Comment by sjwalter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sjwalter | Hacker News Reader

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That argument falls apart quite quickly with just a little thought.

The taste and nutritive quality of meat has many, many factors going into it, and the genes are only one tiny part. For example, the amount of omega-3s in pasture-raised chicken, and their ratio to omega-6s is far better in pasture-raised chickens than in chickens subjected to confined animal feeding operations (https://apppa.org/The-Nutrition-of-Pasture-Raised-Chicken-an...).

My chickens are of the same genetics as gross grocery store chickens, but grow more slowly, get more exercise, require zero antibiotics, have vastly different flavour and nutritive quality, than those exact same genetics raised in factory farms.

The experience an animal has walking the earth--what kind of activities they engage in, what they eat, what they breath, what pharmaceuticals they're injected with--all have impact on the value of the meat.

What does "lab grown" even mean in this context? Sure, it's genetically identical, but what "lab environment" produces something like grain-finished meat? Which produces 100% grassfed beef?

It seems insanely simplistic to say that "we can grow this phenotype in the lab, so it'll be exactly the same as one raised in a barn or on a pasture."

Unless these factors are outside the realm of objective reality, we can certainly replicate them in a lab given a sufficiently sophisticated understanding. Obviously, we're not there yet, and realistically, we might never identically reproduce real meat, but that doesn't have to be the goal. We just need something affordable with a sufficiently similar or better nutrient and taste profile.

Edit: None of this will replicate the romantic imagery of raising animals with love on a beautiful farm. There will likely always be a market for that to some extent, but that is realistically not what most of our meat consumption looks like today either.

> ... we can certainly replicate them in a lab...

Well, maybe we can. But, for instance, a cow that is finished entirely on pasture--a good deal of its nutritive quality comes from the grasses it eats. Where does that nutrition come from in lab-grown meats? Do we have a source for the exact same nutrients as are provided by air, water, and sunlight and grow easily and freely all over many otherwise unusable bits of land?

Where are the inputs to the lab coming from?

It seems kind of like the lab-grown meat maximalists are thinking that Dow Chemical and its brethren can synthesize all the nutrients that are required and known in, say, beef, and just break out the beakers and Breaking Bad them into existence.

As a long-time software engineer who has a deep respect for complex systems, this is totally insane to me. That the lab-grown meat maximalists think we can supplant this incredibly complex system, from sun to leaf to calf to beef, in some Dow Chemical-inputs and a factory, is absolutely insane.

Remember, from Black Swan by Taleb: Up until the 60s, scientists didn't think that fiber was a useful part of our diet. This lead to the notion that fruit juice was equivalent to whole fruit, from a dietary perspective. This contributed in some part to the obesity epidemic.

The idea that we already do know exactly what makes meat so tasty and healthy is suspect, the idea that we can replicate this exactly like burning CD-ROMs in a meat CD-Burner is just off the wall.

> It seems insanely simplistic to say that "we can grow this phenotype in the lab, so it'll be exactly the same as one raised in a barn or on a pasture."

Why would it be exactly the same? We can probably make it better. Perfect marbling on every steak.

We've tried many times to make in labs and factories foods that are "better" than what Nature provides, however we've failed every single time, though we have created a number of large agribusinesses and marketing conglomerates that are really skilled at manipulating people and the political process into believing that unhealthy diets are healthy.

If you're right, that would maybe be cool (but then we'd have to consider the inputs to the factories, which'd probably be GMO soybeans and corn, which means we're harming other animals in the process of producing them), but I believe your statement is full of hubris.

There’s nothing particularly natural about the steaks, burgers, nuggets or fillets you eat: even aside the cooking (quite possibly humanity’s first invention), they are the product of many generations of selective breeding by humans, specifically to maximise value (including taste as a subset) for resource cost (including farmland and time as inputs).

And then you have all of the seasoning, for example KFC’s “secret” herbs and spices are from basically all over the planet.

We've tried many times to make in labs and factories foods that are "better" than what Nature provides

Wild nature doesn't provide very much that is edible by humans, and certainly not enough to sustain a civilization of humans rather than small bands of roving nomads.

Nature doesn't care about us, it won't help us, if left to its own devices it would eventually wipe humanity out entirely. We're well, well past the point where we can rely on nature to care for itself or for us. If we don't all take the initiative to intervene and engineer nature for its and our benefit, then only those with hubris will do so.

Regarding the hubris of believing that a lab-grown steak could be better than the real thing, physics doesn't change just because it's inside of an animal, so there's no reason to think that we won't eventually be able to engineer muscle tissues that are indistinguishable from real grass-fed beef, given the time and money to do so.

You should read Euell Gibbons, one of the finest Americans to ever live, gourmand, gatherer, hunter, and writer of Stalking the Wild Asparagus. We are all much closer to edible food in our natural surroundings than you are making it seem. Some skill and processing required, but almost all of the American population is a few hours of foraging away from a nutritious meal. Nature provides PLENTY. Efficiently harvesting it in a sustainable way (i.e., stewardship) is the hard part, and what I believe farming should be all about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euell_Gibbons

The US population has almost doubled since he wrote that book.

While I can easily believe most specific individual humans could (with skill and training) get a good meal after a few hours spent foraging if considered separately, that is very different from saying that all of the population can be fed that way at the same time.

The carrying capacity of the planet if we’re “in tune with nature” is the pre-farming population, because even neolithic farms were very unnatural things.

I support my local farmers that are doing things better. However, I do believe lab and veggie meat is a solution to a volume problem. To quote your own site "Mulligan Farms, LLC is an agricultural concern run by a family of new and dedicated farmers, and has wildly fluctuating resources." Lab meat and even highly processed veggie meat is about feeding the billions. There will also be local farmers who can provide amazing resources no matter what the out come.

> It seems insanely simplistic to say that "we can grow this phenotype in the lab, so it'll be exactly the same as one raised in a barn or on a pasture."

It seems insanely unimaginative to think we can not.

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