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Comment by colonelxc | Hacker News Reader

Apparently it's all rainbows and sunshine from here on out. I really don't see the meat industry dying out for a long time, and I have some doubts about how easy it will be to be able to ship "in vitro kits" to food deprived nations. Maybe someday, but not for decades is my guess. I'm curious as to how much the materials that the cells grow in will cost, and how hard that will be to make.

One of the commenters put it well:

"In Vitro meat will do to pasture grown meat what margarine did to butter. Despite nearly 50 years of food science, still the most economical way of getting the wonderfully rich flavor of butter is to milk it out of cows.

In vitro meat will be fine for industralized meat products that just want the approximate taste & texture of meat but anybody wanting a fine steak is still going to get it from good old fashioned cows."

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I think that commenter has it right: that "traditionally grown" meat will always have a place in society. However, right now, a significant amount of meat is ground up into hamburgers and sold in McDonalds; that seems like a waste to me. Maybe taking that mass market out we can get back to sustainable farming.

Cutting out ground beef consumption entirely wouldn't reduce the number of cows produced. A given cow produces so many T-bone steaks, so many barbecue ribs, and some quantity of ground and stew meat from tougher cuts. The demand is driven by the good, expensive meat; ground beef is cheap because it's the byproduct. If it wasn't cheap, we wouldn't want as much as was produced.

It's the "In-vitro kits" that really get me thinking. I wonder if they will be as magnanimous as the author suspects or if they will simply be another tool of third world oppression. Like with how GMO crops sometimes have a built in dependency on a nutrition product sold by the same company, or how they can be made infirtile so the farmer cannot reseed the same crop. It all seems like another rift in the Socio-technological Divide, to me!

On a side note, what would in-vitro mean for Halal/Kosher meat? Anyone care to speculate?

> another tool of third world oppression. Like with how GMO crops sometimes have a built in dependency on a nutrition product sold by the same company, or how they can be made infirtile so the farmer cannot reseed the same crop.

That's not oppression.

Those folks are perfectly free to continue to do as they've done for centuries or to buy something else if they feel that the benefits are not worth the costs.

There's nothing wrong with charging more. Customers are always free to buy something else.

That is an incredibly naive viewpoint given how agribusiness behaves.

Their modified crops cross pollinate with standard strains and "become" the modified strains. Then they sue the farmers for not paying the license fees. They threaten to not supply farmers with GMO seed if they use normal seed for their other crops.

Similarly they attempt to patent strains that have existed for centuries in order to become sole providers. See the Basmati / Texmati rice case for just one example http://www.no-patents-on-seeds.org/index.php?option=com_cont...

They have made every effort to remove other options from the farmers and are creating monopolies through questionable business practices and IP abuse.

It's a dirty business all around and it's a clear indication that the patent system is broken. Commodities are cheap, because they are commodities. Simply because anyone can jump on in and have a go at producing them. That's the free market at work, cheap and lots of it.

Contrast commodities with the protected patented good. Expensive and a limited supply typically, since you can only get it from the IP owner or a licensee. Why innovate if you don't have to and if you do, make sure it's patentable and stretch it out.

If patents were fair and equitable all around then people would not be trying so hard to turn commodities back into patented goods.

It's not tenable and it is the cause of our current economic malaise. It's a high tech world and the path to economic growth is blocked because as soon as you computerize or mechanize, you run into a wall of intellectual property that you can't get around without gobs of money for lawyers.

The software startup world was the wide open frontier ten years ago, a place where you could make money with just an idea, but it's gradually getting the life choked out of it by IP law.

Sorry, I did not initially mean for this to become a patent rant, but it is connected to everything I have been thinking about for the last year or so and it's really pissing me off how far it's tentacles go.

> Similarly they attempt to patent strains that have existed for centuries in order to become sole providers.

Oh really?

Since you didn't understand the article that you cited, I'll quote it "It should be perfectly clear that what RiceTec patented was not the genome of basmati rice or a genetically developed variety (RiceTec makes the point that all its products are natural). It was simply a hybrid of basmati obtained from cross-breeding with an US long rice variety."

RiceTec has a patent for its hybrid. That patent does not cover anything else, such as pre-existing strains of Basmati.

The whole argument that what RiceTec has done is somehow wrong is "By including basmati name into the patent definition, RiceTec could claim wide-ranging rights over a traditional name, for which it did not acknowledge the origin or the originality, let alone the copyright."

That's factually incorrect. Patents don't grant any protection for names. Copyright and trademarks do.

I've got a patent for a method of branch prediction. No one thinks that said patent gave me any rights over the term "branch prediction" (or even "programmable branch prediction", a term which was arguably novel when I filed the patent.)

Some guy on Yahoo Answers gave an answer for Kosher: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090519173621AA...

In short, no, it wouldn't be kosher, but meat grown from modified genes could be kosher.

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