"There are more than 10,000 chemicals added directly or indirectly to foods in the US and food makers use an estimated 1,000 without notifying the FDA. In a policy statement as recent as Monday, July 23, the American Academy of Pediatrics noted that of the nearly 4,000 additives inventoried by the FDA, only about 263 had reproductive toxicology data, and developmental toxicology data was only available for two of the additives."

Better make sure those "tried and true" substitutes don't use any of those...

This is precisely why I, for one, have recently chosen to begin eating real meat after 10+ years of veganism. Who wants to be a lab rat in some food scientist's experiment? How many of the Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) substances will turn out to be anything but?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in his books including _Antifragile_ how he doesn't eat any fruit that doesn't have an ancient Greek or Hebrew name, and doesn't drink any liquid that hasn't been in existence for 1,000+ years. Those which pass through this great filter have survived the test of time.

Humans have eaten bovines before history, cattle being domesticated around 8000 BCE but even earlier, about four million years ago Australopithecus, an ancient predecessor to genus Homo, ate meat. Their contemporaries, Hominin, did not and were outcompeted by the meat-eating Australopithecus (Scientific American: Early Meat-Eating Human Ancestors Thrived While Vegetarian Hominin Died Out, 2012).

Eating meat, and beef especially, is in our DNA. Soy hemoglobin "leghemoglobin" is not. I know which one I'll choose.

Also bear in my mind the way which our ancestors ate meat is very different to how we do it, and there is much evidence that red meat consumption is bad for your health in the modern context with our long lifespans.

To be honest, it is very confusing to try and work out what constitutes a healthy diet these days.

Personally, I'm going to keep eating meat, but I'm kind of old-fashioned

Leeches actually are valid medical science. There just were not better alternatives at the time, and they sometimes can still be used today.

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    The certificate is only valid for the following names: web2.uconn.edu, phonebook.uconn.edu, testsite.uconn.edu 

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Maybe HN has jumped ship and I need to simply move on.

Being concerned about the quality of what you consume is likely to be correlated with being skeptical about meat substitutes made in a lab. I suspect the whole project of incorporating a little inherent contradiction.

If you tell me meat is not good for my health, or the planet, and I'm convinced, then I'm going to reason that I should probably just minimize my meat consumption and eat things based on age-old recipes, not be a fanatic about meatless purity or seek out weird meat substitutes.

This may not be an obvious point of view if you see avoiding meat as primarily an animal rights issue and associate it with technological progress.