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Originally Posted by Titan2
It is funny how we are squeamish about lab-grown meat but humans will eat cheez whiz by the gallon, Coke is not going away and all the ####e in the candy aisle or the other processed foods. Also, how is lab-grown "meat" any different than a tomato or broccoli? Those are grown products. If it is good and I like it and can afford it, I will eat it.
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Well, a couple of things.
First, lab-grown meat isn't really lab grown meat. It is to some extent right now, because it's not being produced for consumers and they're trying to get it right. It's still in R&D, effectively. But if it gets to a point where it's being widely sold commercially in the meat aisle at safeway it'll be more like "giant vat grown meat". So it is a bit different from growing tomatoes in a field and picking them and shipping them to Safeway.
Second, meat produced that way is still the same, in terms of what it's made of, as meat produced in a cow. So "synthetic" is really not the correct term - "cultured" is probably more accurate. They're beef cells, the same as a cow's beef cells. It's just that the biological process that grows those cells when you have a calf that ultimately gets bigger by eating grass and becomes a cow is happening without any sentient creature involved. It's still cell growth and the cells themselves aren't a substitute for the real thing, they're not a near-approximation of the real thing, they
are the real thing. Arguably more so, since they're not being fed hormones or other things to create more yield or change the texture, etc. So from that perspective, it's not comparable to cheez whiz, which contains plenty of stuff that isn't "real cheese" and lots of ingredients you can't pronounce. What Memphis Meats and others are doing has none of that. It's just beef that you can eat without any requirement that an animal live and die for you to do so.
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Originally Posted by Mass_nerder
I don't know if I'd want a synthetic steak, but (provided it was proved to be safe) I wouldn't bat an eye at eating synthetic ground beef.
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Can you explain why? If it's just that you don't think it's likely that they'll be able to make the steak taste right, that makes sense, I'm skeptical about that as well. But if they do, and I can't tell the difference between a rib eye from a dead cow and a rib eye that was grown from other cells, I don't see why I wouldn't prefer to eat the latter.