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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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.
And whether screams in inarticulate horror at being conscious without senses other than pressure and pain.
But hopefully that’s not how it goes
Lab-grown meat might not have nerve-endings or nerve-endings that connect to nowhere. You will need a brain or spine for the nerves to connect back to for the nervous signals to get recognized and processed before the screaming and “conscious” state of the brain can potentially exist.
So in essense, the lab-grown meat will just be like tissue cultures kept artificially alive but not a living organism.
Perhaps then it screams at the horror of having no nervous system to organize its consciousness into a time-bound shape.
Maybe the more a creature’s consciousness morphs into the shape you and I inhabit, the more protected its consciousness is from the unshaped horror of formlessness.
Maybe the only reason we have anything other than pure yelp as our existence is because evolution built these structures to give us some relief from a background agony.
Perhaps when we try to engineer flesh that doesn’t suffer, we instead make flesh that lacks the dopaminergic insulation from suffering that higher-order structure enables.
Probably not though
pure hell not pure yelp lol
I’d definitely eat it, especially over ecosystem-destroying meats and dirty meats. Especially if they can work on the price. I’d like to see more farmlands and public lands reforested and taken back to nature.
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
It’s technically vegan if the human consents and wants to be eaten.
I don’t have any desire or curiosity to eat meat, human or animal, so I wouldn’t partake. The added vore fetish sexual aspect is also really gross to me tbh.
I always enjoy the weird questions most.
Absolutely. Nothing suffered or died to produce it so I wouldn’t consider it unethical. I realize most people wouldn’t be able to get past the “human” label.
Edit: not actually a vegan so not sure my vote counts in this thread.
I’m vegan, and agree with you 100%
This I think raises a real question of whether its verifiabley lab grown or from a consenting place and not just unethically harvested.
Have you seen the old reddit foot eating thread?
I have not. On the other hand, I’m familiar with Armin Miewes, who spent a fairly long time in prison for murdering and eating someone that wanted to be murdered and eaten as a sexual kink.
It’s a facinating ride.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8p5xlj/hi_all_i_am_a_man_who_ate_a_portion_of_his_own/
As an omnivore I’ll admit the idea is curious, and while I wouldn’t personally partake because of cultural upbringing about cannibalism, I wouldn’t judge someone who did enjoy it the way I would an actual cannibal.
The real question is, can you call it “human meat” if it is lab grown?
It might have the same texture, taste and consistency, but because it didn’t come from an actual human it isn’t really cannibalism, is it?
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’ve been telling my friends for years that the technology advances in lab grown meat mean it’s only a matter of time before we get Kevin Bacon bacon.
Sure, why not.
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.
Admittedly I expect that most things I would not end up liking, but the ability to try would be really nice.
Man, what a great attitude. I wish everyone was this open about food.
I would eat it, but I would do so on rare occasions in the same way I might have a drink with friends once a month. I became vegetarian for health reasons in addition to the reasons listed by OP and I have grown to really enjoy meat-free eating, so I don’t really miss it but would view it as a treat best enjoyed sparingly.
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.
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Only for fish/eggs/dairy. I’ve never really liked pork or beef.
Chicken, turkey, rabbit?
I think the actual question is do you feel you can eat lab grown meat? Ethically it meets all the requirements of vegan, as there is no animal suffering, no consent, and muscle tissue cells are less sentient than a plant.
If it’s vegan (is fetal bovine serum still an input?) then yes.
Any vegan who says no is saying so for some other reason besides veganism (ick factor, no desire, environmental considerations).
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.
Not that it matters, but obviously if this ever becomes commercialised and actually available, it will no longer be grown in a lab, as labs are equipped for research, not mass production of products.
I’m all for people being vegan and vegetarian. I just wanted to follow up on this with a question: what about genetically engineered fruit/veg? Or greenhouses? Really, what’s the difference between a lab and a greenhouse when it comes to making food? I just don’t see the lab thing making any sense. We eat a ton of stuff grown in what is essentially food labs. Kitchens are food labs, especially the bigger ones. Don’t eat the lab grown meat, all fine with me. I just think the distinction is strange.
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.
I’m a lazy vegan. I intend to stop eating animal meat as soon as cultured meat is viable. Maybe opportunistic vegan is the term?
I’m pretty sure the term here is “not a vegan”.
Nope, don’t miss it.
I could have my own chickens and eat their unfertilized eggs and care for the hens like any other pet - but it all comes back to that its fucking disgusting eating other beings in any sort or form.
Any vegan that says othervise is just a paused meat eater.
Eat some beans and shut the fuck up :-)
Aaaand it’s people like you who make other people hate vegans.
Yeah, only 16 year old girls value being liked by lesser people ;-) go fuck yourself meat head:-)
Yeaaaaah you’re the kind of poster that makes veganism into a meme. Be quiet and let the adults talk.
Go fuck yourself meat head. Your the one that will live in the sewers eating ratburgers shit for brains ;-)
Shhhhhh, I said the adults are talking
I would not mind eating lab grown and I think it is great if people would eat that instead but ive been vegan for so long that i have no interest in meat. I hardly eat mock meats, its only in social situations to not stand out to much.
Seconded. When I was vegan I’d already been vegetarian for years. Meat, including fake meat, held no appeal.
Fake meat has more of an appeal to me than lab grown meat, or it used to. It was kinda interesting when they were unique flavours marketed as alternatives rather than accurate immitations.
Honestly the food science is one of my favourite things about being vegan, I can cook way more interesting meals than I could as a carnist because I’d just use meat as the main flavour which works but it’s kinda lazy. Let me make something with a little miso and shitake broth and you’ll be in love
You got me drooling - any recipe suggestions? I’ve both ingredients in my fridge!
I don’t have any written recipes I’m afraid, I’ve been making them up as I go.
I usually use that combination for a ramen base. I used dried shitake and soak them in a ton of water overnight in the fridge. The dried shitake are honestly kinda inedible even after being rehydrated so I don’t always use them afterwards. I should also soak Kombu but I keep forgetting to buy it.
If you mix that broth with the right amount of miso paste then you’ll get the amazing combination of msg and nucleotides that gives you some amazing flavours. Soy sauce helps too, some garlic, ginger and sesame oil make it perfect.
Good luck working out ratios because I just guess everytime based on the size of my bowls 😅
Thanks so much for sharing! I’ll have to experiment for dinner tomorrow (I’m blessed to have a local eco store that sells everything you mentioned).
Hell yeah!
Good luck and have fun!
Same. I stopped eating meat in the mid 90s, was pescatarian until 2019, and have been vegan since. I don’t miss meat at all. I’ll eat an impossible or a beyond burger occasionally because it’s sometimes my only option, but I could just as easily skip them.
I wouldn’t judge anyone else for eating lab meat, though. I don’t have any moral issue with it, it just isn’t something I’m personally interested in.
it’s* only in
Ill let it slide, because you seam to have made it youre hole identity, butt ill note its knot relevant to this discussion
Meat is delicious, you should try it if theres no reason not to
I eat meat, but I’ve gone months at a time on a vegetarian diet, and the smell of cooking meat could be nauseating at times. I don’t think as many people would eat meat if it wasn’t so ingrained in our society
Meat traditionally was the only food option for most people. Meat, eggs and grain are staple foods across the world no matter where you look.
Ah, so witty! Here is more.
Wasn’t trying to be witty.
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.
Same
If it’s cheap, sure.
