I mean you have to buy it on your own accord, culture your own cells, and then successfully cook and eat them. As long as you aren't stealing other people's cells to eat them without their consent it seems more ethical than the current meat industry.
We have to draw some sort of line here though. Will this give you prions? Does this end the person's life like traditional cannibalism usually does? Theres a lot to unpack in these tiny man steaks. I'd still rather people be growing their own meat at home in a petri dish than having animals locked in cages for eternity.
So, if it were the original cells, then it would be autocannibalism, since these are cloned cells (from what I gather) it's technically not the same thing. [Edit: Personally, it's a bit of a tossup in my mind. I don't think it's unethical, but it's still a weird thing]
This is unironically one of my favourite questions to ask new friends. I've gotten a variety of answers, but my own response has always been yes, if the person was healthy and had clearly consented.
In my opinion, cannibalism is bad for two main reasons, 1) it can be unsafe if the person was ill, the meat has spoiled, or if it's done too often (this has been studied in cannibalistic rituals) and 2) it's unethical if the person doesn't consent to it.
Eating animal meat is non consensual and there can be diseases in there too - many people have died from it. Just because it's more socially acceptable, I don't really see it as an ethically better decision.
I would 100% at least try my own home grown meat cells.
I don't think you can generalize that. I'd love to have little me-steaks and I'd even share them with friends, especially if they can be a Möbius strip.
As long as the human chooses to grow their me-steaks themselves I see no issue.
Haha I've been saying for fucking years that boutique lab growing meat outlets will pop up selling exotic animal meats and celebrity human meat. We are getting close to that future
What are the chances this doesn't result in a rise of (traditional) cannibalism? High profile cannibalism case where they tasted a sample of a celebrity and went for the real deal.
To me that's more ethical than killing of billions of animals, and the latter is considered ethical. I wouldn't do that because that would feel weird, but not unethical.
To me that's more ethical than killing of billions of animals, and the latter is considered ethical.
I think most people would actually consider factory farming unethical, they just put the blame on the producers for treating animals like shit. And the producers are locked into a race to the bottom for competitive prices, so they'd blame the customers/market conditions.
This is ethical despite it walking the line of taboo. It hurts no one, and if the tissue sample can be extracted at home without causing damage to the donor I see no issue with it.
Sure, but where's the upside? (ethically, not sure if consuming your own meat could have some sort of weird effect on you, even though afaik the usual cannibalism issues wouldn't apply). If anything it's more ethical to take it from yourself because you consent to it, the farm animal probably doesn't.
Unless you already have prions from CJD you can't catch Kuru by eating yourself. You have to actually eat someone who already has prions to catch it. Even then you have to eat nervous system tissue to be at a significant risk.
Yes and no. You get prions from eating a person that's also infected with prions. Basically if you eat cloned meat of yourself it should be fine as you either already have prions, or you don't already have prions. Prions manifest as either CJD if you got it naturally or Kuru if you got it through canibalism.
It's unethical because you can't safely perform muscle biopsies at home, thus it is a violation of the duty of care, and culturing stratified squamous epithelium and calling it meat(and steak no less) is lying without any benefit to others, which is a fundamental ethical violation.
I think you would get the copy of a copy problem. DNA in cells degrade overtime. I think with lab grown meat this is much worse than normal human aging.
Fuck, I've always wanted to eat human meat anyway. I'd kill for a sample like this. I don't care about morals here. I'm a vegetarian. I just want to know. If my buddy was like "ayy we're eating Dan from accounting's arm tonight" I'd be there with no questions asked. The police can sort it out.
fetal bovine serum (FBS)... is derived from the blood of calf fetuses after their pregnant mothers are slaughtered by the meat or dairy industry.
I did not know this... and after reading the wiki, I found it rather disturbing...
The first stage of the production process for FBS is the harvesting of blood from the bovine fetus after the fetus is removed from the slaughtered cow. The fetus dies from the lack of oxygen by remaining in the protective environment of the uterus for a minimum of 15–20 minutes after the cow is dead...
The whole point of this art project is to suggest that using expired human blood serum is acceptable for growing lab meat btw. That's what they used to culture the cheek cells. Took them several months to grow that amount though and cheek cells have very different requirements to muscle cells, so I dunno why they were presenting it as an option. Guess that's why it was an art project and not a presentation at a conference.
I don't think the people that came up with the word for cannibalism ever imagined it could come from a petri dish. I'd say it's undefined as or as not cannibalism
Then you have your starter meat and can start the age old tradition of passing it down from generation to generation so that they can keep making You Steaks forever.
Remember that guy on Reddit who claims he had to have his leg amputated and he somehow got to keep it, and he and his friends cooked and ate it?
That's weird, but as long as it remains their own, or consenting others, I think it's fine. The minute capitalism gets involved I think it becomes exploitative and unethical - long pork in the grocery store fundamentally should not be a thing.
God help me if I live in some commie zone where they take my amputated body parts to give to everyone. I grew those and they're mine! Fuck your science, I wanna eat my foot.
Which I would classify as pretty weird, but not really unethical. Besides, I think the comparison doesn't fully work - it's more like, growing a lump on your body somewhere, having it removed, and saying "hey, can I eat that?". Which I would also classify as weird, but not unethical.
auto cannibalism? %100 sure there will be tv shows about who has the best taste and the texture as well as onlyfans models selling cells from different parts of their body for astronomic prices
My hunch is that, as proposed, this is the most ethical form of meat consumption because the meat is being taken and consumed with consent from the donor. (Yourself) And there's no living creature that even suffers from the process
There's bacteria that grow in the roots of legumes that are capable of capturing gaseous nitrogen. That nitrogen makes its way to the soil, where the trees can suck it up to produce protein, like sunflower seeds. I eat those and by the time I urinate and die the nitrogen has been so concentrated within me that I burn a small hole in the ground for the fungus, sun, and time to decay and heal.
If I could photosynthesize the carbs needed to bootstrap this operation I would. If I could plant a piece of myself and feed it rainwater and atmospheric nitrogen to grow a steak I would. If I could leave behind shelter I wood.
the process still relies on fetal bovine serum (FBS) as a protein-rich growth supplement for animal cell cultures.
FBS, which costs around £300 to £700 per litre
That's a fancy serum made from cow blood
Also this all comes from a submission to an art museum in 2020, it's not supposed to be an actual product it's more of a proof of concept type of thing.
The kit likely is optimized for human muscle cells and might not perform as well with other human cells or muscle cells from another species or even not at all. The other question is where would you find livable cells from a cow or whatever that you wanted to cultivate. I doubt that your refrigerated steak has viable cells.
I don't think the requiernments for mammalian muscles cells are that different from each other. It might be optimized for a specific animal, but I'm pretty sure it will still work in general or it would only take very small adjustments to make it work for a different mammal.
The other question is where would you find livable cells from a cow or whatever that you wanted to cultivate
Yeah, you'd need a live or very recently deceased cow. But it should be easy enough to obtain some samples before or during regular slaughter. And once this method is viable and widespread enough there will probably "biopsy cows" that just get pricked for cell samples all day.
Can't speak for this specific kit but in general: A big problem with lab grown meat and cell tissue culture is that to grow cells in vitro you usually need fetal calf serum. That's a liquid from, well, cow abortions basically, that contains a plethora of different molecules like growth factors and mediators. As far as I know, there is no vegan alternative to this yet. We are talking about a liquid here whose composition is really complex, so it's a really big task to create a plant based FCS alternative that performs just as well.
Tldr: probably the set contains a liquid made from cows.
As vegan as it gets, I'd wager. You need to take an initial sample to cultivate the meat from, which obviously isn't vegan, but to my knowledge, the rest doesn't require any further samples
Yes it is, as no animal is harmed:
"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."
I am going to say that it’s unethical for someone to eat others or themselves, lab grown or not, because the community members in a society want to 1) curtail or reduce suffering and 2) increase ways to promote better judgment and impulse controls.
1 - We treat cattle and animals for food production with such contempt and disdain and cruelty, and if we were to start eating humans (lab grown, self-eating or otherwise) we’ll treat humans the same. Delegating some humans to be eaten, lab grown (by choice or not) or otherwise, is going to create a lot of societal strife and suffering. How does self-eating contribute to suffering? See reason 2.
2 - People who consume others or themselves cannot be guaranteed to be devoid of sociopathic characteristics. Even if someone is just eating themselves, it blurs the line between food source and community member.
I think it is the same as people who smoke or cut themselves to relieve stress—yes, whatever you’re doing is your choice and seemingly only affecting you. However, the second hand smoke/scarring in the case of the self-cannibal is their poor judgment and poor impulse control. We expect society members to exercise better judgment and impulse control because the way they think impacts everyone around them.
Why does self-cannibalism seem like poor judgment? Think again of someone who cuts themselves to relieve stress. The way you treat your yourself, including your body, is a reflection of your state of mind. Only a narcissist would say that they’re in complete control of their mind, including the subconscious part, and so their self-eating will be harmless and not result in any bad behavior towards others, ever. We already know vegetarians have more empathy than meat eaters: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/201207/brain-scans-show-vegetarians-more-empathic-omnivores
As mentioned, we have historically always treated animal sources of nutrition with disdain, contempt and cruelty. If someone feels that it’s okay for them to eat themselves using lab grown meat, I worry what kind of psychological interplay justifies that decision for them. Do they hate themselves? Is this self-harm? What will their interactions with other people be like after doing this?
So, yes autonomy and self-actualization is an inherent right of cognitively advanced beings. But they lose that right the second it starts impacting someone else’s self-actualization.
In short, even self-cannibalism is unethical because society wants members who are not sociopaths and who won’t contribute to the suffering of other members.
How is this any way self-harm? To be clear we aren't talking about growing a whole person here as you seem to be confused. We are talking about a few cells in a petri dish or vat. This is all just psychobabble nonsense. You're the one here who shouldn't be in polite society.
How can you qualify that it’s not self harm? Maybe we need to do brain scan study of what it looks like for people who cut themselves vs those who eat meat grown from their cells.
People will eat meat if they want to, you can't stop them and at the end of the day brigading annoys people and disrupts social media
It's the exact same thing you and your group did on reddit
Just stop brigading posts and stop mass downvoting any posts that contain meat, I've looked at the vote ratios of posts in food subs enough to know that it is being done
It's just frustrating. Despite study after study showing that consumption of meat leads to poor health, people keep doing it. It just reminds me of being an addict. Other people saying this causes less harm to other sentient beings are right I'll conceded to that but based off everything I know, the consumption of meat isn't an act of self love. I may just be sensitive because my mother is dying of stomach disease. Beans and rice vegan steps off soap box