#lab-grown

[nickgerlich]

The Steaks Are High

I remember all too well that time in the early-1970s when there was a spike in the price of beef. My Dad the Accountant was also the primary shopper in the family, and he knew the price of every grocery product in Chicagoland. Well, it seemed like he did, because back when gas was cheap, it was actually prudent to cherry-pick a few items here, a few more there, and so forth. In the end, the cupboards and refrigerator were filled.

But the price of beef scared him into a new reality, because he could not find anyone with what he saw as a competitive price. Instead, he had read about some newfangled soybean burgers that were packed in protein, cost less than beef, and were quite possibly the future of dining.

He bought some, and I can still recall the taste of cardboard. They were horrible, not even close to the real deal. It was also the first time I had ever knowingly encountered soybeans as food, which was ironic because our house sat right at the edge of a soybean farm on the far southern reaches of Chicagoland. I had no clue what they used them for.

Skip forward to the 1990s, and food science had done a complete makeover on what we now know as veggie burgers (thank you, marketing!). They actually tasted pretty good, and when dressed properly, were a reasonable substitute. If you were vegan, vegetarian, an ethical consumer, or just wanting to try something different, they were legit.

More recently, Beyond and Impossible have introduced the best versions of meat substitutes yet. They are truly lab foods, and are now reaching ubiquity in supermarkets and restaurants. The mouth feel, the redness, even the juices spilling forth, are the closest approximations yet of a beef burger on the grill. They are so close that the cattle industry is rightfully a little nervous, and in some states, their lobbying groups have pushed for legislation regulating basic food terms, such as “meat,” “beef,” and others. Gotta keep those consumers from becoming confused, you know.

Lab foods require over-the-top marketing, though. It’s one thing to buy a garment made from a different fabric, or any number of other consumables. But when it comes to the things we put in our mouth, you better be careful. I recall my ultra cycling years, primarily the 1980s and 1990s, but a little into this century. If you wanted to be competitive, you had to consume sports nutrition on the fly. This meant no burgers and burritos, because they can do a stomach bad when racing. Food scientists, though, came through and brought us innovative products like Ultra Energy, which they touted as being “pre-digested.”

Now if there is any word or phrase that can turn a stomach, it is “pre-digested.” It just sounds bad. Never mind it simply meant the powdered concoction, once reconstituted with water, would be absorbed quickly within the body, allowing for a continuous source of energy. Drink one of these every hour (550 calories), and you’ll be able to go day and night.

It still sounded like yuck, and we all called it Ultra Eulogy. Where were the marketers when they needed it? The name was good, but the other print on the package was a death wish as far as branding goes. Today, manufacturers such as Hammer Nutrition have worked out the kinks as well as the taste, and they skip all the nasty verbiage and focus instead on the results.

Which brings me to the dinner table finally, and the talk last week about lab-grown meat is once again making headlines. It is coming soon, thanks to a new FDA ruling giving it the green light. It’s just that, once again, the food scientists have been doing all the business planning.

Even out here in West Texas, people are OK with some folks eating Beyond and Impossible. You can find them everywhere. But lab-grown meat? That might just be taking things too far. Cattle ranchers know that the vegans and vegetarians among us will likely always be just a small percentage of the population, and even the others who want to try one occasionally are a blip on the radar.

But these new “meats” will be aimed squarely at carnivores, meaning that all those ranchers and feedlot owners will be shaking in their boots far more than any veggie burger might make them uneasy.

The arguments in favor of lab meat are multiple. The meats, which are cultivated from animal cells, can be produced without ethical consideration of creatures crammed into small pens. The carbon footprint is much smaller, right down to the fact it takes six pounds of feed to produce one pound of beef at the feedlot. And let’s not forget the unpleasant smell, which some folks around here argue is the smell of money. It’s at that time I invoketh Shakespeare. “Cow poop by any other name would smell as pungent.” Or something like that.

In case you’re wondering, lab-grown meat is not a total panacea, because vegans and vegetarians still will not eat it, because animal cells. But will the other 95%? It’s going to take some serious marketing to take the lab out of the lab-grown meat so that people feel like they are eating something good, about as much of a challenge those soybean burger makers faced in the 70s.

Consumers don’t have to worry just yet about mistaking it at the supermarket—that time will come, though—but these new products will start appearing in restaurants. And you know what? You might not even know it. Heck, it took federal legislation a few years ago to force chains with 20 or more units to list calorie counts on menu items. Do you think a restaurant is going to put the word “lab” anywhere on the menu?

I think not.

And you thought that GMO foods was a big deal. I am betting that lab meat will elicit howls of disapproval across the country, especially in cattle-rich West Texas. It’s one thing to make the vegans and vegetarians happy, but it is quite another to let a bunch of scientists start whittling away at your livelihood, the one thing for which this part of Texas is best known.

Heck, they may as well just have a 72-ounce tofu challenge over at the Big Texan. That idea, while offered in jest, is about as under-cooked as the lab meat coming our way. At least for now.

Dr “I’ll Pass” Gerlich

Audio Blog

[memenewsdotcom]

Lab-grown meat approved in US

[theonlinevegan]

[rodspurethoughts]

US Approves Sale of Cultured Chicken Meat

"Big news in the food industry! US regulators approve sale of lab-grown chicken meat, paving the way for a more sustainable future. #culturedmeat #sustainability"

Cultured meat. (2023, June 21). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat This is a major milestone for the fledgling industry, which aims to address concerns about the environmental impact of traditional meat production and improve animal welfare by eliminating the need for slaughter. Cultured meat is made by taking cells from an animal and growing them in a lab under controlled…

[fexjam]

люблю їх

[diamondhedgesblog]

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[cybergoth-damsel]

tumblr watching people pour in from reddit and twitter as the other internet monopolies all simultaneously shit the bed.

[ohno-the-sun]

Poor Sun

[genderkoolaid]

have u seen the post going around that makes a big deal of how lesbians can and do date gender weird ppl and then adds on a whole addition about how they ABSOLUTELY STILL DONT DATE MEN. and finishes with "lesbians do get with genderweird folks AND still do not get with men. both are true." just say you dont believe multigender people are valid and go

goddddddd these fuckin people

Not only do multigender people exist, but also:

There are trans men who were cis lesbians and transition. Their lesbian partners can stay with them and, while some may identify as bisexual, others will identify as lesbians! Not because they misgender their partners, but because lesbianism has always been a space for transmasculinity & those who love it! Their trans male husbands may even identify as lesbians still, or maybe straight men!

Even transness nonwithstanding... sometimes lesbians fuck men. People will make posts about lesbians thinking a twink is a butch and finding him hot but I'm sorry, sometimes a twink and a dyke will have sex for fun because they want to. Sometimes a woman who's never had a crush on a man in her life will fall for one guy, even a cis guy, because human attraction is crazy like that. None of that means anything for lesbians who never want to date or fuck a cis (or trans) man. It means absolutely nothing for you.

Like. I always think "lesbians can't date or sleep with men? Who are you to tell lesbians what they can and can't do? Lesbians will do whatever the hell they want."

This all on top of the inherent fucking nonsense of "lesbians can date genderweird folks but still don't get with men!!!" like I really need people to grasp the concept that trying to categorize genderweird people into "man" and "not man" is just never not going to be exorsexist. Sorry you can't reduce it down to "butches who are transmasc and maybe use he/him or go by "boyfriend" but they never ever ever feel like a boy or man at all which means they are Good and Acceptable To Fuck" its so ridiculous. lesbian sexuality & romance & community is so much cooler and more beautifully diverse than the fucking spreadsheet ass people could ever imagine.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Lab-grown or “cultivated” meat is made by growing animal stem cells around a scaffold in a nutrient-rich broth. It has been proposed as a kinder and greener alternative to traditional meat because it uses less land, feed, water and antibiotics than animal farming and removes the need to farm and slaughter livestock, which are a major source of greenhouse gases.

However, Derrick Risner at the University of California, Davis, and his colleagues found that the global warming potential of cultivated meat, defined as the carbon dioxide equivalents emitted for each kilogram of meat produced, is 4 to 25 times higher than for regular beef.

The researchers conducted a life-cycle assessment of cultivated meat that estimated the energy used in each step in current production methods. They predict that this will be similar regardless of which animal’s cells are being cultivated.

They found that the nutrient broth used to culture the animal cells has a large carbon footprint because it contains components like sugars, growth factors, salts, amino acids and vitamins that each come with energy costs.

For example, energy is required to grow crops for sugars and to run laboratories that extract growth factors from cells. Each component must also be carefully purified using energy-intensive techniques like ultrafiltration and chromatography before they can be mixed into the broth.

[landwriter]

dead boy detectives is a show whose shortcomings and strengths make total sense when you think of it as a comic on tv, ie terribly goofy expository dialogue that sounds way better when you picture it in comic book font with every other word bolded, panel-paced conversation as our heroes figure out something very obvious, fun enormous monster set pieces that used up all the cgi budget which is why all the rooftop shots look Like That, incredible snap zooms and smash cuts in montages that hit exactly like comic panels, and side characters with bland or brilliant characterization that seems to hinge on the metric of ‘how much cunt did the actor put into their line readings’

[starry-bi-sky]

how do you clone a fey? that's trick question; and fey love those!

@the-navistar-carol (<333) brought up a good point while I was talking about my changeling danny au with her -- Dani! How would she exist in this au? Danny's a changeling - a fae. How would Dani, a clone of him, be created? How do you make a fey? Not through any means that Vlad is doing; you can't make a fey through unnatural means, considering the Fair Folk are nature. And Vlad's not a fey himself -- he's a halfa, even if he could make a fey, it's not in his best interest too. He's a powerful ghost, but even the weakest fae can overpower the strongest ghost. He won't want a clone of Daniel to be more powerful than him.

(In a three tier hierarchy it goes Ancients -> Fae/Mythos -> Ghosts. They all live in the Infinite Realms, but on different Planes. The fae live above the Ghost Zone in the Fey Wild, while the Mythos live beside the Wilds or down in the ghost zone depending on where they are. Places like the Frozone, the Athens Acropolis, and other such large islands climb throughout all three Planes.)

(While Ghosts can travel into the Fey Wild, its generally advised against as the ectoplasm tends to manifest differently there due to close contact magic. It can make it rather disorientating for a ghost, and as human spirits, the Fae living there would jump them faster than they could blink. So unless you're willing to play mind games with 'steal thy name eat thy face' fae, most ghosts keep out of the way of the Wilds. Fey can travel down into the Ghost Zone, they just don't bother.)

That's of course, not taking into account if Vlad even knows Danny's a fae himself. Vlad doesn't ring me as someone who really cares much about ghost culture or the going ons of the GZ. He might be aware that fae exist, but the moment he realizes he can't use them for personal gain he just doesn't bother with them. The risk is greater than the reward, and he'd rather not get eaten. But lets assume he's aware by now that Danny is fey, and has to take that into account while cloning him.

So, how does Dani exist? Good question! Honestly; i'm not sure. She might not exist at all, or if she does, she's more halfa than fey. Vlad would need a lot of human dna and ectoplasm to balance out all that fae magic. He manages to steal DNA from Jack and Maddie to do it, and since Jack's fey ancestry is very dormant its much easier to use alongside Danny's DNA.

In turn, it results in a little girl whose more human-ghost hybrid than clone. With that little extra boost in fey magic making her not a fey, but still relatively powerful. Dani is less of a clone and more of a lab-grown little sister. It's a rather tedious, complex process that has Vlad tearing his hair out trying to figure out. But he does eventually figure it out.

[txttletale]

What do you think the compatibility of veganism and communism are, how would veganism slot in? I know the average Usamerican and westerner eats just an absolutely untenable amount of meat, but I'm skeptical about the practicality of trying to completely eliminate it.

as i am fond of saying, socialism is not about consumption, but about production. it is absolutely true that the current level of meat production is completely ecologically unsustainable--but 'veganism' doesn't come into the equation. veganism is a personal choice about consumption habits, not a political program. a reduction in meat consumption would take place under socialism due to the simple fact that, absent the profit motive, there would be no sensible reason for a communally owned system of agriculture operated by worker democracy to devote the amount of land and labour that are currently devoted to expensive and inefficient livestock farming. how the 'consumer' of the meat feels about it basically does not matter at all--under any socialist system of production there will simply be less meat.

[otaku553]

Something something I hate sending emails

[ariadne-mouse]

"And you are sure these are edible?" "Ja. Well, sort of." "What does 'sort of' mean, Caleb Widogast?"

Here is Shadowgast in the style of Scavengers Reign!

Yes, this is a transparent and blatant attempt to pspspsps my fellow fans of Critical Role into watching this series. The first season is airing now on Netflix as of May 31st. They picked it up after Max did not renew it for a second season, and will decide based on the reception now whether to continue - so I am hoping that lots of people discover the show and love it! The animation studio is Titmouse, who also produces The Legend of Vox Machina.

It's like a Miyazaki-esque Annihilation. Cosmic horror and cosmic wonder in equal and necessary parts. If you like the funky biology parts of Candela Obscura, give this a shot. There is horror. There is humanity. There is hope and connection. There are creatures of all shapes and sizes, including a wonderful amount of tiny idiots, which I have made many compilation posts about. It's a setting where you can envision David Attenborough peacefully narrating a nature documentary about it, but be horrified the same time. Just an absolutely incredible show.

[magenta-somethings]

in my head kon-el is both transmasc & transfemme. also non-binary. sometimes all at the same time, even