the public. Dodo is one of the animals that are considered in cultivated meat because then they won’t be directly competing with the traditional meat industry.

          They have already made a mammoth burger (sort of).

    • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      In Transmetropolitan where they can lab grow whatever they want, I think one of Spider Jerusalem’s favorites was polar bear eyes.

      • Rose Thorne(She/Her)@lemm.ee
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        4 days ago

        We even see a Long Pork food stand in the background in one issue. If I remember correctly, it was even advertising that they use 100% cloned meat.

        • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          Wasn’t it a major plot point that people meant for consumption were instead being used as sex slaves? (Been a long time - I literally read the series when I was 10. Not the best parenting decision there)

          • juliebean@lemm.ee
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            4 days ago

            i don’t remember that bit, but i’ve only read all the way through it once, and that was a long while ago.

          • Rose Thorne(She/Her)@lemm.ee
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            4 days ago

            I don’t remember it being a major plot point, but I feel like something got brought up at one point after the Beast arc? Might have been in one of the odd-ball collections, or I might be mixing things up myself. Been a minute for me, too. Guess I know what’s coming up after my Spawn/Darkness/Witchblade read-throughs.

    • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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      4 days ago

      I’m curious what would happen to all the cattle. We’d only need a tiny fraction. So would some actually be released into the wild? Would probably be hard on them. Many would probably be slaughtered to sell off as “the last real meat”.

      • De_Narm@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        They would be killed, plain and simple. But that’s their fate anyway and in this scenario, at least we’d stop breeding more of them.

        It’s sad to think about, but we’ve bred most of these animals to a point where their very existance includes suffering and their only path in nature would be extinction.

        • snooggums@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          If some of them were simply allowed to roam free on some of the no longer needed land used for grazing they would live and recover for the most part. Animals, even domesticated ones, still have the insticts to survive and while they would struggle at first, each generation would filter out the negative traits of domestication until a healthy population is left.

          Yes, this is even true for livestock. A few aggressive bulls being around the herd instead of separated will be a defense against a lot of predators, just like in wild cattle herds.

          • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net
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            4 days ago

            No, cows are far too domesticated to have a decent go of it in the wild. They depend on things like antibiotics and vitamins and constant vet maintenance to survive. They’d be pretty fucked in short order and until then they’d wreak havoc on native ecology.

            • snooggums@lemmy.world
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              4 days ago

              They really don’t as a total population though, that is more about keeping them healthy while they are forced to grow faster than they did before farming. They only need vitamins when they are force fed grain that bulks them out with few nutrients.

              It would require thousands for a diverse enough genetic population and maybe some protection from poachers, but even beef and dairy cattle could be as successful as the Yellowstone bison. There just needs to be enough for them to reproduce enough to overcome the initially high rate of death.

              • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net
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                4 days ago

                Fair points all around in your first paragraph. But the question remains… Why would we want to maintain a herd of large, non-native, probably ecologically destructive, post-domesticated animals in the wild? Seems like a very poor choice, and a treatment we’ve repeatedly failed to extend to most native species.

                • snooggums@lemmy.world
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                  4 days ago

                  We wouldn’t necessarily want to release all of the domesticated animals, but we have lost a lot of native ecology and some of them could fill those missing niches. Like cattle could replace bison if we didn’t expand the bison herds, because large grazers is a niche and we already destroyed that niche in North America. We wouldn’t need to release turkeys since we still have wild turkeys. Chickens and pigs could probably go away too, since I’m pretty sure both are invasive.

                  But the mindset of them all just dying out in the wild is important to dispel, both because it is a bad justification to wipe them out by itself and a dangerous assumption for people that might want to keep some around as pets, not realizing they have a high chance of surviving if they run wild.

          • magnetosphere@fedia.io
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            4 days ago

            I don’t know how many factory-farmed animals can even live without human intervention. Sadly, they’ve been so selectively bred I’m not sure that living in the wild is an option anymore.

            • snooggums@lemmy.world
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              4 days ago

              Pigs thrive when they get loose. Feral horses have successfully started breeding populations multiple times. Chickens frequently roam free on non-factory farms and just stick around for the easy food, but can find more on their own.

      • Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net
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        4 days ago

        They’d be slaughtered right on schedule and just not replaced. It’d be like when cars took over for horses.

      • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net
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        4 days ago

        Um the same thing would happen to them that already happens to them: They’d be killed within a few years for people to eat. The only difference is that they wouldn’t be forcibly inseminated to have more babies. I must say though, yours is not at all the first time I’ve heard someone ponder this and the confusion over the scenario always baffles me. You know that we raise cows specifically to kill them and we have complete control over how many are born, yea? No they wouldn’t wander aimless into the ecosystem, they’d stay on the farm until slaughtered and we just wouldn’t raise more of them.

        • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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          4 days ago

          But I bet some environmental groups would try to get them released. Other environmental groups would protest against lab meat for being “unnatural”. Many farmers will protest and want to be compensated for lost income. Some farmers would take pity on their animals.

          And of course it wouldn’t happen over a year but it would take longer for lab production to ramp up and the prices will gradually decrease. And all this time all the different groups with different interests would voice their grievances. And some governments would pass laws to free some cows, some would compensate or subsidise farmers.

          I’m pretty certain that it will be a complicated process. Maybe kinda similar to electric cars. With ethical implications beyond climate impact on top.

      • ssillyssadass@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        There would still be a market for “authentic, grass-fed” meat. It would become the fancy stuff, despite not tasting any different. There will also be a market for milk.