<story><title>World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day</title><url>https://www.slashgear.com/worlds-first-lab-grown-meat-facility-pumps-out-5000-burgers-per-day-25680053/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iammisc</author><text>Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition.&lt;p&gt;For example, goats eat almost any plant, including many natives. Unless you think humans are going to be able to eat chaparral.&lt;p&gt;The fact is that modern edible agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuel and mined fertilizers. Until we solve that problem, it&amp;#x27;s better to stop growing too many plants, let native vegetation regrow and set loose the troops of goats and chickens.&lt;p&gt;People have this idea that plants and vegetables are clean..they&amp;#x27;re not</text></item><item><author>wcoenen</author><text>I suspect reality will be a lot more boring.&lt;p&gt;Animals are a low efficiency method of converting plant material into meat, both in terms of calories and protein mass input&amp;#x2F;output. So with scale, eventually lab-grown meat should become much cheaper than traditional meat. At the same time, it will be higher quality. Sterile production will eliminate E. Coli, salmonella, antibiotics... Input nutrients will be tightly controlled. Environmental pollutants and parasites will be kept out.&lt;p&gt;Traditional meat will still be available, but it will be an expensive and morally questionable luxury product, like &amp;quot;foie gras&amp;quot; today.</text></item><item><author>marcus_holmes</author><text>I always wonder about the morality questions. This is like a lab experiment for subjective morality.&lt;p&gt;For the sake of the experiment, let&amp;#x27;s assume the sci-fi writers are right, and eating animals will eventually be considered immoral. This is an extreme stance at the moment (hello PETA) but let&amp;#x27;s assume it will eventually be accepted as the only moral stance.&lt;p&gt;How long will it be between the introduction of lab-grown meat until killing animals for food is banned? Is this a generational thing (so older people still consider eating animals to be acceptable, while younger people do not), or is it a country-wide thing (countries move to ban eating animals one by one, driven by a general shift in moral attitude),  or what? How does this change in morality propagate through society?&lt;p&gt;Will we get to the point where statues of now-famous people are pulled down because they ate animals? Assuming some variant of &amp;quot;cancel culture&amp;quot; exists then, will that act retroactively and currently-lionised people get cancelled because they are carnivores, even though the current culture that they exist in considers it acceptable?&lt;p&gt;Will we see clever re-interpretations of religious texts dealing with the eating of animals? Will we get religious divisions between different interpretations? Will some people refuse to accept the general moral stance on eating animals because their religious text says it&amp;#x27;s acceptable? How does this interaction between objective religious morality and subjective secular morality work?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s going to be really interesting to watch this unfold.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tfehring</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s true that most of the food consumed by livestock isn&amp;#x27;t edible by humans - [0] says 86% - but livestock are &lt;i&gt;so&lt;/i&gt; inefficient at converting food to edible nutrition that they still generally consume more than 1 human-edible Calorie per Calorie of meat produced. For cattle, &lt;i&gt;Diet for a Small Planet&lt;/i&gt; [1] cites 16 Calories per edible Calorie of meat and 8 grams of protein per edible gram of protein produced, other sources seem to be in the same ballpark - both higher than the ~7:1 ratio that&amp;#x27;s implied by that 86% figure. The ratios for chickens are better, but they also generally get a much lower share of their feed from human-inedible sources.&lt;p&gt;Also, even that 86% isn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; - it&amp;#x27;s not all pasturing, and it takes a lot of effort, energy, and equipment to get hay, inedible by-products of human-edible crops, etc. from the field to animals&amp;#x27; mouths.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cgiar.org&amp;#x2F;news-events&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;fao-sets-the-record-straight-86-of-livestock-feed-is-inedible-by-humans&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cgiar.org&amp;#x2F;news-events&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;fao-sets-the-record-s...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Diet-Small-Planet-20th-Anniversary&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;0345321200&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Diet-Small-Planet-20th-Anniversary&amp;#x2F;dp...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day</title><url>https://www.slashgear.com/worlds-first-lab-grown-meat-facility-pumps-out-5000-burgers-per-day-25680053/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iammisc</author><text>Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition.&lt;p&gt;For example, goats eat almost any plant, including many natives. Unless you think humans are going to be able to eat chaparral.&lt;p&gt;The fact is that modern edible agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuel and mined fertilizers. Until we solve that problem, it&amp;#x27;s better to stop growing too many plants, let native vegetation regrow and set loose the troops of goats and chickens.&lt;p&gt;People have this idea that plants and vegetables are clean..they&amp;#x27;re not</text></item><item><author>wcoenen</author><text>I suspect reality will be a lot more boring.&lt;p&gt;Animals are a low efficiency method of converting plant material into meat, both in terms of calories and protein mass input&amp;#x2F;output. So with scale, eventually lab-grown meat should become much cheaper than traditional meat. At the same time, it will be higher quality. Sterile production will eliminate E. Coli, salmonella, antibiotics... Input nutrients will be tightly controlled. Environmental pollutants and parasites will be kept out.&lt;p&gt;Traditional meat will still be available, but it will be an expensive and morally questionable luxury product, like &amp;quot;foie gras&amp;quot; today.</text></item><item><author>marcus_holmes</author><text>I always wonder about the morality questions. This is like a lab experiment for subjective morality.&lt;p&gt;For the sake of the experiment, let&amp;#x27;s assume the sci-fi writers are right, and eating animals will eventually be considered immoral. This is an extreme stance at the moment (hello PETA) but let&amp;#x27;s assume it will eventually be accepted as the only moral stance.&lt;p&gt;How long will it be between the introduction of lab-grown meat until killing animals for food is banned? Is this a generational thing (so older people still consider eating animals to be acceptable, while younger people do not), or is it a country-wide thing (countries move to ban eating animals one by one, driven by a general shift in moral attitude),  or what? How does this change in morality propagate through society?&lt;p&gt;Will we get to the point where statues of now-famous people are pulled down because they ate animals? Assuming some variant of &amp;quot;cancel culture&amp;quot; exists then, will that act retroactively and currently-lionised people get cancelled because they are carnivores, even though the current culture that they exist in considers it acceptable?&lt;p&gt;Will we see clever re-interpretations of religious texts dealing with the eating of animals? Will we get religious divisions between different interpretations? Will some people refuse to accept the general moral stance on eating animals because their religious text says it&amp;#x27;s acceptable? How does this interaction between objective religious morality and subjective secular morality work?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s going to be really interesting to watch this unfold.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>theptip</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think your main points here are true.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition.&lt;p&gt;Animals are pretty inefficient at converting plants to calories, e.g. see &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;learn.uvm.edu&amp;#x2F;foodsystemsblog&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;meat-vs-veg-an-energy-perspective&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;learn.uvm.edu&amp;#x2F;foodsystemsblog&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;meat-vs-veg...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most of the energy spent getting grains to the table is in transport&amp;#x2F;processing. If you just compare the production, grains are way more efficient than animals.&lt;p&gt;Even though I&amp;#x27;m sure goats are better than cows, they aren&amp;#x27;t as efficient as plants at producing calories, and in all cases you still have to process and transport them.&lt;p&gt;However if you&amp;#x27;ve got some data showing otherwise I&amp;#x27;m open to being convinced here.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Until we solve that problem, it&amp;#x27;s better to stop growing too many plants&lt;p&gt;I think this is making perfect the enemy of the good. Plants use less water, produce substantially less GHG emissions, and so are still a net major win on environmental terms vs. the status quo.</text></comment>