• Lugh@futurology.todayOPM
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    8 months ago

    Good news for pigs. I’ll be delighted to see factory farming disappear and be replaced by tech like this.

    • Chip_Rat@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Except for the pigs raised for stem cells? Which I think somehow is an even more distopian concept… Maybe just a different flavour.

      Note: I am actually in the comments looking for the answer to my question “how many stem cells?”. Like per lb or whatever… What’s the ratio?

      • smeenz@lemmy.nz
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        8 months ago

        The article answers your question

        It involves nothing more than pulling a single cell once from a pig without causing harm.

        • Chip_Rat@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Thank you. I read the article, I swear, before posting. (Literally stopped what I was typing after I read my own statement “looking in the comments”) Not sure how I missed that.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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        8 months ago

        The whole “stem cells from a fetus” thing certain groups try to spread is false. Technically stems cells can come from a fetus, but they generally don’t. We even have methods to turn regular cells into stem cells I’m pretty sure. This doesn’t do anything more than taking cell(s) from a pig one time and they can be grown on their own potentially forever. No other pig needs to be involved.

  • ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Sausage seems like the perfect entry point for this technology. People don’t really care what goes in them as long as it tastes good. It’s also a lot more forgiving from a texture perspective. It would even be feasible to expand to more exotic sausages like pheasant or alligator.

    • KillingAndKindess
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      8 months ago

      I know i’m in a significant minority, but I care a great deal what goes in processed pork products (or rather, my gut cares). I’ve yet to pin down which “preservative” commonly used in pork/pork-like products I’m allergic to, but I have a serious problem with even Kosher Hot dogs.

      Basically, if its not fresh homemade bratwurst or sausage, I just can’t eat it.

      I’m sure that, if these methods continue to become more viable than their livestock counterparts, then the need to use at least some preservatives will decrease… hopefully.

      • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        Man, that’s gotta suck. Not knowing exactly what’s causing the problem can mean it being a problem unexpectedly with other things.

        • KillingAndKindess
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          8 months ago

          Its not awesome, but for theost part, that specific reaction is limited to just that. I’m pretty adventurous when it comes to food, so i’m sure that whatever chemical causes it is limited in use outside of that market.

      • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        One problem I’ve noticed with currently available meat alternatives is that they are even more processed than real meat.

        • KillingAndKindess
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          8 months ago

          Yes. I’m not sure how much of the non-meat chemicals are for the preservation / shelf life as opposed to the ones necessary to the creation(?) process.

          I suspect that at first the meat will still require the more aggressive preservation methods because the distance in both time and geography from the lab will be similar to that of the slaughter locations.

          But without needing to work around breeding seasons and just general herd growth variations throughout the year, the creation of the meat could be much closer to the demand. Storage costs for temperature sensitive products that are also time sensitive has got to be a huge industry cost, so there is more economic reasons than just “use less chemicals” for it to start to trend that way. (Also, I’m sure the chemicals used are absurdly cheap and hardly a factor)

      • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        Some ideas you’ve probably already considered:

        • Nitrates and nitrites: in pretty much every commercial sausage. May be listed in the ingredients as curing salt or Prague powder.

        • Onion or garlic powder

        • Breadcrumbs

        • Emulsifiers: in any kind of hotdog or Weiner where it’s all blended and looks smooth, as opposed to a sausage where you can actually see little pieces of fat and meat. Listed in the ingredients as some kind of gum or some kind of glyceride.

        • KillingAndKindess
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          8 months ago

          Those first three I don’t think are exclusive to pork products, and I’m sure its not Onion/Garlic powders or breadcrumbs. I use them frequently when cooking without getting sick.

          But emulsifiers… would sausage/bratwurst of a lesser quality also have them? And are they exlclusive to tubular pork? Because they sound they may be the same thing that’s in most sugar-free gums, and glyceride by itself is everywhere, unless it’s a specific kind.

          I appreciate the help, but like I said I have narrowed it down to something that’s pretty exclusively used to preserve pork for really any duration of shelf life of a grocery store. I don’t get sick when I eat fresh pork of any kind, well I guess so long as it’s cooked, and I don’t get sick when I eat other animal products with preservatives in it, or at least not consistently at all.

          I’m good with just leading this pseudo-jewish life for the time being. Honestly unless it’s like quality fresh brought worse at Oktoberfest, then I don’t really feel like I’m missing out anyways.

          • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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            8 months ago

            I have narrowed it down to something that’s pretty exclusively used to preserve pork

            I don’t know of any preservatives that are exclusively used for pork. I’m a butcher so I have pretty good knowledge of that stuff. I didn’t really expect it would help you but I thought I’d take a shot in the dark.

            I don’t really feel like I’m missing out anyways.

            Grocery store sausages, definitely not.

    • Zerthax@reddthat.com
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      8 months ago

      It’s also a lot more forgiving from a texture perspective.

      This is also why I see milk and eggs being easier to develop. Non-animal dairy actually already exists (see: Perfect Day Foods), though I’ve only seen it in a few products.

    • Not_mikey@slrpnk.net
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      8 months ago

      You have to compete with plant based sausages though which, unless some big breakthrough happens, will be much cheaper. They’ll also probably taste pretty similar cause this is only generating cells, they’ll have to add in a bunch of other artificial stuff like heme to make it taste like a sausage at which point I’m not sure if people could taste the difference between animal cells and plant cells as the base.

      • Skua@kbin.social
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        8 months ago

        As someone who really enjoys meat but tries to eat vegetarian (and does so 99% of the time), I can’t say that I’ve ever been impressed by the taste of a non-meat sausage. Every single one I’ve had has left me wishing I’d just had falafel instead. Fortunately falafel is delicious and cheap

        Notably, though, vegetarian haggis - which is essentially just a large sausage - is usually pretty damn good. I have no idea why it seems to end up differently. Maybe because haggis depends less on the meat flavour in the first place?

        • ThisIsNotHim@sopuli.xyz
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          8 months ago

          I had a vegetarian sausage that had a close-ish flavor recently. It might have been Beyond? The texture was surprisingly awful though. Far from inedible, but I’d expect all parts of the texture to be closer, especially the casing.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    8 months ago

    I’m skeptical. It’s been really picking hard to get those things to grow in a vat. This would be a huge breakthrough, and popsci has a way of leaving out critical, fatal details.

  • nifty@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Sustainable sources of real meat without killing animals are very welcome! Good luck to them because killing things to eat meat is the worst.

    My hope is that these alternative meat industries also factor in job creation opportunities for people who are working in conventional meat production right now—if there’s populist pressure towards moving for more lucrative and safer jobs in lab-manufactured meats, that would be help reduce pressure from farm industry lobbyists, I think.

    But the above is a secondary goal (and maybe the responsibility of another party), and shouldn’t distract from the primary goal of researching methods to create sustainable, cruelty-free lab-manufactured meats!

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      people who are working in conventional meat production right now

      The industry is ripe with conditions that at least approximate human trafficking and anything lab-grown sounds like basically completely automated, and where it isn’t you need highly skilled professionals. Not of the “is dexterous and can learn to make a clean cut fast” kind, but of the “degree in cell biology” kind.

      Jobs for people without advanced education are getting rarer and rarer, that isn’t going to change, and don’t look to industry to change that they have the exact opposite incentive. If, OTOH, you introduce something like an UBI soon you’ll have a gazillion people getting into pottery or knife or furniture making or whatnot, again doing actual crafts because it’s economically feasible because you don’t have to sell your stuff for prices only rich people can afford just to make a living.

      • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Honestly you will not need a college degree to run a bioreactor. It won’t be automated because it’ll consist of cleaning, taking out the outputs and refilling the inputs. You do for inventing the reactor, but not for running it.

        Whoever’s overseeing many of them will need a degree, but labor will mostly still be labor.

      • nifty@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        If, OTOH, you introduce something like an UBI soon you’ll have a gazillion people getting into pottery or knife or furniture making or whatnot, again doing actual crafts because it’s economically feasible because you don’t have to sell your stuff for prices only rich people can afford just to make a living.

        Fair point. If I’d had the time for it, I’d be encouraging or supporting my local representatives for working on this.

    • RatBin@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Than you have to wait a bit. At this juncture in time, vegan alternatives have yet to gain popularity, and those are mashed plants. This is quite a step up. If you feel like making a difference don’t wait for this and reduce the .eat consumption altogether regardless of its origin.

  • Brekky@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    This sounds like good news but what I don’t want is one big corporation replacing hundreds/thousands of worldwide farmers and having total control over the cost of selling this to consumers.

      • maynarkh@feddit.nl
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        8 months ago

        Those farms receive immense subsidies as well. No, it’s not efficient, it’s just what the US economic system produces.

        • Zerthax@reddthat.com
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          8 months ago

          Regardless, we really shouldn’t be preventing progress for the sake of protecting jobs. Especially when the status quo is so wantonly destructive. And even as this would replace some jobs, it would create new ones.

          All that said, I’m very skeptical of this tech.

        • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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          8 months ago

          The fields used to feed livestock would be used to grow stuff to feed humans

          The buildings… Should we really stop progress to save some buildings used to raise animals in order to kill them?

          There’s a labor crisis in the farming industry already (and in general really) so it’s not as if they had no option in front of them

          • bluewing@lemm.ee
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            8 months ago

            You do realize that not all farmland is suitable for growing onions or melons. A pretty good chunk of it is pretty much suitable for grass only. Where I live, half of all the farmland is growing grasses for grazing and hay, (no, its not alfalfa). What are those farmers supposed to switch to make a living? The rest is used for wheat, rye, and barley and some green chop corn silage. And yields can be quite limited depending on the year.

            Unless you are fine with massively more use of fertilizers and pumping ground water to irrigate those food crops on marginal land. And even then the growing season overrides all.

            • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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              8 months ago

              Then you stop using that land to grow feed and let nature do its thing and the people working that land can just go work somewhere where there’s demand.

              Should we have stopped telecommunication progress to keep the switchboard operators working?

              • bluewing@lemm.ee
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                8 months ago

                “the people working that land can just go work somewhere where there’s demand.”

                So easy to say when it’s not your job isn’t it.

                Now, I don’t know what you do to make a living, but with AI, your job as a programmer should just go away and you should find a different job where there is demand - maybe you could be a servant or stock shelves. It’s so easy to do so, just go somewhere else.

                • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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                  8 months ago

                  Again, should we stop all progress so as not to eliminate jobs that would otherwise become unnecessary?

        • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
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          8 months ago

          The industrialized meat industry in Europe has very little to do with farming. An industrial stable with tens of thousands of pigs who never see daylight or breath fresh air is a factory, where bought animal feed is input, and manure and pigs are output.

          • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            The industrialized meat industry in Europe has very little to do with farming. An industrial stanle with thens of thousands of pigs who never see daylight or breath fresh air is a factory, where bought animal feed is input, and manure and pigs are output.

            sounds like the US system, without the child labor.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      We do have a number of excellent meat alternatives now, which use relatively simple processing steps and legumes, wheat etc. as base material.

      As such, I imagine, they will remain cheaper than lab-grown meat and if we can get past people’s reservations with them, I feel like they would offer a much more direct path for farmers to get paid, as well as the opportunity for various smaller companies to compete in doing that processing.

  • revisable677@feddit.de
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    8 months ago

    I’ve been waiting for that for so long. Just hope governments and people give it a fair chance instead of jumping rashly negative conclusions just because it is lab grown. So is beer, and cheese, and most other things we consume.

    • derpgon@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      I mean, with modern sausages, it’s mostly trash or overpriced. They taste like they have 5% meat, 95% sawdust.

    • tooLikeTheNope@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      Italy’s politicians in a fantastically backward and utterly brain farted move has made “synthetic meat” outlaw, for study, production, sale and consume, like already some months ago, just to please the local (read: national) farmers lobby. Or at least they adverised as they did… forgive me I kinda lost hope and interst as well.

      Gotta love the totally-not-neofascist Meloni government :(

  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    OK, but how does it taste?

    Sausage is smart since you can get away with a lot of textural sins, and it’s already expected to be packed with sodium.

    Follow-up questions will also include price.

    • h3ndrik@feddit.de
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      8 months ago

      I mean it also heavily depends on the exact version of sausage. We already have fake Mortadella made from peas (I think) which I can not (or barely) tell apart from the real thing. And at the other end of the sausage spectrum, Chorizo or Sujuk have enough spices, paprika and/or garlic and cumin in it so you can probably hide a lot of stuff instead of pork in it. Though I haven’t yet found a fake version of those which I liked. And sometimes my German nature gets in the way. I’ve had sausage abroad. And some people put actual ground-up pigs in there and the product still doesn’t taste of anything I’d call sausage. I also had those british-style breakfast sausages with a really weird consistency. It’s really quite some variety with sausage, already. And I still need a good plant based alternative to Salami and pepperoni on pizza.

  • buzz86us@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I like the idea, and I hope it scales to be significantly cheaper than murder sausage

  • gmtom@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Still won’t stop the “alpha male” types from hating it because they base their entire personality around doing what they think wi make other people mad.

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    I’m not exactly what you would call concerned about meat as a food source. I’m fine with it. But anything that can break the need for industrial farming is a damn good thing imo.

    I’m eager for a good product to come to market so I can at least try it. So far, there hasn’t been one that’s available that’s priced well enough to be a viable choice, nor that matches expectations of taste. Textures have gotten good though.

    But I think a sausage format is a great place for cultured meats to break into because there’s a wide range of ingredients with different flavors already. We’re used to sausages being fairly varied in taste and texture, so adding a new type is less of a “new food” barrier. Tbh though, it’s gotta be better than veggie sausages, those are pretty meh at best.

  • NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone
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    8 months ago

    This stuff was basically ready to go minus scaling up two decades ago. They were still working on adding marbling and texture into steaks that could fool you in a blind test, but amazed it’s taken this long to get to sausages.

      • Kata1yst@kbin.social
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        8 months ago

        Just copying my answer from above. Not to say that this is what they’re doing for sure, but generally stem cell cultures these days are sourced once then replicated forever.