Lab-grown meat is made by taking a tiny sample of cells from an animal through a quick biopsy, which does little harm to the animal. These cells are then pampered in a nutrient-rich environment and placed in a bioreactor to multiply and form muscle tissue. Once enough tissue has grown, it’s harvested and processed into delicious meat products like burgers or steaks. The donor animals feel minimal, temporary pain and, since they aren’t headed to the slaughterhouse, can look forward to potential gigs at petting zoos. Win-win!
I’m dropping the number of cattle slaughtered each year from 34 million to zero, but you have to accept some temporary pain to a few cattle donating cells….and it’s a dealbreaker?
I think vegans will object to that “minimal temporary pain”. I mean, they won’t eat Fig Newtons, right?
For me, personally? If lab-grown meat required horrible suffering? Yes, it would be a dealbreaker. I would be thrilled that animal abuse had been reduced so enormously. I would definitely trade our current model for this new one. But that doesn’t mean I have to eat it. Not sure why that seems so unbelievable.
If it’s trivial discomfort, and the cattle otherwise live a pleasant life, I’m in. But I don’t want any entity to have to endure misery so that I can eat a steak. Oh, well…
Relevant article on aeon.co today:
When we’re told that something we see as ordinary – like eating meat – is actually wrong, our first reaction is to get irritated and dismissive. If it’s not about bacon, it’s about plastic straws. Or a phrase we’ve been using for years but is now considered offensive. Or having to share your pronouns.
This is nothing new. In the 1990s, nascent attempts to combat casual forms of sexism, racism and homophobia – such as calls to end so-called ‘ethnic parties’ on university campuses, or efforts to use the term ‘survivor’ instead of ‘victim’ when referring to people who have been sexually assaulted – were also seen as preachy and annoying, and were often derided as ‘political correctness’ run amok.
Sounds like a vast improvement. The beef industry is going to fight it like hell, though. And they might win. They usually do.
Coming from another non-vegetarian who is also trying to cut back on meat, I think that’s admirable.
Please don’t think I’m picking on you, @Spice_Weasel, because it sounds like you are more than doing your part. However, I think your reasoning here is a bit specious. For one thing, unless you are hunting or slaughtering your own livestock, any meat you purchase or consume is already dead.
But to my main point, it’s like when I get after my son for using disposable plates when there is no need to (i.e. not eating outside or on a picnic, but just eating in the kitchen). He argues that the trees have already been cut down and turned into paper plates, so why not use them? I counter with the fact that we only buy them when we run out, and if we use them infrequently, we don’t have to replace them very often.
And here is the key point: every time you use a paper plate, or eat meat, or burn fossil fuel, or whatever, you send a signal to the market to produce more.
Overheard a conversation recently about this very subject. We were in an outdoor seating area of a small bar/restaurant. I was contemplating the tofu banh mi or the grass fed smash burgers. The gist of the convo at the three top behind me - there was a lapsed vegetarian kinda berating his vegan curious veg friend for succumbing to greenwashed marketing in the food industry.
Well I made up my mind, tofu it is!
It was a well seasoned brick of soy but not the best sandwich ever. Shoulda hd the smash burger.
Well, here’s my thinking on this. The person who bought the meat is the one sending that market signal. At that point, it’s done, and the priority becomes preventing food waste. This is not out of line with monastics who have a rule to eat meat when offered in their begging bowl.
I’ve been reading some discussions from Buddhists about the choice to eat meat. It’s a fairly nuanced issue. Some say they emphasize not wasting food more than not eating meat. Others say it’s really just a matter of being aware of what you’re doing, knowing that keeping yourself alive requires other things to die, and maintaining a general sense of gratitude (I think this is my teacher’s take based on conversations I’ve had.) And then others say you should be a vegetarian if you can.
My understanding is Mahayana Buddhists tend to be more strict with monastics around meat consumption, though I’m not sure how that translates to the laity. Zen is technically a Mahayana tradition. The Buddha himself permitted it, not that I think it’s necessary to follow his lead on everything, but I suspect he would have a real big problem with industrial farming. It’s important to note that industrial farming is cruel, but various traditions throughout the world have been cruel to the animals they breed, so it’s not like animal cruelty to livestock is a particularly new thing.
I am NOT drawing a moral equivalence but I’ve been listening to Behind the Bastards’ take on Thomas Jefferson, a raging hypocrite about slavery, and it’s fascinating to see all the ways he twisted himself up in knots trying to justify benefiting from something he knew was evil. I can’t help but reflect on all the little ways I do the same thing.
I’m going to a special dinner tonight with my Sangha and it will be interesting to see if there’s any meat on the menu.
Fair enough, although when you say “served by someone else,” I would draw a distinction between receiving it from a server in a restaurant after you ordered the meat dish (which is the way I first interpreted it); as opposed to eating something prepared by a host in their house, or given to you at a company picnic or begging bowl. In the latter examples, you didn’t choose the food that was prepared.
Also those who care about human welfare. Slaughterhouse jobs have some of the highest workers’ comp premiums of any industry because they are very dangerous. They are also unpleasant.
I absolutely assumed the latter. The difference is not who cooked it, it’s who requested that the dish be meat.
Actually that’s not my first reaction at all.
When I hear that something is now considered wrong, I’m interested to hear why. And I’ll stop saying / doing that thing if the reasoning makes sense and/or it is clear that it causes offense.
I might even feel I need to make amends for something I did without realising at the time.
Instead, people who get defensive… Must be nice for them, they probably have fewer regrets.
I’ve never really understood why people often get defensive against vegetarians and vegans totally unprovoked and out of the blue. I have a theory that many of those people cover their inner doubts and bad conscience by being rude and condescending. Ok, and some of them are just assholes.
Most people really have an extreme anger reaction to having their obliviously destructive habits pointed out to them. I don’t understand this, really. I struggle not to find this contemptible, but I don’t make much headway. I have always wanted to live the least harmful life possible given my means and personality. I mean, since I was a young teen it’s been an aspiration that never wavered. I’ve thought very hard about it for a very long time. It never ceases to bring me grief that most people really don’t give a fuck how destructive they are.
We were crossposting, but kinda made the same point. But in my experience, I don’t even have to point out the destructive habits (I never do, I never preach), I just randomly remark in a social gathering (restaurant, BBQ, party) that I’m vegetarian, mostly after being offered meat to explain why I decline it, and bam! the lazy jokes and yuk-yuk replies follow… 
That’s why I hate to be invited to parties and gatherings that are heavily about food nowadays.
If i invite you to a food-focused event at my home, i promise I’ll provide a nice selection of vegetarian foods.
I’m sure you’d will, and I’m thankful for hosts who do that. There are some divides in my experience: first, I became a vegetarian 28 years ago, and back then you very rarely encountered vegetarian alternatives in social situations or in restaurants. That has changed, but to a degree. I live in a rural and traditional/conservative area, and I’m still some kind of an outlier here, but for decades when I was invited to a party in a city, it has been obligatory to have vegetarian/vegan choices. But attending a BBQ where I live? The people load tons of meat on the grill and chuckle about the vegan sausages and steaks I put on, which mostly I have to bring myself because I know in advance that else I would have to limit myself to salad and bread, which I’m not very fond of.
It was about 30 years ago that we got “an invitation to Indian cooking” (the cook book) at which point my husband said, “now i could be a vegetarian”. It takes some knowledge to be able to make tasty varied veggie entrees, and many Americans don’t learn that growing up.
I don’t usually do BBQ, but if I did, I’d probably suggest you bring your own grillable, as that’s not in my repertoire and i don’t know what’s good. But i do a very nice Indian chick pea dish that is popular with almost everyone, and would be a good side at that kind of party. And you’d give me an excuse to grill some portabello mushrooms… (my family doesn’t eat mushrooms, but I’m quite fond of them.) And of course if I’m serving vegans i avoid randomly contaminating side dishes with butter…
I love grilled veggies! If you served me a plate of grilled veggies, I’d be thrilled.
Yes, agreed. I was not talking about ordering a dish but being a guest at someone’s house.
Mostly vegetarian bento box, with one egg dish, and ice cream mochi for dessert. Most of it was not really my jam, though I got the sense that each dish was probably a really good example of the food it was supposed to be. Worth it for the mochi.