DDL on 22/4/2014 at 11:23
Quote Posted by henke
In vitro meatI really wish Dr Post was better at science and worse at publicity. Seriously, this whole "lab meat" idea is ludicrous. Getting cell culture myoblasts to form myotubes is no easy task in the first place, getting myotubes to form coherent muscle-like tissue structures is pointlessly tricky, and they apparently went the whole hog and actually made
contractile sheets (complete with electrodes to synch the contractility) to generate the samples for this fucking burger. And they still needed thousands of them. All that glassware, all that plasticware, almost all of which was probably burned afterwards (because biohazard waste), all that vastly expensive tissue culture medium (a lot of which is, hilariously, extracted from baby cows anyway), all that technician time and incubator and isolation hood use, not to mention the freezers to store the samples (which were most likely -80 freezers or just big ol' vats of liquid N2, since -20 just won't cut it for cell culture), and the entire laboratory complex, and the infrastructure needed for all the above...gah. No wonder the damn thing cost 200 grand.
And then then had to dye it red using beetroot because myotubes don't make much myoglobin, and it had next to no fat because again: myotubes.
All this, or you could just buy a cow, put it in a field and feed it on grass (which grows using zero human input) and after a few months you have enough meat to make hundreds of burgers. Which would be delicious.
If they wanted to make lab grown burgers, they'd've been better off using fungal sources (like quorn
already does) because it's not going to taste like beef anyway and fungus can be grown far, far more easily, in bulk, on cheaper nutrient sources, but of course, this is something we can already do. Or hey, tofu.
There really is zero mileage in making laboratory meat that is "actually cow", other than to prove a needless point. Even if the architecture were scaleable to an actual economic endpoint, all that architecture could be more easily, more economically, and indeed more sensibly redirected toward fungal or plant based protein sources (see above). Nature has already produced an independent, maintenance-free, surprisingly efficient (and self replicating!) method of generating cow meat, known widely as "a cow". This is not something that really warrants laboratory optimisation.
It's more or less equivalent to looking at 18th century cities with their horse-based transport methods, studiously ignoring all mentions of "the wheel" or "the combustion engine", and spending years developing a steam-powered mechanical horse.
Yes, it's fucking awesome from a technical standpoint (just as a steam-horse would be), but it's an utterly unnecessary and hilariously inefficient way of meeting a specific need nobody really even
has, and a general need that is better served by other vastly more sensible methods.
Maybe the guy just really fucking hates quorn?
faetal on 22/4/2014 at 12:08
Plus, if manufacturing synthetic food became practical and cheap to do, it would be used to make a fuckload of money, not feed starving people. Developed countries already contribute plenty to starvation in poorer countries due to buying up their staple crops at prices which put them out of the range of the natives. Quinoa anyone? Used to be the staple food for the poor of South America, good source of protein to boot. The poor of South America can't afford to eat it any more because it's the fancy rice alternative du jour in industrialised countries. Pretty much ditto many other fancy grains etc from far away places.
nicked on 22/4/2014 at 12:16
Well I can see the point of trying, because no-one's ever going to swap meat for quorn, because quorn tastes like plastic mushroom soufflé.
demagogue on 22/4/2014 at 12:56
I never tried it, but there are ways to make tofu very meaty and palatable.
Since I think many animals quite far down the Darwinian chain share consciousness with us, and mammals much of our emotional life as well (homologues anyway), I'm not a fan of exploiting them as a food source if alternatives are reasonably within reach. As a political realist, though, I'm not one to trivialize a structural problem like hunger or poverty by tossing magic bullets around thoughtlessly either.
faetal on 22/4/2014 at 13:02
Is a cheetah "exploiting" a gazelle?
demagogue on 22/4/2014 at 13:11
Quote Posted by faetal
Is a cheetah "exploiting" a gazelle?
No. I wouldn't say so. Exploitation requires moral judgment, which in turn requires linguistic ability, which other animals don't have. I mean you can do signal processing on animal sounds and know they don't carry enough information content to be any kind of real language, much less what you'd need to make a real moral judgment.
faetal on 22/4/2014 at 13:20
But we have teeth, a digestive tract and metabolism which is optimised for extracting nutrients from a variety of sources including the meat of animals. If we shouldn't be eating anything which shares certain Venn diagram aspects of our consciousness (which is a shaky concept at best), then isn't it also our moral duty to prevent other animals from doing so? We should be weaning lions onto quorn etc...
I'd say the only good reason to switch from meat to a substitute should be based on energy efficiency, not the notion that animals don't psychologically benefit from being prey. The most damaging aspect of meat eating is the wastage of plant material, since assimilation of food into animals ends up being broadly about 10%, that means that humans eating grass-fed cows are only using 1% of the energy from the primary food (plants). This means that we use a disproportionate amount of plant food to generate meat on an industrial scale, which isn't sustainable and also contributes greatly to human starvation in poor countries which grow the crops we feed to livestock, since they can't pay the prices the crop is worth to cattle farmers. If a meat substitute could use fewer resources than the real thing, then we'd be talking.
DDL on 22/4/2014 at 13:36
Basically this ^^
We really shouldn't be working out ways of making "meat in a lab", because it is ruinously expensive (and will remain so for a very long time), and is (hilariously) dependent on the meat industry anyway* -along with an awful lot of bioscience.
We should be working out ways of making people eat less meat in the first place.
*proliferating myoblasts, and to a lesser extent, differentiated myotubes (which you need a fuckton of myoblasts to produce) are incredibly serum hungry: you grow them in a cozy balanced mix of salts and sugars and various metabolites (like pyruvate and glutamine) which is...relatively cheap, but supplemented with a crapload (like, 30% v/v) of foetal calf serum, which comes (as the name suggests) from foetal calves. I.e. is straight from the slaughterhouse. Some myoblast cultures even like additional serum in the form of chick embryo extract (mashed up chick embryos, filtered), which comes directly from the egg/poultry industry (via a homogenizer and a good filter, obviously). Basically to make this "lab meat" they probably used hundreds of dead baby cows' worth of serum.
demagogue on 22/4/2014 at 13:48
For that matter, our whole biology generally is optimized for a Pleistocene era lifestyle because natural selection hasn't had enough time to adapt it to a modern lifestyle. It's not a great argument by itself to give up most modern culture for Pleistocene era culture because it's better suited to our biology.
As for sharing consciousness, I wouldn't do it because of a Venn Diagram. The argument would be utilitarianism. If you're on board with the widely shared metric of moral decisions being to maximize welfare or "happiness", then you either need to take "welfare" seriously and apply it where you see it (which is broader than an anthropocentric view), or you need an argument why and how human and animal welfare are different for the purposes of different moral judgments. Consciousness is a fast & loose short hand, but if you get into nuts & bolts, the meaning of "welfare" probably varies depending on species and you'd probably need a book length treatise for each species for each moral demand to do it justice. Utilitarianism isn't the only moral theory out there either. You could be a Kantian deontologist, or a consequentialist, or do virtue ethics, etc, and the question comes back in another form.
Rights and efficiency are completely separate questions. Slavery may be a hell of an efficient economic system, but it doesn't matter if it's morally prohibited or restricted. Edit: More precisely though, even as separate questions, they can still get mixed, e.g., in utilitarianism you're doing complicated moral calculus since most moral issues are welfare-tradeoffs; it's the kind of thing we apply to things like health care, as opposed to slavery where we want to apply deontology and throw the calculus out. There's not much consensus which framework to apply to animals; well, there's not consensus on a lot of topics. Rights are a deep & tangled issue to get your hands around.
Edit2: Since you ask about an obligation to control other animals, of course, one, we already do have lots of regulations on wildlife control, including population control and controls to prevent extinctions, so you mention it as if it's a new idea we don't already do; and two, aside from that, for a lot of reasons, most natural behavior would undoubtedly get a dispensation, and subsistence hunting by indigenous groups would probably also get a dispensation (like they're still allowed to do whaling). Just like tribal cultures can get dispensations for what's effectively homicide, the murder of other human beings, for that matter. In realpolitik, anyway, the main target is mass industry farming; people aren't morally worried about lions and gazelles. To get into the details, though, you have to lay down what moral theory is grounding the question, how consistent you want to be, what you can expect politically in the real world, etc. Things like the realistic nutritional needs of humans is part of the moral calculus too.
But my real answer is, we've already talked about this at length in other threads, and it's not really the topic of this thread. This thread is about bedazzling futurist stuff. Although critiquing a candidate is open game, I'll grant.
faetal on 22/4/2014 at 15:38
Quote Posted by demagogue
For that matter, our whole biology generally is optimized for a Pleistocene era lifestyle because natural selection hasn't had enough time to adapt it to a modern lifestyle. It's not a great argument by itself to give up most modern culture for Pleistocene era culture because it's better suited to our biology.
I wasn't making that argument and neither were you arguing that we should be giving up meat for that reason. We were talking about the morality of preying on creatures above a consciousness threshold.
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As for sharing consciousness, I wouldn't do it because of a Venn Diagram. The argument would be utilitarianism. If you're on board with the widely shared metric of moral decisions being to maximize welfare or "happiness", then you either need to take "welfare" seriously and apply it where you see it (which is broader than an anthropocentric view), or you need an argument why and how human and animal welfare are different for the purposes of different moral judgments. Consciousness is a fast & loose short hand, but if you get into nuts & bolts, the meaning of "welfare" probably varies depending on species and you'd probably need a book length treatise for each species for each moral demand to do it justice. Utilitarianism isn't the only moral theory out there either. You could be a Kantian deontologist, or a consequentialist, or do virtue ethics, etc, and the question comes back in another form.
You'd be offsetting the estimated increase in psychological well-being of the animals you weren't killing against the well defined psychological stress placed on people who could no longer eat the things which evolution has wired them to crave. Again, why leave out the gazelles, let's get the cheetahs eating TVP lasagne pronto. If we seek to intervene between humans and other mammals wrt food ethics, then why not mammals and other mammals since we're going for the lowest amount of animal suffering? Damn those wildebeeste should feel safe on that plain - why aren't we doing anything about it etc...
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Rights and efficiency are completely separate questions. Slavery may be a hell of an efficient economic system, but it doesn't matter if it's morally prohibited or restricted. Edit: More precisely though, even as separate questions, they can still get mixed, e.g., in utilitarianism you're doing complicated moral calculus since most moral issues are welfare-tradeoffs; it's the kind of thing we apply to things like health care, as opposed to slavery where we want to apply deontology and throw the calculus out. There's not much consensus which framework to apply to animals; well, there's not consensus on a lot of topics. Rights are a deep & tangled issue to get your hands around.
I'm not sure how the world would benefit from this new currency of greater animal kingdom happiness. Are other species going to share in this benefit with us? My educated guess is that no - they will perceive life as being just the same, since evolution has wired prey species to see the world a certain way, since that's how they survive. Cows will either be living the same life on a dairy farm or not living anywhere at all, barring zoos or at people's houses as pets, since no one would have a need to breed them any more. At the moment, we have a system whereby people who don't wish to eat meat can completely opt out. Hell it's massively facilitated. I wish to eat meat and I don't particularly worry about the consciousness of the animals providing my food, since they are my prey. This is a long established feature of biology and to interrupt it for one species does not follow any kind of logic which merits the uprooting of an entire nutritional group. Sure if synthetic meat were to be able to be cheaply and efficiently produced (despite that being highly unlikely, since everything DDL says is right on the money), then everyone shifting away from eating meat could switch to it, but what are the few remaining cows getting out of that? Emancipation?
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Edit2: Since you ask about an obligation to control other animals, of course, one, we already do have lots of regulations on wildlife control, including population control and controls to prevent extinctions, so you mention it as if it's a new idea we don't already do; and two, aside from that, for a lot of reasons, most natural behavior would undoubtedly get a dispensation, and subsistence hunting by indigenous groups would probably also get a dispensation (like they're still allowed to do whaling).
I don't hold with this false notion of "natural" behaviour, as though that only includes the activity of early humans and indigenous tribes. Everything that humans do is a part of our phenotype and is as natural as anything else which occurs within the universe. From the eyes of a sufficiently advanced non-earth sentience, a CD player is no less natural than a caddis fly larvae's case. Sure industrial scale food production is ugly, but it is pretty much the only way you feed the number of people there are on this planet. Well that and making sure that you pay just enough for food from poor countries that they don't get to eat it.
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Just like tribal cultures can get dispensations for what's effectively homicide, the murder of other human beings, for that matter. In realpolitik, anyway, the main target is mass industry farming; people aren't morally worried about lions and gazelles. To get into the details, though, you have to lay down what moral theory is grounding the question, how consistent you want to be, what you can expect politically in the real world, etc. Things like the realistic nutritional needs of humans is part of the moral calculus too.
Well yes I'm in agreement there, but I still don't hold that we have a moral obligation to remove a category of animals from our menu. I disagree with bush meat for example, since we are talking about rare species, but the removal of livestock as a food source would have the effect of making them less common, so I'm not sure again what the overall gain is.
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But my real answer is, we've already talked about this at length in other threads, and it's not really the topic of this thread. This thread is about bedazzling futurist stuff. Although critiquing a candidate is open game, I'll grant.
I do enjoy the future tech talk, but I have to admit that I'd find it all a lot more interesting if the primary driving force behind modern society and its technology was not share price. I'd love to know what kind of advances could be made if profit was not the sole motivator. I can't even imagine such a system though, so it's entirely wooly.
