Few stories make me as happy as this one did. Thank you OP. Hopefully in the future I can enjoy a beef-steak guilt-free!
The cow methane problem is one that literally keeps me up at night. I kept thinking about my inevitable switch to chicken and missing out on a tenderloin.. and how my kids won't be able to eat like me.
I feel ya and it would make my feel a little better about my meat treats, but improving that end (pun) of the equation seems to be a smaller problem than the energy required.
> The findings, while expected, are quite sobering. Pork, chicken, dairy and eggs are equivalent within a factor of two when it came to their environmental burdens, the authors determined. But beef requires far, far more resources than any of those other protein categories. The team calculated that beef requires 28 times more land, six times more fertilizer and 11 times more water compared to those other food sources. That adds up to about five times more greenhouse gas emissions.
People are also trying to make meat without animals, by culturing animal tissues outside of an animal. You can see on a number of previous HN threads on this topic that a lot of animal advocacy groups have been forming a consensus about supporting these. I don't think any limits have been established on their eventual "realism" or biological similarity to tissues grown inside an animal.
As that Wikipedia article mentions we would need a plant-based growth medium to get the meat to grow.
Today they are using fetal bovine serum as a growth medium, which is both expensive and it is a by-product from the dairy industry.
When a cow coming for slaughter is identified to be pregnant, the cow is slaughtered and bled, and the fetus is removed from the mother and brought into a blood collection facility. The fetus, which is kept alive alive during the following process to ensure blood quality, has a needle inserted into its beating heart. The blood is then drained until the fetus dies. The whole process takes about 5 minutes. The blood is then refined and filtered, and the resulting extract is fetal bovine serum.
Until we no longer extract fetuses, I can't see many animal advocacy groups being that positive about it.
I didn't know about this aspect; thanks for pointing it out. Do you know how plausible alternatives would be? I guess the chemistry of the serum is pretty specific and maybe challenging to replicate, as in human blood transfusions most blood products are taken from a human donor rather than synthesized.
The cow methane problem is one that literally keeps me up at night. I kept thinking about my inevitable switch to chicken and missing out on a tenderloin.. and how my kids won't be able to eat like me.