Try my meaty poll

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1820279]

context

Comments

[zz]

I would not be willing to pay a premium for either of those
...on a regular basis. while it was new and shiny, as a one off, sure.

[simont]

If it was really indistinguishable from normal meat then I would feel a little disappointed that they hadn't taken the opportunity to make it more consistently tender, remove gristly bits, not have inconvenient bones, and so on. If it was like meat but with the annoying misfeatures fixed then I'd pay a premium for that.

If they could produce it at a lower resource cost than ordinary meat but then charged more for it than ordinary meat, I would probably feel that was excessive profiteering! (And no doubt they'd use their patents to go after anyone who tried to set up in competition and actually pass the savings on to the customer.)

[steer.livejournal.com]

Surely resource cost and financial cost are not the same thing. I think the cost we're talking about here is, in specific, the cost to the ecosystem which meat-eating causes (though people disagree hugely about the magnitude of this). It's wholly possible there will be a point where the artificial meat is much better in terms of resource usage but must worse in terms of financial cost.

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

If this takes off successfully, I think we're more likely to reach a situation where people pay a premium for meat that has required the killing of animals.

[andrewducker]

Oh, 20 years after it's taken off people will be shocked that anyone kills animals for food at all. Right now most people justify it to themselves with "But I grew up eating beef, and it tastes good, so killing cows is ok." Once that justification goes, I suspect people will flock to artificial food, and it will suddenly be very weird to _choose_ to kill animals when you have a choice not to.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I've read Oryx and Crake - and after reading that novel no fucking way would I eat meat made that way.

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

If they could make meat from my own cells then they really could say you are what you eat.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

Gah, this is nightmare poll for me, my answers would depend so much on what resources lab grown meat would require, what waste products it would produce etc and how that balances out with normal meat production in terms of energy and resource use and environmental impact of these things.

I genuinely have no moral objection to killing animals for food as long as it is done as humanely as possible and they have had a good life beforehand. I'd like to raise and eat my own animals if I ever have the opportunity to do so. As it is I only buy high welfare standard, outdoor reared British meat, and eat quite a lot of veggy food to balance the cost. As an ecologist, I'm also very aware that if we got rid of all livestock, our landscape would look very different.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

I'd compare the resources and environmental impact with my current diet - veggie and try-to-be local; I don't eat e.g. tofu due to the impact of its production. If it was a *lot* better I'd consider artificial meat, but I also really hate the taste of most meat (as far as I recall at more than 20 years' remove).

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

I don't think the problem is the amount of energy eetc required for humans to eat meat; I think the problem is too many humans in the first place. CULL THE HUMANS!

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

:-) that was my point too :-)

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

I would rather not go near a burger made from cells taken from me, actually - to put cells into culture they'll have to be immortalized and probably have chromosomal abnormalities and other ways of getting round the natural blocks on cell division, and I would like to avoid eating my own pre-cancerous cells just in case.

[laplor.livejournal.com]

Chickie Nobs!!!

[sigmonster.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum

If there's a muscle cell culture which doesn't use other meat products in the medium, I have yet to hear of it....

[andrewducker]

At this point there isn't, so far as I know. I suspect it's only a matter of time though.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I would be willing to pay a premium for the artificial meat on the grounds that it had a lesser impact on the environment but I would expect that premium to be offset by some combination of lower prices for other commodities that are grown on the land or use the resources currently used for burger production and lower costs from environmetal damage.

[frandowdsofa.livejournal.com]

I answered the way I did because you specified "grown in a lab". If you'd asked the real question, "manufactured in an industrial environment", not by scientists or technicians but by transient ill-paid untrained factory workers, you would have got a different set of answers.

[andrewducker]

People currently eat all sorts of food which is prepared by transient ill-paid untrained factory workers. They (mostly) don't seem to care very much.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

*celebrity* human meat - it's the future I tell ya...

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I don't want to live in a world where that is the future.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

The answer to the planet not supporting the current level of human population with us eating an optimal diet for our physiology is not for us to eat a poor-quality (i.e. grain/legume based) diet or artifical or highly-processed foods - it's to cut the damn population.

(same applies to overuse of other natural resources)

Of course, that is self-solving..... but it'd be a lot *nicer* if we managed that ourselves before the usual suspects of population control kick in.... (disease, war etc....)

[andrewducker]

The population problem is self-solving, with 42% of the planet already below replenishment levels of reproduction, and every sign that rising education levels cause the same effect everywhere they spread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility

[charleysjob.livejournal.com]

They are, of course, already at work on growing human-meat in labs. A friend of mine got his master's in bioengineering on the topic. Of course, they don't call it "growing human-meat", they call it "producing organs which are a 100% genetic match, drastically reducing if not eliminating the risk of rejection after a transplant".

But hey, if they grew you two new livers, you could always ask for the second one fried with onions...

[andrewducker]

That is a _very_ good point.

Not that I like liver.

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

Humans are omnivores/predators and would thus probably taste rather bitter and unpleasant.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

You'll just have to limit yourself to eating vegetarians.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Yes, well, I wasn't quite organised enough to ask to keep my own placenta to stew it. Slightly regret that now but honestly it's just one more thing to think about when you're incredibly busy anyway.

I believe that nearly all the 'meat' on Pizza Hut pizzas is artifically textured soya in any case and people are completely up for that, mostly because they don't realise. So we're part way there. If they can create fake meat that tastes like (and has the complex nutritional values of) the best organic meat then I'd be entirely happy. I don't tend to buy Quorn because I find it hard to make it as tasty as the relatively cheap cuts of meat I buy.

[andrewducker]

I didn't know that about Pizza Hut! I shall have to do some digging.

I've eaten Quorn Chicken, and found it ok, but a bit rubbery. I'd put up with it, but Julie likes her chicken :->

[redshira.livejournal.com]

I only eat meat because I need to keep my carb intake to a minimum and maximise my protein intake and have a shedload of food intolerances that make that really difficult, and a large part of what makes meat-eating so abhorrent to me is the squick; veins, gristle, fat, etc. I spend an hour takng the objectionable parts out of my chicken before eating it *every time*, so if the meat could be grown without veins etc, I would definitely pay more to get that rather than normal meat. I still wouldn't enjoy it, because I dislike the taste and texture of meat, but it would save me a lot of time & energy, and reduce my disgust levels.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

As a vegetarian, how would I *know* that the meat was lab-grown? I woudn't trust someone who said so. I wouldn't like the normalisation of vat-meat-eating among vegetarians, it would make it far to easy to also eat dead animal.

Some vegetarians find even Quorn is "disturbingly meaty" - I did at first. Eating something that tastes as much like real meat as possible is missing the point.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Eating something that tastes as much like real meat as possible is missing the point.

That rather suggests you're a vegetarian because you don't like the taste. What if you're a vegetarian who thinks that meat tastes good but you are willing to abstain for ethical principles.

[gwendally.livejournal.com]

I eat meat that is locally raised by farmers I know. The animals are born, live a happy life in the sun gamboling and playing, pooping in the fields. They have one bad day but got to live in the first place. And my farmer friends got a job working outdoors with their fields, with animals. And I get nutritious meat that tastes good.

I pay a premium to get sustainably raised meat, and get to live in a place that has both farmers and farm fields as a result.

Read Wendell Berry if you don't get my perspective. There's honor in this.

[wolfieboy.livejournal.com]

Artificial human meat seems like a wonderful way to spread new-fangled diseases that we don't know how to screen for.

[steer.livejournal.com]

How on earth would artificial meat spread diseases? That seems a kind of whacky idea.

[erratio.livejournal.com]

If I had enough money to pay a premium for food in general, I would pay a premium for ethical/efficient meat. But alas, I am but a poor grad student.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

Taste is what matters. v1.0 will not taste as good. Plus, I suspect stuff others list as misfeatures (veins, gristle, etc) are precisely the things I like about meat, so there's multiple markets that need to be satisfied.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

I realise that ticking both:
"I would be willing to pay a premium for meat that required less resources than ordinary meat"

and

"I would not be willing to pay a premium for either of those"

is a bit contradictory. I'd be willing to pay a premium to begin with to offset the development costs, but would expect the cost to come down and eventually be at a discount to meat that requires more resource, cos that's just how things work.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I'm vegetarian for IBS-related reasons, which I suspect would not be avoided by lab-grown meat. The idea of lab-grown "human" meat squicks me irrationally, so I answered on that basis, but I don't actually think it would be morally wrong to eat it if the source could be guaranteed, nor would I want it banned or anything (but you know me well enough to guess that.)