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[dragonlady7]

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roach-works https://roach-works.tumblr.com/post/663333851598323712/david-humbird-the-uc-berkeley-trained-chemical :

the-nerdy-aspie https://the-nerdy-aspie.tumblr.com/post/663333054602952704/i-am-all-for-lab-grown-meat-and-eventually-food :

roach-works https://roach-works.tumblr.com/post/663331446425108480/lab-grown-meat-is-supposed-to-be-inevitable-the :

Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story. https://href.li/?https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

“The environmental ravages we face are vast, destabilizing, and encroaching on our real lives right now. The fires, the floods, are already at our door. In all this, it would be so good to know we have a silver bullet. But until solid, publicly accessible science proves otherwise, cultured meat is still a gamble—a final trip to the casino, when our luck long ago ran out. We should ask ourselves if that’s a chance we want to take.”

I am ALL for lab grown meat (and eventually food replicators ala Star Trek.)

But we need to focus on prevententative measures in the here and now first.

David Humbird, the UC Berkeley-trained chemical engineer who spent over two years researching the report, found that the cell-culture process will be plagued by extreme, intractable technical challenges at food scale. In an extensive series of interviews with The Counter, he said it was “hard to find an angle that wasn’t a ludicrous dead end.”

Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.

“And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”

like, the whole point of the article is that this isn’t just ‘a nice idea to accomplish later after we’ve got our priorities sorted’, it’s that lab grown meat is very likely never going to be economically viable and almost certainly going to be ecologically disastrous.

there’s plenty of ways to raise livestock that actually enrich the land the animals are grown on! aquaculture can play a huge part in wasteland remediation, mindful pasturing of cattle can restore topsoil and end up sequestering more carbon in grass roots than the total process expends. chickens improve garden yields by eating pests and shitting out natural fertilizer. sheep and goats turn marginal lands that can’t be farmed anyway into natural fibers far superior and better than plastic derivatives. properly run hunting licensees and departments of fish and game act to preserve forests and waterways and fund conservation efforts.

vat meat is not going to save the environment. it only reinforces the delusion that humans can somehow manage to operate outside the environment.

I dunno, I’m probably the only person who feels this way, but every time I’m reading some far future utopia or dystopia and it’s got lab-grown meat in the worldbuilding I always have to take a moment to think about the intervening time, and how agriculture has to have been dismantled, and I think for a moment about the bloodbath when the corporate interests slaughtered all the last herds of livestock because the money’s in lab-grown, and dumped their carcasses somewhere– horrible production breeds and heritage lines alike, certainly– and no author ever addresses that transition or seems to have even considered it a little bit. but I always think about it. Because even if lab-grown meat were feasible that’s what it would do– lead to the extinction of livestock herds and all the pastures sold for probably subdivisions, the way it’s usually gone historically.

Ten to twelve thousand years ago, humans began domesticating sheep and goats. Ten thousand years, humans have spent with domestic swine, raising them and refining them. Gone. Nine or ten thousand years of domestication on cattle, gone. Eight thousand years for chickens. Gone. That’s what these people excitedly dream about?

I never got the appeal. Maybe if you lived in space, but I can’t imagine wanting to live on the Earth and not partake in any of its heritage. Lab-grown meat has never been an appealing fantasy for me and I don’t know why it’s got such cultural appeal, when it would cost us so much. (Your picture was not posted)