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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

> The alternative is already there, vegetarianism.

Since "lab grown meat" lacks characteristics that would make it an animal (both by biological definition and also according to popular opinion), i.e. it's not motile, it too should be considered a vegan option.

Because it's not coming from an animal, it's not even "meat" - it's technically just flesh.

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Veganism as an ethical principle is very simple - the use of any products created from or by animals is unethical. Since you still have to get your stem cells and fetal serum from somewhere, cultured meat isn't vegan. Even if you managed to get self-renewing stem cells and a different growth medium, you still have that initial gathering of stem cells making it non-vegan.

So getting cultured meat from a human who agreed to it is ethical and therefore vegan ?

Implying that because you satisfy the criteria of one moral principal means that all other moral principals are void is nonsense-think.

Vegan doesn't follow from ethical. While this would technically qualify as vegan, most people also have a pretty strong stance against cannibalism even if voluntary.

If the only connection to "meat" is the initial stem cell gathering then you may be right that it's not technically vegan but I can't imagine most people would care about that

True. Personally I'd be happy with that myself, but that definitionally makes me a non-vegan

> I can't imagine most people would care about that

It depends. In India for example, vegetarians also have a learnt aversion towards meat (for religious/caste reasons). Even now, in colleges, many vegetarian students demand to have their own separate hostels and canteens, so that they don't have to use the same utensils that have once been contaminated with meat (even though they have been washed thoroughly with soap after).

For someone like this, anything meat like is disgust-inducing and not even remotely an option.

Of the vegans I know in real life, none take such a hard-line approach with respect to products such as vaccines that were initially cultured with animal tissue, or even tested on animals. [1] I assume cultured meat would fall into a similar category, though they might avoid it for other reasons. When we discussed it, most of them also do not object to native peoples hunting wild animals or judge people who consume animal products in places (e.g. above the arctic circle) where a vegan diet is cost-prohibitive.

There are no doubt vegan purists who consider my friends to be "bad vegans", I'm just bringing it up to refute the notion that the vegan community is as fanatical or monolithic as some make them out to be.

[1] https://www.peta.org.uk/blog/vegans-covid-19-vaccine/

India has banned production of cheese using rennet, which is why quality of cheese in India is almost uniformly atrocious.

But I suppose that's more of a "cow" thing, than a "vegan/vegetarian" thing.

How did we get from vegetarianism to veganism?

It was me. Shame on me. I quoted someone talking about vegetarianism, and wrote veganism while talking about vegetarianism.

I'm wondering how people would react to eating "lab grown human" flesh ... Kinda freaks me out, but also kinda curious.

There's a novel in which a celeb named Polly is cloned and harvested for burgers.

"Oh my god the government is feeding us dead babies!" would probably be up there.

There are two rather well known sci-fi stories on this subject. Food of the Gods by A.C. Clarke and Pleased to Meat You by Stephen L. Burns.

Yes, I think so too. Previous comment I think meant that if making cultured 'flesh' is infeasible, we can switch to a diet that is vegetarian and feasible at scale.

I believe vegan considers the ethics of production too, so milk is out, even though milk is not technically an animal. Honey is a common example that is considered on the borderline I think that may (or may not) be similar to lab grown meat depending on the specific process.

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