Lab grown burger, would you eat it, if you could afford it?

hare05 wrote: »

Meat is meat. Fat, protein, nutrients, etc. That we can finally manufacture it without killing an animal should be a good thing for vegetarians / vegans, no? As for whether I'd be comfortable eating it... Unsure about how it would taste, but it's guaranteed to be the healthiest meat out there, having been made in a sterile environment.

I get why you feel the way you do. It's always unsettling to think that something that came from a chemistry lab is intended to be eaten by humans, but let's face facts here. There's a reason medicine made in labs is the standard and 'herbal treatments' are seen as quackery. The point of science is to take all arguments to their inevitable conclusions and find facts, comfort be damned, and the fact here is that lab grown meat is all but guaranteed to be safer, cleaner, healthier, less resource intensive and more ethically sound than slaughtering animals.

And if you still want to stay vegetarian, think of the benefits to you when the 70% of agricultural land used for livestock is freed up to grow more veg.

Well I can't see all that land being freed up. Cows will still be needed for leather and milk. Unless of course they grow genuine leather in the lab too and somehow manufacture milk.

If it tasted like meat and looked like meat, then yes I would eat it.
No better than that Quorn shoite!

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

As they say about land, they ain't making any more of it.

They're not but it could make farming economically unviable for anything but high quality meat.

If the intensive farms fail due to competition from lab meat it will start having a knock on effect. Even though intensive farming is mostly done indoors they use some similar products, if the big producers stop buying those products it puts the price up for everyone that's left. It could cause a gradual decline in farming when the costs go up as farmers get priced out of the market.

There may be lots of land but no one that can afford to produce any more because what they produce will be so expensive no one could afford to pay for it.

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

Can't see that having an effect here really. The beef and lamb produced in Ireland, the vast majority of it exported, is of very high quality. A lot of poultry producers are already going through hard times last I heard due to imports. Don't know anything about pigs.

If the export market disappears because everyone's buying cheaper lab burgers it will affect everyone in the country.

The amount of messing done to make stem cell meat will put a lot of people off. The most people welcoming it are those with other older agendas.

It won't matter what kind of messing they do, the bottom line to the consumer is price. If the lab meat is cheaper they will buy that.

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

I'll let you do your own legwork, I've already done mine. All the information you seek is readily available to you.

That's your answer all too often on this thread. You want to sit there and say I agree with you when I don't, you want to tell me this or that is just so, but you don't want to show me why. I'm genuinely interested in some the claims you make, but you'd rather I just accept unquestioningly. It does you no favours.

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

Still see no issue. As population will be increasing all the time, it doesn't automatically follow that there will be a massive drop in income globally.

I never said there would be a drop in global income.

If lab meat can be made cheaper than intensively farmed meat that will wipe out the intensive farmers. I don't see how they could possibly keep going when their niche in the market disappears.

If you lose the bulk of the commercial farming industry it will drive up the costs for the farmers that are left. It's all down to quantity in manufacturing. If the tractor factory only gets half the sales of the previous years it makes everything more expensive for the manufacturer. As you know the more you buy the less it's costs per unit, so if the tractor factory has to buy half as much steel it's going to cost them more to make each tractor driving up the cost to the customer. This could end up making the tractor too expensive for the average farmer.

Quality will always sell.

But to a much, much smaller market.

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

I'm too long in the tooth to fall for the tactic of having me scour the internet for information for you just because you say you don't accept what I say.

But you said you already done the legwork so surely you must remember where you got your information from. Even the search phrase you used would be helpful.

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

The income was my own input, you say the market will shrink yet contradict yourself talking about how many a lab burger will feed. Billions of people are procreating on this planet, the rate of human population increase is growing every day, the market is growing, not shrinking.

Consumption is going up but lab meat could easily meet that increase because the costs would be so much lower in the long run. All you need is a large factory and the right machinery. All your other costs are gone, no expensive land, cheaper feed, no vet bills, can be set up anywhere, even places that don't have good land further reducing costs.

If lab meat is cheaper to produce it will take over, it's an undeniable fact. One big factory could churn out filet meat that requires no processing without producing all the bits they don't want. If it's the cheapest way of doing business it will have an almost instantaneous effect on the market.

This is the global economy, reduce costs and increase profits. That is all that matters.

Lab meat will not match the quality of properly reared Irish meat.

I've already agreed with you on that point but we already know that people buy the cheap crappy burgers, even after they've been shown to contain meat from the wrong animal. People don't care about anything other than the initial cost to them. Even telling them the low quality meat is slowly killing them won't turn them off cheap meat.

This isn't even an issue on Irish or foreign farming related forums.

Just because they don't know or are dismissing lab meat doesn't mean it'll have any less of an effect on the market.

With the amount of meat we produce in this nation we should not even have to consider this bull****.

Conmaicne Mara wrote: »

You expect meat prices and demand to either remain static or fall on the back on an increasing global population and lab meat.

I don't and have addressed that already.

You also expect people to buy something just because it's cheap. If that was the case everyone would be driving Micras and watching 14" TVs.

People are going out and buying small engined cars now because of tax hikes. I deal with Irish buyers at exhibitions and the number one concern is nearly always the price.

People value quality.

The popularity of tescos, aldi and Lidl show what people want. I don't see to many up market supermarkets around the country. When you watch advertising it's always discounts that they promote over quality.

Lab meat will not match this. As for your comment describing farmland as the "wilds", I'm sure some of the eco folks on here would disagree vehemently with you comment.

Compared to a factory a field is the wilds.

Sam Kade wrote: »

Meat is around €10/kg in shops now, how long will it take to get the 250k burger below that never mind being able to grow a decent cut of steak in a lab. Steak that is 100% beef. Also remember that 250k burger had other ingredients in it as well. It had salt, beet root juice, egg powder, bread crumbs and saffron added, I wonder what % lab meat it had in it, very little I would think.

You can't compare a one off prototype to a factory produced item. Look at when the likes of Lamborghini produce a low run car, a car that was €100,000 shots up to nearly 2 million euro.

Maybe lab meat won't take off, my argument is if they can get this into a factory setting the cost of production will be very low, they wouldn't even attempt it if they couldn't beat current intensive farming prices. So if you see a factory set up to produce this type of meat it will wipe out intensive farming and put a huge strain on every other type of farming. They'll be turning out meat 24/7 something the natural world just can't compete with.