The bird was not "encouraged to grow", it was forcefully bred by a corporation that treated it like trash to increase their financial gains...
>> I wonder if it was painful for the bird
I seems very safe to assume that it didn't have a remotely pleasant or normal life...
The same could be said for plants.
So the choice is: destroy a plant to eat directly OR destroy an animal who needed n plants destroyed to grow sufficiently large to eat. Option A definitionally requires less destruction.
Make sense?
Regardless of whether anything "feels pain" or not, I, personally, would choose to not destroy anything I don't have to, even if it's a uniquely-shaped rock.
I mean, look at [0]. It's probably universally safe to say that the absence of these formations would not adversely affect anyone or anything. Yet, a sapient being would agree that the world would somehow be less, in some intangible metric, without them, even if they weren't the result of a million years of forces..
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=natural+rock+arch&tbm=isch
Furthermore, farmers can kill your dog (humanly) on his land if it is causing distress to his animals. In law this is a lawful excuse to cause criminal damage. There are all kinds of lawful excuses. For instance, a person (usually a farmer) is free to kill your horse, humanly, if keeping it alive is causing a material financial loss.
Well, that's the whole point.
I thought you were going to say that in the UK, you can't just chop down a tree on your land - there are often legal barriers preventing the felling of listed trees!
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "discounting welfare issues". Sure, if you discount the laws that protect dogs, they're not protected, but The Animal Welfare act (2006) does exist, very much does protect dogs from people "doing what you want with them" and is enforced.
Of course, that protection is not offered at all costs. If a dog attacks a person, or invades farmland and attacks an animal, then the priority of that person/farm animal takes precedence over the dog.
I'm a vegetarian, so dogs are not special to me in that regard. I only mentioned dogs because I was replying to a comment that mentioned dogs specifically.
Plants are very lowly sentient through structures that are the plant-counterparts to animalian neurons.
They communicate with other plants and they sense what can be described as "pain."
But, I don't think arguing on the sentience of an unprotected kingdom will further this discussion.
The discussion on animal welfare seems to be an emotional one alone. As long as our mirror neurons aren't firing in response to the perceived pain animals feel, all is millhouse.
This is why, I believe very few care about plant welfare. They have no mouths with which to scream, so we believe (or make ourselves believe) that they aren't in pain. That they are too dumb to feel pain (this parallels sinisterly with the cruelty of psychological medicine in the 20th century).
Not to mention how silly it is to care about plant welfare... or is it? There have been little studies done on how the constant slaughter of plants affects the secondary factors (maturation speeds, yield, etc. -- as apposed to the primary: deforestation, etc.).
However, I don't think there ever will be such advances in this field. Perhaps because they have no way of polluting this discussion with emotions, unlike their animal counterpart.
I've learned these arts as well, to hear the ebb and flow of what goes on around me. Many times, I can feel the data going on the wire, and the emotion it carries. Standing in our data center's networking room, I can feel thousands of voices, like a cacophony all unawares that they too are projecting emotions. Some of us can hear.
But in learning how to hear, I also learned how to listen to other things we wouldn't normally consider sentient. Plants. I found I've been able to hear them, and their talk. It's not words per se, but more of word-pictures. And the more I do so, I come to the understanding that Chomsky was indeed correct, but also wrong: emotion is the underlying language.
How do I prove this? I don't. I can't, at this time. These techniques were taught to me, along with my innate abilities. I doubt even an fMRI would be able to pick up on these, until long after my brain processed them. But what then?
I've also been attempting to find a way to connect whatever that emotion energy I'm feeling is. If it's not matter, it must be energy.. or something else. I'm not ready to say there's a something else yet... So it must be a type of energy that we can measure, no? I know I've pissed off enough other pagans and occultists, but my primary goal is to bridge these two disparate (scientific vs esoteric) into a unified theory. Or barring that, a way to "view" this energy. Because once we can sense it, we can manipulate.
But alas, I figure I'll be downvoted or worse yet, ignored. I certainly don't hold a publicly acceptable view for sure.
And I believe this is what could hold you back, atleast in public acceptance (if you're even aiming for this -- and not just discovery among the "initiated").
I'm sorry I can't offer you anymore words, getting a taste of the esoteric after all of this time away has left me in shock.
So, may you succeed in your journey and if there's anyway I may assist, I would oblige.
They still are out there, but most have gone the anti-technology, anti-science.. almost hippie like. To most of them, it's all flowers and happy auras, and vibes. That sort of stuff. In my opinion, they are a dead end. It's all circle this, good vibes that. And absolutely no proof, no scientific work on understanding the underlying nature. Nothing.
> And I believe this is what could hold you back, atleast in public acceptance (if you're even aiming for this -- and not just discovery among the "initiated").
Nahh, I obviously don't talk about this at work. It can easily be seen as "Religion". No sense in alienating people. If they are intent on discussing it, I invite them to a coffee shop, a bookstore/cafe, a quieter bar and talk.
Then again, I do have to be careful in whom I talk with. Obviously, these ideas are exactly mainstream. And, many of them can have very deleterious paths (cults, single-mindedness, magus-itis). Last thing I want to do is get someone who is weaker-willed into something they cannot handle. Primarily, I don't want to be responsible for someone else's failures.
> I'm sorry I can't offer you anymore words, getting a taste of the esoteric after all of this time away has left me in shock.
> So, may you succeed in your journey and if there's anyway I may assist, I would oblige.
Thank you much for the kind words.
There are a few ways to help, and they be primarily information. I'm blessed with an ample amount of money and goods. It's mind I need.. Thought. Ideas. Creativity.
Primarily, this "woo woo" area, Ill call it magic. The problem is that the only way to sense it is to be trained in it. And how do you know if someone is trained? Its a chicken and egg problem. The way out of this, is to develop some sort of sensor that can "sense" whatever this is. Once a sensor is made, then ideally it would provide a way to prove/disprove these claims. Not only that, but we in the engineer class (yes, systems engineer as well) would also be able to experiment in making devices to manipulate this energy. With appropriate feedback from the sensors, we could start mastering this other realm.
I've a few ideas how to do this.
1. Auras. Some people see it naturally. Some can be trained to see it. What is it? Is it EM? What frequencies? Is it magnetic domain, or electric domain, or both? Could a camera detect this? What if you could adjust the response frequencies in the CCD to different areas?
2. Remote sensing. This would require time and lots of money at an fMRI. Would entail in self-selecting people whom claim to have these gifts. Fraught with false positives, given fMRI tech. Open ended investigation on peoples' brains. Not likely.
3. Emotion. Is it possible to sense emotion? I believe yes. We all have felt it, someone staring at us. Someone angry, and we don't know why. Dread that makes a room thick. What's going on, and why? Is this measurable? If no devices, can we use people to detect (and then measure with equivalent of lie detector electronics, to bypass verbal means)?
But these are diffuse ideas, and none are terribly good. But given my computer science, engineering, IoT sensor net, and biological backgrounds, It's all I have. If you have other ideas, I'd be very much interested in knowing or collaborating. I don't even need much of citation. I'd rather enable the occult for the masses, by means of science.
If you'd like to get ahold of me, you can email me [email protected]
Sincerely,
That's easy to prove. Have people send certain kinds of data and then name the emotion. You could upend several sciences and also be rich.
So why don't you?
But given that what we perceive is in most cases so heavily filtered through what we believe, I'm not sure this is necessarily a conceptual mistake.
Envisioning something in the minds eye isn't necessarily a sense but it's pretty close. I do think it's a good idea to regard envisioning as property of our own mind however rather than relating it entirely to external phenomenon. Which should also be more widely practiced with perceptions in general IMOP.
The key out of this mind-trap is unbiased 3rd parties.
For example, consider this. You're by yourself. You do something "magical". It conjures an invisible dragon around you. It has a distinct shape and look. Ok. So this is in your head, as per your comment above.
Now, you go to the local book store, and you meet some friends. You're not talking about any of your private practices. One friend looks at you and your shoulder and says, what's with the dragon thing around you?
Is it really there? Someone else selected 2 unique details about it out of nothing. Or, did your subconscious chose the reality that someone chose to say that to you, reaffirming your belief? Or what? Mere coincidence? (There is no such thing as coincidence in this world, only the inevitable.)
How many times one must go through with "interesting" happenings with others, whom have no clue what you're doing? We will never receive 100% proof.. But then again, a zero knowledge proof doesn't provide 100% certainty.
But also we sometimes correlate things that aren't necessarily correlated because we are just walking talking shitting correlation machines and it's what we do.
I don't mean to say "all in your head" like it's a bad thing though. My opinion is that most things are at the end of the day so I hope it's not offensive.
Heh :) I don't quite attribute humans to a complicated form of a calculator, but I get the sentiment. People thought back in the early 1900's, that people were not much more than really complicated mechanical systems, like clocks. Now, It's computers. I still think that's too simplistic.
> I don't mean to say "all in your head" like it's a bad thing though. My opinion is that most things are at the end of the day so I hope it's not offensive.
No, not at all! I had to first consider that wasn't the case for me. Consider it a sanity check. "Am I just seeing bullshit because I want to?" Probably. Can I disprove this? Yes. The key to disprove, is kind of a double blind test - you don't say anything, and someone else confirms... The only better test I could think of, is if someone else devised a ritual for you, and you conducted it, and you noted effects and happenings.
What about a painless and euphoric death?
As many others have noted in the past, slave labor and concentration camps operated on a similar industrial calculus of forcibly squeezing out value from living beings before putting them to death.
Waiting for "fake meat" to fix the problem is like saying: "I can't wait until we can grow zombies to pick cotton, then all the slaves can finally go free."
For many, there are few ways of consuming a balanced diet without meat. Take low-FODMAP diets [1] for example, which are becoming very popular with people with IBS, a condition some ~15% of the U.S. population suffers from [2]. For many, coming up with enough sources of protein while satisfying their dietary restrictions is not easy without meat.
On an individual level, picking the "harder" way for its ethical advantages is definitely the right thing to do.
For the scientist working on fake meat, their work is probably essential here.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irritable_bowel_syndrome#EpidemiologyI'm not sure this is true. I know it's a pretty common argument, but in reality, it's not particularly difficult to hit your protein requirements on a plant-based diet. Even if you take a relatively low protein food, like brown rice, and eat your required daily calories worth of it in a day, you'll hit your protein requirements for the day.
Consider that most people don't eat just rice all day, and toss in some beans, spinach, nuts, seeds, etc., and it should be clear how easy it is to get enough protein (assuming you're eating enough calories).
It's kind of like that... except that slaves were people - not chickens. Which certainly flavors the metaphor a bit.
E.g. 1 - 'free range' chickens have almost no extra space per chicken compared to battery-farmed chickens, and many die after being trampled by the others. They are at least a breed which can stand on its own legs - battery chickens can't even walk.
E.g. 2 - 'organic' animals must not be fed antibiotics (which means their general conditions must be good enough for not too many to die from disease, which is otherwise avoided by routine antibiotics in feed). This means sick animals are generally left to die rather than be treated, since allowing antibiotics would lose organic status.
E.g. 3 - For eggs: no matter how good the conditions are for the hens, egg-laying chickens are a different breed to chickens-for-meat. Ergo, all male layer chicks are redundant, and are killed immediately on hatching (normal method is to grind the chicks en masse).
Eating animals is not a pleasant thing. Definitely worth reading up on.
(FTR: I eat animals, eggs, and dairy. I'm struggling to find out how to do so ethically, given the current 'ethical' labels are so close to meaningless.)
After we left our hobby farm I decided to not eat anything smarter than a fish. (I don't eat octopus)
I like being Pescatarian.
I do try to avoid wild fish for ethical/environmental reasons. Food animals should always come from a farm, obviously.
I am a vegetarian, and I disagree with this. I feel that it is more ethical to kill and eat an animal that has at least been given a chance to live a free and natural life, vs. confining it to a prison from birth.
Of course, it would be impossible to maintain humanity's current level of meat consumption without animal farms. I would prefer that people dramatically reduce their meat consumption, and eat only hunted/caught animals.
The level of intelligence I will eat, between chicken and fish, is totally arbitrary.
I think this is true for anyone who is not actually vegetarian.
The next level down is insects and oysters, I suppose.
Don't eat octopus because they are smart
Eat fishes, even those able to detect, hunt, defeat and eat octopus (therefore smarter than them)
Same thing a sad or lonely chicken makes: food.
Since happiness is generally associated with good health I'd wager happier chickens are healthier, ergo, tastier.
Is it? Isn't human happiness associated with human good health?
Forcing (?) billions of people to change their eating habits is a far more difficult task than a quaint little Civil War to settle slavery.
If enough people in, for example, the US felt as strongly about not eating animals as they do/did about not having human slaves, they could have another "quaint" civil war (or maybe a political argument that could achieve the same thing without bloodshed) and get to a point where it would be illegal to eat animals just as it's illegal to have slaves.
(I'm neither American, nor a vegetarian, FWIW.)
I don't buy or eat cheap chicken because I know how it is bred/produced and it's both miserable for the animal as well as for anyone who eats it. I prefer paying twice as much for chicken and having it less often, which is what I do.
Speciesist and anthropocentric mentality that is reinforced by world's most popular ideologies - shallow postmodernism, christianity and other religious ideologies - is what keeps this stuff alive.
It is a shame war is necessary to force people to abandon congitive dissonance and start making a better place of this world. At least we in first world countries have all the time to make the change and be the role model, but we seem to be doing business-as-usual, at least the majority of us.
Yeah, there's nothing cognitively dissonant about the idea of making the world a better place through mass slaughter. You know, while we're talking of ideology keeping terrible ideas alive.
As to "why have empathy for non-human animals?": I don't know, but I guess having a somewhat-arbitrary rule of which animals it's ok to eat, and which not, can lead to a certain amount of congnitive dissonance.
There are also health issues with meat, that don't exist (or don't exist to the same extent) with a vegetarian diet.
That's just it it isn't a biological incentive, it's a moral one.
If you can afford it, you can also only buy meat from non-intensive farming. Or stop eating meat all together.
I just don't think it's morally right to wait for a solution that may not ever come, or not for a long time. I eat veggie fake-meat often, and sometimes it's great, but it's not close to real meat and I don't know that it'll ever be accepted by most of the population.
Is it still a common belief that we 'need meat'? I thought it was well established that humans in normal health do not _need_ meat to thrive - especially with our current technology and industry. We can easily meet all of our nutritional needs without any animal flesh.
I'd rather use the less-strong statement I need to make a point. It is still a common belief that not eating meat is in some way less healthy, because plants have lower-quality proteins.
ProTip: we don't need meat.
Cultured meat would be grown from animal cells without developing an entire, independently viable animal. This is what "vat-grown" meat would be.
Synthetic meat would be processed polymerized amino acids that are chemically and structurally similar to animal meat. This is the holy grail of meat substitutes for vegans. No living thing of any kind is killed, molested, or even inconvenienced in its manufacture (provided you don't look too closely at where the amino acids came from).
"Fake meat" would be imitation or synthetic. Cultured meat wouldn't exactly qualify as "real meat" to me, but it isn't quite "fake meat", either.
Hi, vegan here! I already get all this from plants.
> No living thing of any kind is killed, molested, or even inconvenienced in its manufacture (provided you don't look too closely at where the amino acids came from).
Where do they come from, then? There is already enough plant diversity to not need to manufacture cells this way. In fact, fermentation of foods brings us many nutritional gifts, and I do actually kill these organisms when I eat them, but I'm ok with killing some yeasts over cows (grey line, I know! :)
As such, they could come from full organic synthesis from ethane feedstock, or from cultured microorganisms, or from plant protein, or from animal protein. They could by produced as a by-product of some other industry. If the company producing the synthetic meat is not particularly cautious with respect to sources, the vegan pedigree of its product could be questioned.
From the HN conversations about Soylent and Soylent-like products, I have been made aware of religiously-motivated vegans that even feel vaguely guilty about having to kill plants for their food. Those and the vegans motivated by supposed health benefits would not give a fig about the "meatiness" of any synthetic meat, caring more about its nutritional qualities. Those motivated by ethics would likely only care insofar as the existence of a full-synthetic meat could help encourage others to give up animal-harvested meats. If you don't proselytize veganism, you wouldn't care (nor should you).
From my own shallow study of nutrition, the height of my bar for going vegan is the chicken egg. If anyone wants me to stop eating animal products, they must necessarily produce something of equal nutritional convenience to a chicken egg, at a lower price. By my "holy grail" statement, I meat that specifically for proselytizing ethical vegans (i.e. PETA members), as an "Aha! With this, the meat-eaters can no longer argue in favor of their destructive lifestyles based on nutrition or culinary experience!"
1. They look very similar! Both have a large egg/seed in the middle of the white/fruit. Look is important for a substitute, e.g. all of the faux meat products.
2. Nutritionally they're also very similar in terms of fat and protein.
Are there any other salient variables for classification which come to mind?
In my opinion, structured growth of 'muscle tissue' disconnected from any animal is still "fake meat". Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, it is either still science fiction or too expensive (otherwise I'd have heard about it from places that aren't scifi).
Once we solve the minor engineering issues, we're good.
Plus it's way cheaper and you get to massively reduce your carbon footprint too. It's not for everyone but maybe worth thinking about? :)
This introduces you to new ingredients and recipes without adding immediate restrictions to your diet and life.
Even if you never go full vegetarian, just cutting back on meat consumption still has an effect.
Aside from some devout paleo people, I've never known a single omnivore who doesn't routinely have meatless meals, without even giving it much thought. Having meat with every dinner seems rather obsessive to me, or (in my biased view) reflective or someone who isn't very creative with their diet. There are so many awesome foods out there for which meat is a minor, optional detail. I suppose some people always find a way to insert some meat, even when it adds nothing to the meal as a whole.
Vegan is a bit challenging for nutrition because things like zinc are fairly hard to get. Although the UI is fairly poor, I recommend using nut [0] to help you calculate how you are doing. I haven't actually seen anything else even close for a nutrient calculator (which is strange since you would think it would be an obvious piece of software for people to write).
Also take this advice from the Vegan society on vitamin B12 [1]. There is a lot of dangerous information out there, so be careful.
I really enjoyed being vegan. Unlike many vegans, I was not an ethical vegan. I just like eating that way. I actually became vegetarian to save money when I was young and poor (meat or beer was an easy equation for me to solve). After a while, I just found that the foods I enjoyed the most and that made me feel the best were vegan. YMMV :-D
No reason to go crazy at first, though. Just start cooking vegan meals. If you become vegan full time, you'll be cooking a lot in most countries, so be prepared for it.
[0] http://nut.sourceforge.net/ [1] https://www.vegansociety.com/resources/nutrition-and-health/...
https://medium.com/@manibatra23/2016-a-reflection-e80378393f...
https://medium.com/@manibatra23/2016-a-reflection-diet-30c15...
You do, but as your gut bacteria changes you sort of stop craving meat so much and start craving the new foods you've been eating.
FWIW, plant-based complete protein groups are fairly inexpensive and easy to come by.
My diet is primarily: Rice, beans, tofu, mushrooms, and various greens. I've never really been a salad person, and even as a vegetarian that's still generally true.
I know of local farms where getting above average cabbages, from little seed to the nice looking one on the market stands, takes little more than one month, thanks to the chemicals they get.
It is nothing more than "I feel good" kind of thing.
This post lacks common sense. Processing and feeding animals uses far more resources than processing crops (especially since crops are often processed in order to feed animals...).
"The efficiency with which various animals convert grain into protein varies widely. With cattle in feedlots, it takes roughly 7 kilograms of grain to produce a 1-kilogram gain in live weight. For pork, the figure is close to 4 kilograms of grain per kilogram of weight gain, for poultry it is just over 2, and for herbivorous species of farmed fish (such as carp, tilapia, and catfish), it is less than 2. As the market shifts production to the more grain-efficient products, it raises the productivity of both land and water."
http://www.earth-policy.org/books/pb2/pb2ch9_ss4
> It is nothing more than "I feel good" kind of thing.
Seems like you would deny reality in order to continue to 'feel good' about eating meat.
However, the fish, chicken, pork, or beef are not. I can eat them as I choose.
Whether it is worth the environmental impact is a different issue. Interestingly, googling 'vegetarian diabetic diet' suggests that a vegetarian diet may be healthier for diabetic people:
"Vegetarianism excludes high-calorie foods and animal products laden with saturated fats. It instead concentrates on foods that give necessary minerals and vitamins that help give diabetics a better chance of blood glucose control."
1. Vegetarianism is not an end-all-be-all
2. Some people fare very badly on many vegetables. Potatoes, grains, rice, and those sort of things are effectively slow poisons for Diabetics.
3. No, you will not shame or embarrass us into not eating meat. I'd personally consider vat grown meat. We're not there yet.
2. Hmm, I keep reading things saying that vegetarian diets can be healthy for people with diabetes. Even on the official American Diabetes association website [1]. But if it truly isn't then it is a special case.
3. I agree that shame and embarrassment is not a good way to persuade people. However, there are lots of genuinely good things about a vegetarian diet that people might want to think about.
[1] http://www.diabetes.org/food-and-fitness/food/planning-meals... - "A vegetarian diet is a healthy option, even if you have diabetes. Research supports that following this type of diet can help prevent and manage diabetes. In fact, research on vegan diets has found that carbohydrate and calorie restrictions were not necessary and still promoted weight loss and lowered participants.
"Vegan diets are naturally higher in fiber, much lower in saturated fat, and cholesterol-free when compared to a traditional American diet. The high fiber in this diet may help you feel full for a longer time after eating and may help you eat less over all. When fiber intake is greater than 50 grams per day on a vegan diet, it may help lower blood glucose levels.
"This diet also tends to cost less. Meat, poultry, and fish are usually the most expensive foods we eat."
I'll give you good for the environment. I know animal protein costs more resource than plants do. Good for individuals? Nope. You're going to have to defend that claim.
2. Hmm, I keep reading things saying that vegetarian diets can be healthy for people with diabetes. Even on the official American Diabetes association website [1]. But if it truly isn't then it is a special case.
You undoubtedly triggered my disdain and hatred for the American Diabetes Association. It is my opinion, backed by my own personal data as fact, that they are peddling false medical science.
ADA claims that a diabetic can have 60g carbs per meal. Sure. And I'm sure they say testing 1x a day is fine as well. Instead, if you test regularly around the day, you'll find that certain foods cause significant blood-sugar issues. For me, harder squashes, potatoes, carrots all cause problems. I know the foods that cause spikes for me. I avoid them, or eat them very sparingly to level out any spikes.
Beer. Same. You're told by doctors that Guinness is fine. 7.5g carbs. And the docs never say to graph your blood sugar from before first sip to end. You can see your own results.
In the end, a diet high in fiber (types of carbohydrates that cannot be easily digested, and are good for many things), fats, and proteins are the healthiest for us diabetics. I only have my blood sugar reports to point to.
Yet, ADA recommends way too many carbs, and more drugs. Metformin is great... until it doesn't work 8-10 years later. Is it resistance, or bad eating that makes metformin not usable? Who knows. So I'm doing both. Taking Metformin when I know I cannot easily control my food, and eat very low carbs/day. I've already lost 80 lbs, and feel better than I have in years (well, not not, caught a cold at work, sigh).
And per note, I ALSO eat vegetables. I won't eat potatoes, certain squashes, and other high starch veggies. I also limit how much sugar containing veggies to my personal limits (which amounts to no higher than 140mg/dL glucose - the point of neurological damage).
Closing the eyes to the vegetables industrialization is what I meant by feeling good.
There's an enormous difference between eating grains directly and using them to grow animals which eventually become meat. Industrial meat production has a greater negative environmental impact than agriculture.
But yes, the relevance of suffering seems proportional to relatedness with the sufferer. Or maybe the ability to identify with the sufferer, based on perceived intelligence and self-awareness.
It's also not so black or white. Does a cow have greater "capacity for suffering" than an oyster? Does this have ethical consequences? I think it does.
And yes, maybe oysters are closer to plants than cows, in that regard.
But it's not just about suffering. It's about the morality of killing other lifeforms. Personally, I'm OK with it. I'll be eaten after I die. Indeed, I'm always under attack from bacteria, yeast, molds, etc. But I won't eat anything that I wouldn't kill myself.
Have you actually, personally, killed a cow, chicken, or pig?
Granted, the fauna in question aren't living on the farm, but that's a distinction without a difference.
I'm very skeptical of fake meet insofar as nutrition involves highly complex systems. Surely the risk of a trans-fat-like health debacle is non-negligible ...
tl;dr: fake meat isn't a problem per se, but I sure as hell won't be the first one to eat it. I'll consider it when there's >50 years of hard data on the record.
The hard part of 'fake meat' (which isn't fake, it's real muscle tissue, it's just grown differently) is that muscle alone doesn't taste good, or have a pleasing texture. You need connective tissue, fat, blood vessels... The whole lot, really. And that is a much more difficult problem.
I'm personally looking forward to it, though.
Not where nutritional epidemiology is concerned. Not by a long shot.
Like I said before, I really don't want to push anyone to try anything they don't want to. But people know how hot dogs are made ( https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pw_CTCSkOZI/WAPJuZWaF5I/AAAAAAAAm... ), and it hasn't stopped them, so I expect cultured meat will probably take off pretty quickly once it becomes cheaper than farming.
The devil is in the details, and nutrition touches upon highly complex systems. The point being, we've already seen how seemingly simple, innocuous changes to nutritional substances can have nasty consequences. To think this time is different is pure hubris.
I get your point, but you seem to be missing mine.
Cell culture is growing more of what we've already evolved to eat.
Do I want all food tested for safety? Of course. If they were creating a brand new cell line from scratch instead of using cells we already know we can eat, I would share your concern to a much greater degree.
And I think you're understating the risk of side-effects, i.e.: understating the immense complexity of biological systems.
Yours is little more than a claim of faith.
Seems like a more natural evolutionary correct way to get our food rather than some kind of franken-meat grown i lab.
Every autumn I buy a lamb from the farmer living next to my father, I kind of like it when I can watch my food being happy before I eat it.
also, "natural" is a kind of ridiculous term. plenty of food additives are natural, but that doesn't make them good. also plenty that are unnatural aren't all bad.
medicines are highly "unnatural", but they save lives. why is food any different?
given how quickly we're heading toward a world in which we don't have the land area to be able to feed our population (and by "heading toward" i mean we already don't and it's getting worse), grass fed anything is totally unsustainable. lab grown meat, or lab vegetables might be our best option, and i'd go with that over a tortured chicken any day
The biggest problem is that its inefficient to feed meat animals grain. Instead we should be farming lots of insects for human and animal food!
Lab grown meat is a nice idea, but I don't see how it can scale.
Many medicines also cause more harm than they provide help. Just look at the history of drugs that have had to be taken off the market due to crippling or deadly side effects just to treat some mild cold symptoms or something equally minor.
"Natural" is not at all a ridiculous term. It can be made ridiculous when things like "natural flavoring" aren't any different from "artificial flavoring," but I will take natural (or at least human incrementally improved over generations and generations) over artificial (top down diet science-ing) any day.
How many is 'many'? 50%? 25%? Or simply 'more than zero'?
> but I will take natural (or at least human incrementally improved over generations and generations) over artificial (top down diet science-ing) any day.
I assume that you would prefer an 'unnatural' vaccination to the 'natural' disease it prevents. If so, which categories of 'natural' do you prefer?
As far is 'happy cow' goes, there still can be a huge difference between both cases in how they live and die. Firstly, a 'grass fed' or 'forage chicken' label can cover a whole lot of different things. I don't know which country you're from, whether those are the official definitions nor what they mean. But I do know countries where something like 'forage chicken' depending on exact translation and law doesn't even mean they ever saw any daylight or living plants in their life. Just that they got like 1 square meter to live on instead of 1/4. But it doesn't end there. Take the grassfeeding: even if it actually means they could range free on nice green fields, from the moment production starts being all about the money and goes into the direction of industrial-scale it is unfortunately not unlikely their last hours on the way to and in the slaughterhouse were stress, torture and immense pain. Refer to e.g. the recent (very graphic) movie which popped up in Belgium where you could see what goes on in a slaughterhouses processing thousand of pigs a day and how far it deviated from what the laws for it prescribe.
You understand that this animal is happy and thus does not want to be killed, but you value it being happy.
Don't these two sentiments exclude each other?
Not the OP, but a meat eater. I think it's obvious for most people that they want to eat meat but they don't want to cause unnecessary suffering. Those two sentiments aren't just not mutually exclusive, they complement each other.
I know people who keep animals for their meat- chickens, ducks, goats, pigs and a cow or two. I've seen them really care for, and about their animals, and I couldn't miss the big, loving smiles on their faces when they're around them, particularly the younger ones. I'd call those smiles almost parental.
The same people have no compunction about killing those same animals, even the younger ones (that have the most tender flesh). I'd even go as far as to say that some part of the love they feel for those animals may actually come from knowing how they taste.
It might sound a bit crazy, but I think it's actually natural to love your food, rather than hate it and wish to hurt it.
I also think other animals have similar feelings. For instance:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2017/apr/07/...
[Picture of a lion keeping a zebra fowl alive in the wild]
Allow me to put this into a little statement: "I love you, but now I have to kill you, so I can consume you"
And they still cause suffering. A mother loses her child (calf), a sister her brother, just because there is someone who wants to eat him/her/it?
I'm not going to torture an animal because I derive no pleasure from it. Given the choice, therefore, I would rather the pig lived a happy enough life in a field with little pig huts to live in before it was slaughtered. I'm willing to pay more for that to be the case, because I think it's the decent thing to do.
I don't love animals in general, heck I barely love any humans...
Dog fights used to be very popular, but for some reason most people find it unacceptable even though those dogs probably had/have better lives than most farm animals.
In principle, maybe. In practice, we're really good at dealing with contradictory and even conflicting emotions.
For instance, in the past people used to beat up their kids to teach them things. Today, we generally don't- but that's not because we love our kids any more, or less. We just find it unproductive.
So, yes, it's perfectly possible to dearly love an animal and want to eat it- because, after all, that's why we keep farm animals in the first place: to kill them and eat them (and also for their milk, wool, eggs etc). The relationship that makes us love animals is the same one that makes us kill and eat those same animals.
Edit:
>> A mother loses her child (calf), a sister her brother, just because there is someone who wants to eat him/her/it?
If we didn't do that something else would. Animals kill and eat each other all the time and most of them die when something else eats them.
Of course we're special- but even in our specialness we can only subsist on food that is alive- if it's not a calf, it's an egg that cold have hatched into a chicken, or a fruit that could have grown in a beautiful plant. Calfs and lambs can scream and run away but a cabbage is no less alive.
Not directly relevant to farm animals, but how many married couples don't have fights? I don't think that assumption is right.
And when considering raising and killing an animal vs. never having any animal at all, consider the quote "'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all".
> And they still cause suffering. A mother loses her child (calf), a sister her brother
Unless you have the cure to aging, that's going to happen no matter what. In fact, slaughtering means that more of them die at the same time and don't have to go through this suffering.
Ideally I could eat animals that are happy and content then instantly dead without ever knowing what's happening. If we could breed them with little switches in their brain stems that can be turned to Off via a wireless signal ...
I'd want that. That would be great. Press button, chicken drops dead. Takes 1 microsecond to die.
The more important question is how self-aware is the chicken? Does this self-awareness give it rights? Do rights stem from self-awareness, or from humanness, or is it arbitrary based on a wishy washy feeling of "Hm, that looks too severe. Oh but that other thing, that's okay". Or is how we treat them based purely on how much they can take before the taste becomes too poor for us to bear?
Ultimately the point is that meat is tasty.
If it was only about avoiding suffering/pain and not the dying, would you be okay with farming children for eating?
They will live happy lives pampered and cared for, running around in the backyard until you press a button and child drops dead. Takes 1 microsecond to die.
It's obviously absurd, but you're making that decision with the animals you eat all the time. A chicken (probably) is less self aware than a cow, but we do eat cows.
But how do you decide that another being is un-self-aware enough to be eaten?
Which takes me back to the absurd. If human meat was tasty (I read it isn't), would someone with downs syndrome be morally ok to eat? How about someone in a vegetative state?
If the sliding scale of self awareness is the deciding factor, we might as well eat less aware humans.
If a child grows up and does nothing more than put together a single shoddy chicken coop that lets water in and falls over in a mild breeze it has infinitely out-performed the chicken. People with disabilities are still infinitely more capable than chickens, cows, most any animal we eat.
There's also the problem of disease transmission too if you really want to hash out the idea. Most diseases don't transfer between species (at least not in catastrophic ways), if we were eating other humans there would be a lot of new diseases we'd need to fight or die from. See also BSE [1] and CJD [2] as examples of problems that occur through cannibalism.
[1] Bovine spongiform encephalopathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...
[2] Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt%E2%80%93Jakob_dise... - particularly the "Cannibalism" section of Transmission.
This is true for most people except that pigs are smarter than dogs and many people won't eat dog meat.
Relative intelligence is difficult to measure. Would I eat a person if they were actually dumber than a chicken?
In a survival situation, not having a choice, sure. I would eat the dumb person before the smart dog. That is a strange thing to say though..
Would you mind dying right now? Or would you prefer to stay alive? Sure, one might argue that once you're dead you don't mind anymore, but while being alive, you usually strongly prefer staying that way.
It's that simple.
It certainly is difficult to determine wheter or not something wants to live, but in the case of chickens we can be fairly sure, as they display somewhat intelligent behaviour, and actively avoid harm.
Sure I'd prefer to stay alive because I'm curious what happens next. But realistically speaking my death is other people's problem not mine.
Dying is easy. It's other people that suffer the consequences.
Although the process of dying, if drawn out, sounds hella unpleasant. I wouldn't want that part.
If we're talking step into the street and get splattered by a runaway 18-wheeler, instant brain death ... fuck it, not my problem.
If we're talking 8 months of ineffectual chemo followed by 10 hours of drawing my last breath ... I'd rather just shoot myself.
If we're talking normal life vs "eat this pill and aging becomes so slow you will be physically and mentally young well into your 90s followed by death of old age at 140" ... yeah I will definitely take that pill.
I'm not sure that really answers your question but there you go. My views on life and death.
You're assuming this as a premise, which I think may be the root of the problem. Plenty of people don't believe that livestock is intelligent enough to comprehend the idea of death, or really anticipate the future in general. How then would it have a desire about future events?
> Don't these two sentiments exclude each other?
Wanting something to be happy whilst not respecting its autonomy is common amongst humans, so I'd say no. Additionally, killing an animal humanely doesn't cause it to be unhappy, since dead animals are incapable of experiencing emotional states.
There's an inkling of empathy there, I suppose. It's a start.
We just disagree with you on the question of whether veganism is the answer to a very real problem.
But consider that bleeding to death is also considered to be relatively painless, as a suicide method.
I feel like this argument collapses when given any serious thought. Mainly because even without experiencing either, I'd consider drawing a warm bath and cutting your own wrists a very different experience compared to hanging upside down and somebody else cutting your throat.
I've never cut my wrists, but I have experienced substantial rapid blood loss. The injury itself wasn't at all painful, in the moment. Not until much later, waiting to heal. And the experience was actually rather peaceful, rather like methaqualone or diazepam. Except for the freakout about stopping the bleeding, anyway.
It's my understanding that proper kosher/halal slaughter is supposed to be non-traumatic. Because trauma makes the meat taste bad.
It's really interesting to me that you reached for fake meat instead of better farming practices.
I'm vegan, I've decided against the current practices. I applaud any attempt to move towards or support better practices. But I don't think eating meat from previously living creatures is for me.
But I am seriously undecided for lab meat. I don't really mind the chemical components of meat, some of them seem really useful. And no animals were harmed, it could probably be a lot more energy efficient. Also, there is the potential for serious scale I imagine, which interests me. Not sure when it could get there though.
If that happens I think "real meat" might end up being the fancy expensive stuff :)
He swung open her door. “This is her nest,” he said proudly. I looked and gulped.
It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored. Chicken Little filled most of it. She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter. Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh. You could see that she was alive.
Herrera said to me: “All day I walk around her. I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice.” His two-handed blade screamed again. This time it shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak. (Ch. 9)
Also [2]:
Scum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America.
On January 17, 1912, Nobel prize-winning physician Dr. Alexis Carrel placed a part of a chicken's embryo heart in a nutrient medium in a glass flask of his own design. Every forty-eight hours the tissue doubled in size and was transferred to a new flask. Twenty years later, it was still growing.
In his 1941 story Methuselah's Children, Robert Heinlein paid homage to his work by referring to the famous chicken as a research tool for the long-lived Howard Families:
Lazarus found her servicing the deathless tissue of chicken heart known to the laboratory crew as "Mrs. 'Awkins." Mrs. 'Awkins was older than any member of the Families save possibly Lazarus himself; she was a growing piece of the original tissue obtained by the Families from the Rockefeller Institute in the twentieth century, and the tissues had been alive since early in the twentieth century even then. Dr. Hardy and his predecessors had kept their bit of it alive for more than two centuries now, using the Carrel-Lindbergh-O'Shaug techniques and still Mrs. 'Awkins flourished.
[1] http://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.nl/2012/08/this-is-her...
Just replace New York with San Francisco, and "ad agencies" with "tech companies who derive their revenue from ads"... And the book is a surprisingly accurate satirical portrait of what we're living today. (You can also see a shadow of Donald Trump in the book's portrayal of the U.S. President.)