spoke to two cultured cell scientists the other day - they said we’re about 40 years away from making cultured beef joints. Not quite at bladerunner replicant level yet.
i hope the tech will one day make slaughtering animals for meat a social taboo
like remembering the times before we had toilet paper…
However, the tech alone isn’t even close to what’s needed, remove mead subsidies. make it so it’s a one every few days meal (like it used to be), not the core part of every meal.
also increase animal welfare regulation, so animals suffer less.
that will pivot farmers from meat production, and animal feed production to produce. we will need much less land to cultivate, so rewild them. IE, just abandon them and let nature reclaim it.
remove mead subsidies.
We have mead subsides? Do we have a strategic mead stockpile? Can I get some fermented honey?
/j
I’m making mead in Vintage Story… I should get a small bottle to remind myself why I don’t drink the stuff.
that will pivot farmers from meat production, and animal feed production to produce. we will need much less land to cultivate, so rewild them. IE, just abandon them and let nature reclaim it.
I would argue, for the US, we should not rewild, but rematriate. Return the land to the tribes we stole it from and let them decide what to do next.
After all, Native Americans were the keystone species in every biome in North America for tens of thousands of years. Restoring the pre-Colombian ecology requires humans to occupy and manage the land. The myth of human-free American wilderness is settler colonial bullshit.
I’m on board with this, but, and I’m totally willing to be corrected if I’m wrong, abandoning our farm animals en mass seems like a bad idea. Especially pigs. Cows might fill the niche left by bison or aurochs, chickens are fucking suicidal and find unique ways to die whenever possible, but farm pigs turn into giant ass boar that aren’t native and can genuinely harm people, property, pets and just generally wreak havoc. I’m not sure what a good alternative is, to be honest, since their current conditions are utterly cruel, but just turning them loose by the millions seems like something we’ll regret a lot a decade later
A quick and dirty internet search says that a typical farm pig lives around 7 months. So you could ban every meat pig product in a year, stop breeding new pigs and just murder the old ones for meat and you would have no problem at all. So a grace period of less than a year is needed and you wouldn’t have this problem. (I also seriously doubt that most farm pigs would be able to survive in the wild, but for that i am not knowledgeable enough. But e.g. modern chickens have a huge calcium deficiency which makes them not very suited for wildlife, there was an study that the average chicken at any given time has three broken bones.)
Or to put it in another way, we have to replace all farm pigs almost twice yearly anyway, so let’s just stop replacing them.
That makes a lot of sense. My knowledge on feral farm pigs is anecdotal at best, but from what I’ve been told and understand (at work now, so not enough time to research it properly) hogs that get released or escape breed with wild pigs and create dangerous pigstrosities, but that may well be farmer lore/old wives tales for all I know
My knowledge of the bovine threat comes from Some More News. the only news agency that isn’t afraid to report the truth about pigs that the main stream media doesn’t want you to know.
sorry, but definition not just releasing farm animals into the wild.
let’s just have a gradual transition where frames just raise less animals as demand decreases.
good, releasing all the farm animals into the wild might do more damage than what those farms are doing.
I meant just letting abandoned farms turn into wild forests, now opening the gates.
oh my god, I made do many typos I can’t read it
RIP my lemm.ee account,
Holy hell I am like a 30 minute tram ride away from this. Will definitely give it a shot when I can. I am not used to things being this close lmao
Awesome! I’m currently pursuing a biochemistry degree with the goal of working in the cultivated meat industry, so this is super exciting to me! It seems the process is still too clunky for effective mass production, unfortunately. But hey - maybe that’s a problem I’ll be able to help solve!
To make their product, the food company’s scientists collect living cells from Pacific salmon
And how can the salmon give free, prior, informed consent for this? This is still exploitation. This is not vegan.
EDIT: This could be done ethically if the company collected still-living cells from the bodies of recently deceased salmon in spawning season or if they collected genetic material from male gametes that did not end up fertilising an egg, but I’ve not found anything to suggest that this company does it this way.
I’m a bit curious is purists like yourself also don’t take nearly all modern medicine. Like legit curious.
The fact that youre not joking is insane lol
Oh come on, cut the nonsense
No animal can give consent. Hell, no human could give consent if they didn’t speak the same language as you.
Given the option to be killed or getting a scratch to take a sample of cells, you don’t think any animal would chose the latter? That is, of course, if animals could understand that concept even.
Look, there is doing the right thing and there is just pretending to do so. This, of applicable to all animals, would be a huge leap forward. Factory farming without the abuse of sentient beings is enormous for animal rights and treatment. We could stop pulling the seas empty, no more tortuous slaughter houses…
But here you are “but the animals didn’t consent to a needle prick, it’s bad!”
Found the consequentialist.
Consent-wise, would a side-to-side tail-waggle count as a Yes or a No?
I can’t tell if this is a serious question, but I don’t know enough about salmon to answer it, or even whether there would be a conclusive answer.
EDIT: And that was kind of the point. I don’t know whether it would even be possible for a salmon to consent to this sort of thing.
Are you serious about this? If so that standard seems pretty insane to me.
Like, we essentially can’t do anything with animals with that…
Did you look at what community you’re commenting on? Why are you so determined to use other animals?
Like, we essentially can’t do anything with animals with that…
Yes. That’s the point. Animals are sapient beings with rights, not objects to “do things with”.
That being said, I recognize how far out of the Overton Window that attitude is.
Positive thought: if cultured meat goes mainstream, I expect there will be demand for “ethically sourced” cell lines - or some ad campaign will use it as a selling point - and shift the idea of not exploiting animals just a tiny bit closer to the mainstream :)
I’m a bit curious is purists like yourself also don’t take nearly all modern medicine. Like legit curious.
The definition of veganism, from the Vegan Society:
Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment.
Please note the italics.
Living without modern medicine fits squarely within “not possible or practicable” because you can literally die without it. If you refuse vaccines or treatment for contagious diseases, it’s even more compelling, because you’re not only risking your life but the lives of others.
On the other hand, it is completely possible and practicable to live without lab-grown meat, so “were animals exploited to create this product” is a much more relevant consideration.
Then does that mean you can’t take pain killers of any kind? What about birth control for the primary use case?
And based on that definition, it would sound then this Salmon would be allowed, even if a few were killed, because it would prevent the permanent suffering of billions of future salmon.
Pain - especially chronic pain - can shorten one’s life significantly, never mind one’s quality of life. And people die from giving birth. It’s possible to refuse those meds but I wouldn’t call it exactly practical.
But really, what possible and practicable mean differs from vegan to vegan, the same way “thou shalt not kill” differs among different Christians. And it’s the same with lab grown meat. There is a possible ethical consideration based on the sourcing of cell lines; some vegans may oppose lab grown meat based on that, other vegans might decide it’s perfectly fine, still others would personally refuse to eat it but encourage its development for the sake of harm mitigation. Who knows. Put five vegans in a room and you’ll have six different opinions.
I mean that essentially all human interactions with animals seem like they’d be unethical under that standard. Like obviously no pets, but I assume that’s way further up the chain of thoughts (and while I don’t agree, I think that’s a reasonable stance to have). But also it seems like we wouldn’t be able to do things like tagging certain species for tracking purposes, something we do primarily for conservation. Or like moving animals out of spaces made for humans (I.E. buildings.) My problem is that an animal cannot consent to anything, so informed consent as a standard means that all human-animal interactions seem to be exploitative. IDK, maybe I’m thinking about this wrong, or maybe I’ve interpreted it as more extreme than it is.
I should state that I’m trying (and possibly failing) to examine it as an idea on its own terms, not argue that you shouldn’t believe it.
I think of it this way: in what situations can we act on a human’s body without that human’s informed consent?
And one of those times is when an action needs to be taken for that human’s own good, and the human is unable to comprehend the situation enough to give informed consent. When a young child or an unconscious person needs medical treatment, for instance.
I think tracking or relocating wildlife would fall under that category. Does a bear understand why it’s not safe for it to break into people’s cars and eat their McDonald’s wrappers? No. Does the bear want to leave its territory and be shipped somewhere without cars full of delicious McDonald’s wrappers? Certainly not. But we can’t convince the bear to leave those delicious McDonald’s wrappers alone, so instead we relocate the bear, to protect both it and us.
On the other hand, harvesting a human’s cells for medical experiments? Does require informed consent, even if, as the history of Henrietta Lacks painfully shows, that requirement has often been ignored.
And harvesting cells to clone for food falls more on the medical experiments side of things than the “for their own good” side.
Probably less important when dealing with animals, where it’s usually more cut and dry, but I’ve got some hangups about our ability to make objective decisions about what is “in something/one’s best interests.”
I see the point. I won’t say I necessarily agree with it. I think the ethical considerations are much stronger in the “in favor of” column for this development than in the “against.” Which TBH, I don’t know if that’s a statement Jim East was disagreeing with. I do think that in the future we could probably improve the ethics of this kind of process by applying more rigorous standards, but in the near term its probably better to focus on stopping killing animals for food in general.
Either way, it doesn’t really matter for my actions, as I don’t have access to lab-grown meat anyway.
but I’ve got some hangups about our ability to make objective decisions about what is “in something/one’s best interests.”
Yeah, me too :/ It’s like every human (or animal) right - it has to be enforced by people, and people are pretty shitty. I don’t think that means we reject the principle, it means we put guardrails around it to try and prevent errors and abuses.
And I certainly agree: lab grown meat is far less heinous and morally offensive than factory farming. It involves a moral compromise for vegans, but, well, so does almost everything else. We can recognize both aspects.
It’s the same standard that I use for young children. If doing the thing is not clearly in their best interest, I don’t touch them without their consent.
So yes, just leave other animals alone. Pretty simple.
