The future of meat industry

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by Plazma Inferno!, Jan 22, 2016.

  1. Plazma Inferno! Ding Ding Ding Ding Administrator

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    Here's interesting article analyzing the future of meat. Source claims that our current method of producing meat for consumption is unsustainable, but in the future, we might look for alternatives and meat from an animal may be nothing more than a distant memory.
    http://factor-tech.com/feature/taking-the-meat-industry-to-the-slaughterhouse/

    So, meat grown in lab or plant-based burger, what's your choice?
     
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  3. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    I'm fine with either or both. I just hope there is a future with no meat industry.

    Think about it for a minute. Is there an more obscene phrase to describe living, thinking, terrified creatures?
     
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  5. Edont Knoff Registered Senior Member

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    I liked the idea from old Sci-Fi novels to grow meat in cell cultures, and overcome the need to kill living animals to produce food.

    So I have no problem with protein from the glass tube as long as it is nourishing and tastes alright. And cooks can do many tricks to make things taste fine.

    It happens that I eat no meat for several days in a row. I'm fairly sure I could live without it, but it's a bit more difficult to put together a complete diet all without meat. Probaly just a matter of habit though, once one has interned the rules and guidelines, it's surely doable.

    What really bugs me is the amount of meat that gets thrown away uneaten. In my home country a study showed that every 4th pig was killed all for nothing. The meat was not eaten in time and had to be dumped.

    In my opinion, this is an outrage. I can understand that someone kills an animal to eat it. Afterall, humans are omnivores by nature. But I have _zero_ understanding for killing an animal and then not eating the meat.

    Source: http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article109447217/20-Millionen-Schweine-landen-pro-Jahr-im-Muell.html

    Catchline, "20 million pigs end in the dumpster per year" - imagine! 20 million killed animals per year, for nothing, in just one country. I so hate this fact.

    So first step should be to reduce the waste of meat. This alone will save 25% of the food animals.
    The second step is to replace more and more food animals with other protein sources. Be it plants or tubes, doesn't mater much to me. I'll happily eat both as long as it's healthy and tastes acceptable.

    Post-note: To make things even worse, pigs are fairly intelligent animals. I sometimes wonder if this is the reason why pigs are forbidden meat in some cultures.
     
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  7. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    I doubt the intelligence of another species (or another nation, or gender, for that matter!) plays any part in religious taboos. Those aren't about the food; they're about setting people apart. If they can't share a meal, they're far less likely to form friendships or intermarry or [**gasp**] tolerate each other's beliefs.

    Not just animals - all food. I saw a segment of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (He covers a great many American problems, in a comedy show.) a while ago about food wastage in the US. It's utterly disheartening to see this, while they're also cancelling school lunch programs and can't keep the Food Bank stocked.
    We are one badly wonked-out species! Capitalism is not helping.

    We've been ovo-lacto vegetarian for 40 years, with no ill effects or hardships, even though we've had health issues to accommodate. A friend of mine is on a fat-free vegan diet. Now, that seems difficult to me, but she's managing all right, and looks much better than before the heart attack.
     
  8. Plazma Inferno! Ding Ding Ding Ding Administrator

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    Memphis Meats, a company growing meat grown outside a live animal (i.e., cultured meat), will make its global debut on Feb. 4 in San Francisco. The founders will present to investors at the biotech accelerator Indie Bio, which was created by venture capital firm SOS Ventures.
    Memphis Meats is already growing real meat in small quantities using cells from cows, pigs, and chickens. The company’s first products—hot dogs, sausages, burgers, and meatballs—will be developed using recipes perfected over a half century by award-winning chefs. The founders expect to have products to market in less than five years.
    “This is absolutely the future of meat,” said Memphis Meats CEO Uma Valeti, M.D. “We plan to do to the meat industry what the car did to the horse and buggy. Cultured meat will completely replace the status quo and make raising animals to eat them simply unthinkable.”

    http://www.thegoodfoodinstitute.org/memphis-meats-cultured-meat-company-profiled

    Here's the demonstration video of the first cultured meatball.

     
  9. Plazma Inferno! Ding Ding Ding Ding Administrator

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    The company “Memphis Meats” has successfully grown real, authentic tasting meat from animal stem cells

    Synthetic meat has potential to be the future. The production process is exceedingly healthier, sustainable and more humane than any of its competitors.
    By growing meat from the cellular level Memphis Meats is able to control the amount of fat in the meat, allowing for consumers to get the leanest, most nutrient dense meat possible. Also, thanks to the frighteningly sterile lab environment that the meat is grown in there is no need to worry about antibiotics, fecal matter, or other pathogens and contaminants. Bottom line: synthetic meat is designed to be healthier and better for you.
    Second, no animals are harmed in Memphis Meat’s production process. The recent rise of food documentaries showing the darker side of livestock production i.e. overcrowding, inhumane slaughtering, miniature cages etc. has led to a rise in veganism. It really is pretty hard to watch the butchering processes used by large meat companies that mass produce their products.
    Third, Memphis Meat’s products harbor a smaller environmental footprint. The livestock industry, on the other hand, imposes a heavy toll on the environment. Some argue the livestock industry is the largest threat to our environment, far exceeding the burning of fossil fuels.

    http://www.theinertia.com/health/heres-a-company-growing-real-meat-from-stem-cells/
     
  10. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    Philosophically, ethically, morally and practically, I have been a vegetarian for several decades. However, since some meat just tastes so darn good I eat it routinely. This isn't hypocritical, it's just weak. I have longed for the time when I could enjoy the taste with a clear conscience. Nevertheless, I think we should retain some farm animals wandering around fields for the aesthetic impact on the scenery.
     
  11. Edont Knoff Registered Senior Member

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    [Deleted - Stupid me. I had replied to this thread already and just repeated what I already had said]
     
  12. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    At least you know an alien parasite has not infected your brain and altered your viewpoint.
     
    Edont Knoff likes this.
  13. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    Cultured meat has several advantages. One is, obviously, flavour: so much of the world's population has developed a taste for flesh, they would suffer real physiological and/or psychological privation from a sudden change in diet. Another is that plant proteins are more diffuse: you need a lot of soybeans or chestnuts to equal the protein content of a steak. A third is ease of preparation: vat-produced meat would need a lot less processing - energy, man-hours, containers, incidental ingredients - to make a palatable protein-rich entree than would a sack of chick peas. Two very important advantages: the land no longer used and the methane no longer produced by all those cattle, and, since the meat-making facilities are likely to be located in the center of cities, it would save a huge amount of trucking, both of livestock and refrigerated meat. A frivolous bonus is simply a wider choice of foods to make up a balanced, healthy, palatable diet.
     
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Aside from the issue of cultured or factory grown meat, a good idea (shellfish meat would be my obvious first project or attempt, btw: why the fixation on beef? ), on the matter of old style:

    We're going to be killing animals, one way or another, as we always have been. If we don't eat them, fly maggots will.

    Farming obliterates from the earth far more animals than hunting or herding. Farming destroys entire ecosystems, lays waste to whole landscapes. Farming creates the ethically dubious category of "vermin".

    We prefer a world with savannah and other grasslands in appropriate places - that requires herds of ruminants and other grazing organisms. That requires predation - by predators capable of killing, say, bison. Those predators will be eating their prey.

    Human metabolism is built for significant meat (in some sense, most likely seafood) consumption. Even compromised vegetarian diets (eggs, milk) are highly artificial and dependent on dubious aspects of modern industrial life. This dependency resembles the insulin dependence of diabetics, more than it does an ethical pinnacle of humane dealings with the world.

    The monstrous ethical blindness of the modern meat industry is not the end all and be all of raising, killing, and eating animals - any more than the video game, trophy macho, spiritually degraded, entertainment with firearms travesty of recreational slaughter is the only approach to hunting, killing, and eating animals. Or for that matter, any more than the aquifer poisoning, landscape degrading, animal extinguishing, human exploiting, ecologically disastrous modern vegetable farm is the only approach to raising, harvesting, and eating vegetables.

    If you regard killing and eating as inherently exploitative, the act itself as an exploitation of whatever it is you eat, you are in trouble, spiritually. Because you have to eat. And you have to kill animals to eat. If you cannot do that well, and with a clear conscience, and in spiritual harmony with the world, then that status is unavailable to you.

    The various health and wellbeing downsides of vegetarian diets especially risk or affect women of reproductive age - the very demographic category in Western society most likely to adopt such a diet on variously persuasive grounds. There is an ethical issue with that.

    Or as a famous spiritual source once put it: It is not what goes into a person that befouls them, but what comes out.
     
    Last edited: Jul 7, 2016

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