this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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lab grown meat is a vaguely EA/rationalist/self IDed neolib meme. in theory it will save the environment (ok) and prevent suffering (yay) in a way that concentrates capital (double yay) and involves a lot of tech magic (triple yay).

hot luigi is a big fan apparently. seeing this discussed reminded me of this excellent article which shreds the concept of mass produced lab grown meat. I haven't really seen this circulate much over the years, but it is really a masterwork of grift dissection. please enjoy

archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20241208141305/https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/

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[–] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 0 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Something this does lead me to wonder: the primary draw I usually have seen for lab grown meat is obtaining actual meat without animal suffering. (The article mentions theoretical environmental benefits if somehow perfected given the lack of need to produce unwanted parts of an animal, but given that any kind of processing of plant matter is going to be less efficient than eating the plants themselves, that seems like it can't really be the primary motivation). Do we actually need to culture cells to do that? Suppose we went the other way, instead of trying to, say, create chicken meat without the rest of the chicken, we were to take a chicken and try to redesign it so as to be unable to suffer, while keeping other useful properties (like an immune system, as the article brings up). Suffering requires a certain level of cognitive function, which requires a certain level of brain complexity and size. Chickens in industrial scale farms don't exactly utilize their cognitive abilities to the full, we barely even let them space to move to my understanding. So, what if we were to try to genetically engineer a chicken, or other livestock animal, with as little brains as possible while still being able to keep the thing alive, until the ethical issues of killing it were equivalent to those of something like a plant?

[–] veganes_hack@feddit.org 9 points 2 weeks ago

or, you know, just eat the fucking plants instead

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago

We’ve actually already done that. KFC can’t legally call itself kentucky fried chicken anymore because they don’t serve “chicken”. Instead it’s a GMO non-chicken animal that fits all the criteria you mentioned. Open your third eye