Good news for pigs. I’ll be delighted to see factory farming disappear and be replaced by tech like this.
Yeah but what are we gonna do with all these pigs then? Uplift them and invite them into our society?
Slaughter them for one last time and spare their future generations by removing their lineage from existence. Nbd
We could let the pigs run the farm, then document what happens.
You could even write a book about that!
Eat the last generation and put a couple in zoos, like we did with all species once they are no longer useful…
This was definitely one of my concerns when I first went vegan, but thankfully, it’s really not a problem at all, due to basic supply and demand.
Everyone in the world isn’t going to go vegan overnight. The demand for animal products will gradually decline over decades, and farmers won’t waste their time and money by raising more animals than they can sell, so the supply will decline in turn.
Release them into the wild
Imagine how that moment would look on The Simpsons. Imagine Lisa hitting the button to free them all
Animal reservoir? Instead of millions of pigs sent to the slaughter, thousands in free range zones where they can have their stem cells harvested without suffering. And “train” the rest to live on their original place.
Their original place is farms.
Yeah, not a good idea. There are wild hogs, but our farm pigs are not good for the wild. They go feral and become giant and dangerous and do a lot of damage, and they also breed like crazy. It’s actually a really big issue. These animals are meant for the farm and nothing more.
Technically kosher because there’s no cloven hooves?
As a technical Jew I can say that yes, this is technically kosher ^disclaimer: I have no knowledge at all of Jewish custom or scripture^
What
Their mother was Jewish but they haven’t been taught the religion, making them technically Jewish but without any knowledge of Judaism.
He’s a Jew but not Jewish.
Like me.
One is an ethnicity. The other is a religion. It’s easy to get them confused.
He’s Jew-ish
So is everybody here a technical Jew? Like, that’s three of us, and this isn’t a huge community.
I’m Brian, and so is my wife.
Brian is an interesting name for a woman. Then again, my brother Steven married a man named Stephen.
Ahhhhh this makes more sense, thanks for clarifying!
Bingo 👍👌
They’re a theoretical Jew like Einstein was a theoretical physicist.
New judaism lore dropped
But is it considered cannon?
They’re not technically kosher. Nor halal.
NOT YET
It hasn’t officially been ruled upon by either kosher or halal certification boards yet (although many Jewish and Islamic leaders have expressed differing opinions on the matter), but most lab meat growers very much hope it will be ruled as what is known as “parvere” — or not meat. That is to say, since it didn’t actually come from an animal, it’s not technically meat, it has no blood, wasn’t slaughtered, etc., and, as such is considered more in line with a vegetable or other foodstuff that isn’t milk or meat.
If lab meat is considered in this way, it could clear the way for Kosher and Halal certification as well as for Hindus who do not eat beef, and many others with objections to eating meat for various reasons.
kosher or halal certification boards
That’s fucking wild.
We live in a brave New World, adjudicated by a very old and blind one
Imagine if the next big Abrahamic schism comes over wether or not lab grown meat is halal/kosher or not.
While the Christians cry over whether it’s “woke”.
Asking the real questions!
Yes, very Kosher.
source: porky the pig
I’m skeptical. It’s been really picking hard to get those things to grow in a vat. This would be a huge breakthrough, and popsci has a way of leaving out critical, fatal details.
Such as “a claim proven by the hundred pounds of pseudo pork they shipped us overnight”?
I didn’t read the article. I assume this journalist made zero primary observations?
I mean, even shipping it wouldn’t say anything about what it’s production cost is. Only that they paid it.
It literally quotes the company spokesperson as the main source on all this, and then comments on the brand having done a taste-test in Singapore.
OK, but how does it taste?
Sausage is smart since you can get away with a lot of textural sins, and it’s already expected to be packed with sodium.
Follow-up questions will also include price.
I mean it also heavily depends on the exact version of sausage. We already have fake Mortadella made from peas (I think) which I can not (or barely) tell apart from the real thing. And at the other end of the sausage spectrum, Chorizo or Sujuk have enough spices, paprika and/or garlic and cumin in it so you can probably hide a lot of stuff instead of pork in it. Though I haven’t yet found a fake version of those which I liked. And sometimes my German nature gets in the way. I’ve had sausage abroad. And some people put actual ground-up pigs in there and the product still doesn’t taste of anything I’d call sausage. I also had those british-style breakfast sausages with a really weird consistency. It’s really quite some variety with sausage, already. And I still need a good plant based alternative to Salami and pepperoni on pizza.
It says they sampled it. It doesn’t say how it tasted. Hmmmm…
Yeah, that’s a little suspicious.
I’ve been waiting for that for so long. Just hope governments and people give it a fair chance instead of jumping rashly negative conclusions just because it is lab grown. So is beer, and cheese, and most other things we consume.
I mean, with modern sausages, it’s mostly trash or overpriced. They taste like they have 5% meat, 95% sawdust.
No idea where you get your sausages but look elsewhere
Italy’s politicians in a fantastically backward and utterly brain farted move has made “synthetic meat” outlaw, for study, production, sale and consume, like already some months ago, just to please the local (read: national) farmers lobby. Or at least they adverised as they did… forgive me I kinda lost hope and interst as well.
Gotta love the totally-not-neofascist Meloni government :(
I’m not exactly what you would call concerned about meat as a food source. I’m fine with it. But anything that can break the need for industrial farming is a damn good thing imo.
I’m eager for a good product to come to market so I can at least try it. So far, there hasn’t been one that’s available that’s priced well enough to be a viable choice, nor that matches expectations of taste. Textures have gotten good though.
But I think a sausage format is a great place for cultured meats to break into because there’s a wide range of ingredients with different flavors already. We’re used to sausages being fairly varied in taste and texture, so adding a new type is less of a “new food” barrier. Tbh though, it’s gotta be better than veggie sausages, those are pretty meh at best.
Ok can it be translated to meat on the table with costs and impact being less than actual pig slaughtering? I wouldn’t even mind the taste being a little different
This stuff was basically ready to go minus scaling up two decades ago. They were still working on adding marbling and texture into steaks that could fool you in a blind test, but amazed it’s taken this long to get to sausages.
I think you got your timing wrong. The first prototype of cultured meat was presented 2013 and costed about 250.000 € back then. “Minus scaling up” was and is a pretty big issue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/05/world-first-synthetic-hamburger-mouth-feel
So when can we realistically expect this to be a thing?
Rednecks on Facebook are already getting butthurt about this like this and asking lab grown meat to be banned
They’re going on about stuff like cancer or whatever
Uhh. That’s meaningless? What’s the energy/resource usage comparison.
I’d try to use money to calculate that. For farming, there’s probably tons of data. But for growing meat, there won’t be as good a model of what this thing’s inputs are. Like say it takes a dropperful of iodine at one point in the process. What’s the energy content of that iodine?
Money would be a good approximation of this: what’s the cost of producing that pork versus rearing a pig?
For us, it’s essential that our meat is available to and affordable for everyone. So it will, at the very least, be the same price range as traditional meat.
That’s the claim
Only meaningless on one scale. It seems like a huge improvement on the animal cruelty scale.
Eh it’s not great but if they can create true pork competitive product quickly, that can be profitable in a chaotic market, allowing them to scale production to meet more unforseen/fast moving demand.
Does this mean no more plastic fed to pigs?
I’m not exactly sure, but I think we can combine pork growing vats and AI to create a new species.
Make way for a bit of porkbeef and some chick-eye steak for the adventurous.
Wait until pig cancer cells turn into sausages 90 times faster
I see the sustainability argument, but it doesn’t address my main concern, which is that it sounds yucky. Still, I’ll eat lab sausage before I eat cockroach patties so 🤷
Why does this sound more yucky than the current way of obtaining meat?
